Previously, we saw Kaburagi zapped into unconsciousness, his fate unknown. This week we follow up with Kaburagi as he’s sent to robot Gulag. True, Kamina Shades Manager wanted to simply scrap him outright, but with the suggestion that someone (likely his friend in charge of the Deca-dence fortress itself) pulled strings in his favor, he’s sent off to a “bug correction” camp instead.
There, under miserable conditions, he’s
assigned a thankless and lethally dangerous bit of drudge work,
breaking up Gadoll feces to be reprocessed while avoiding getting
crushed by new deliveries. He and his fellow inmates are maintained
in misery, and most seem to either be insane from the start, or have
ended up that way. They’ve also lost hope, and toil as little as
they can get away with to preserve themselves for another bleak
tomorrow.
In this pit of despair, Kaburagi
(suffering nightmares of Natsume dying in battle against the Gadoll)
reminds himself of Natsume’s burning desire to push her limits that
resonated so strongly before, and goes at his task with a newfound
diligence and determination that wows the other ‘bugs’, particularly
a quirky moonshine peddler who takes a liking to Kaburagi. That
inmate tries to help him adjust, revealing the not entirely
surprising ‘secret’ that the hope of reintegration into society
dangled before them is an illusion. Nobody gets out of the facility,
and because it’s buried deep under a lake used to grow the Gadoll, no
one can really escape either. Despite this, Kaburagi is determined
to push his own limits and keep living.
When his new friend challenges him on
this matter, Kaburagi talks about Natsume, and mentions in sorrow
that she may already be dead. Our moonshine bot says that’s
unlikely, since Deca-dence has been in a peaceful holding pattern
since the battle at Everest. Kaburagi catches onto the problem at
once: how in the world does he know this?
As it turns out, some inmates have
figured out a way to log on to Deca-dence and play for themselves
despite their conditions. Its very hush-hush, though Kaburagi
squeezes the info out of his senior, in part because the ones with
the log on are a pack of violent thugs that even the guards don’t
want to tangle with. Kaburagi, though warned against it, is taken to
see them, and finds some familiar races: Donatello and Turkey, his
old team-mates, who were cast down here in the cheating scandal that
saw him made an armor repairman. They aren’t too pleased to see
Kaburagi, though, regarding him as an honorless sellout for not
standing firm against the system back then.
Ultimately, Kaburagi ends up with an
offer to log on so he can see Natsume (though what he intends to do
when he does is unclear), but if he wants to actually earn it, he has
to navigate a deathmatch against Donatello first, 1v1 on swinging
poles over a deep pit, and whoever takes a fatal fall first loses.
It’s an effective action scene, if a brief one, with good
choreography, and ultimately a strong character moment. Kaburagi and
Donatello both fall, the latter dragging the former down with him
like the Balrog pulling down Gandalf, but Kaburagi uses his (not
previously known to be functional) rockets, which he declined to use
in the fight, to pull them both out of the depths. Donatello shortly
returns the favor when he uses his cannon, which was also not known
to be working and which also could have helped out during the fight,
to keep Turkey from smashing Kaburagi in a rage, letting the two
combatants recognize that, even after time and events had come
between them, they’re not so different.
As the episode draws to a close,
Kaburagi prepares to log back on to Deca-dence, but there’s a rub –
he can’t use his old account, and instead has to start a “new
game”. How that’s going to interact with his desire to see
Natsume, and what he’ll do when he finds her (possibly cluing her
into the truth of the world?) remains a mystery to be addressed next
time. What is know, though, is that he’s reaching this point in the
nick of time, as the Gadoll Lab in the lake and the other
administrators have completed the emergency maintenance triggered by
the story being thrown off the rails, and combat is about to begin
again.
I hate to sound like I’m on repeat, but this episode has somewhat reinforced the style of Deca-dence moving through this big story at a fast yet steady clip. I’d compare Kaburagi’s time in the Gulag here to the time inEureka Seven we spend in the dreary gray mine, since it has a not dissimilar emotional arc. The thing is, this is one episode as opposed to many. Because the show is laser focused on its leads, and how everything relates to them, rather than trying to paint a broad picture, we don’t need the same amount of time we did seeing how the mine’s conditions hit EVERYONE. Neither strategy is wrong, but they are doing very different things and I feel like you don’t see the one Deca-dence uses executed well nearly as often, because it’s not as easy to get quality and emotion, especially with a potentially big epic plot, out of minimalism as it is out of grandeur. So seeing it done well here is really a treat.
If I had one qualm with this week’s
episode, it’s that Natsume was very out of focus. We do cut back to
her for a single scene, as she talks to Kurenai about Kaburagi being
missing and the strange peace they’re experiencing, but it’s very
minor and doesn’t say all that much about her. It’s a good scene,
don’t get me wrong, but if you’re watching particularly for Natsume,
you’re not going to find her this episode.
But, in a way, I think that was
necessary to let the episode do what it does as efficiently as it
does it. We don’t get that scene out of Natsume until Kaburagi knows
the broad strokes what’s going on in Deca-dence, so until then we’re
just as in the dark as he is about what he fate might be. We don’t
need to see Kaburagi dwelling on his worry about her as much because
we as invested viewers are already sharing in that worry – the one
brief nightmare and the references Kaburagi makes to her in order to
explain himself to the other robots are enough. If we were
constantly cutting back to her and not sharing that experience, we’d
need more time and energy to be spent on it in order to communicate
it properly. Deca-dence utilizes the fact that a story isn’t just in
the parts you tell, but the parts you don’t tell to good effect here.
And, I’m fairly confident that we’ll be getting much more of her
next week, since the show up until now has often worked by switching
which of the two we’re weighted on before. In Episode 2, when we got
Kaburagi’s backstory, we didn’t see a lot of Natsume either. And he
was more out of focus in episodes like 1 and 3 that focused on
Natsume’s struggle.
In any case, the show continues to go
strong as we round the half-way point. We’ll see you next week for
the next turn in the plot.