“The world needs bugs.”
This episode is mostly concerned with the resolve of the situation that the previous episode established, which takes about the right amount of time. As various teams deal with the small fry on the mountain, the sacrificial teams challenge the fog-spewing Gadoll alpha, which is supposed to be unbeatable. Natsume has to face it down for her life and the lives of her squad, but of something manages to kill it, the game’s storyline will be thrown into disarray.
Natsume does a surprisingly good job,
actually managing to deal real damage to it. Of course, a single
clean hit is nowhere near enough to deal with the monster, so it’s
critical that Kaburagi come in to save her. At first, he only wants
to get Natsume out, but she’s driven by a deep resolve (one that’s
quite familiar to him, having seen it in his former game-playing
partners) to try to save her remaining squad-mates and win the day.
Ultimately, when she won’t back down and her team needs to get out
the slow way, Kaburagi stands up to the alpha, and releases his
limits to kill it off.
This, of course, kind of breaks the
game, triggering the arrival of an unfinished Gadoll uber-boss
(solidifying the idea that the Gadoll are fully artificial, not just
something the robots have mastered and use) called the Stargate to
meanace Deca-dence. Having been seen by players and Tankers alike,
it’s sent into battle with critical weaknesses from its status but
some very impressive attacks. Kaburagi and Natsume (mostly Kaburagi)
fly into combat, knocking it off balance to buy time so the
Deca-dence, with its commander (Kaburagi’s friend who was arranging
his return) scrambling to make this all work out, can deal the fatal
blow.
In the aftermath, dawn rises over
Everest while it seems like the Gadoll have been defeated for good.
Natsume and Kaburagi watch the beautiful scenario until Kaburagi
tells her to take care of pipe and disappears… just before a wave
passes over the world, revealing the “next stage” with countless
clusters of fortress-sized Gadoll and their packs of mid-sized
attendants hearalding a new stage for the game-playing Gears and
absolute despair for Natsume and the other Tankers who have victory
snatched away.
Kaburagi goes to face his pointy
purple, Kamina-glasses wearing boss, this time in their earthly
incarnations. The boss wants Kaburagi to submit to the company line,
and when he doesn’t, zaps him so that he falls down. Whether he’s
dead or just out of comission for re-education remains to be seen.
There are a lot of ways that Deca-dence
could go from here. Whether Kaburagi is alive or dead (the smart
money is on alive, since we haven’t seen a lot of the shots from him
in the intro, and while his commander friend could step in to be
Natsume’s link to the secret behind the world, Kaburagi is one
better) is going to have a huge impact on how the show progresses.
Even in the case where he’s alive, what his punishment will be and
how long it will take could be a major shift.
There’s also the fact that the System
has been forced to scramble here. The “new stage” is not the
plot that was thought out ahead of time, and Kaburagi’s sudden
appearance at the end of the Everest battle was probably recorded
(like his previous sorties) and might well have gotten some notice.
I could even see him getting something of a stay of execution if
popular demand needs him to play a role in the game.
And of course there’s how the “new
stage” is handled by the Tankers. They saw the new legions of
Gadoll come into being, and Kaburagi’s words that there can never be
peace rang in Natsume’s ears as she watched the respawn happen.
Ultimately, I don’t think this show goes much of anywhere if humanity
doesn’t become able, on some level, to see the strings controlling
them. They’re reliant on the dome and currently at the mercy of the
machines that use them as a source of entertainment, so they’re not
well-positioned to put on a resistance, but there has to be some
element of that somewhere along the line. And I think seeing the
fakery of it all combined with the knowledge of those pulling the
strings could help that move forward. Right now Natsume and the
other Tankers don’t realize there’s anything other than the Gadoll to
resist, so there is the question of how, when, and why that is going
to change.
The character writing was also good
this episode, despite the episode being much more focused on action
as opposed to the character stuff in the last one. Telling was
Kaburagi’s willingness to tell the commander that Natsume is a bug,
indicating a fairly absolute trust that she wouldn’t be turned over
to the System to be destroyed because of that. Also telling was
Natsume’s growth, where we see her dedication tested, reacting to
friends or at least acquaintances being killed in front of her, or
even dying for her. How she takes that, and moves forward with it,
is a big deal, as is how absolutely crushed she is when the Gadoll
respawn. This isn’t an episode with a lot of big talks like the last
one, but what the characters do and how they approach the situations
they find themselves in says a lot about them.
As has continually been the case for
Deca-dence, I’m very much looking forward to the next one.