I’m in the part of the world that ate lots of turkey last week, so we’ve got another double feature.
In the first episode, the fate of the odd couple from Episode 8 takes the first half to make its point, that sometimes lies cannot be forgiven, as the boisterous former cheater is served a divorce despite his efforts to make amends.
And you may question, what was the point of that? The second act of the episode is Yuugure dueling her angry sword sister, while the weird nun sister makes sure the bystanders don’t get ganked.
Despite managing to make a cunning showing, Yuugure has a near death experience when she underestimates her supposedly subdued foe. Akira runs to try to save her, but clearly can’t make it in time. This is where the show goes ahead and reveals what I guessed back in episode 1: Akira is, himself, an android. He saves Yuugure with a burst of super speed, but the revelation when the cut meant for Yuugure reveals steel beneath his synthetic skin and his very action was humanly impossible causes Akira to have a little mental meltdown.
Yuugure tries to explain why, you know, she didn’t tell him he was a robot, but if you remember first act “lying is bad and apologies don’t work”, you know it’s going to take a little more than talking it out. Thus, Yuugure promises to share the truth of the past, launching us into episode 10.
This episode is mostly Yugure providing flashbacks and explaining the lives of Akira and Towasa after the fateful shooting Akira remembered. Both actually survived, but Towasa caught a bullet in the wrong place for her reproductive system to continue to function, which seems like the beginning of a depressive spiral around her relationship and future.
She still pursues the LC system, and eventually cracks femtotechnology (smaller than nanotech and therefore more magic) in order to create it, cyborging up humanity as a whole with “Femtoblood” (you know, the “special blood” from the storybook) that gives them the promised in-mind connectivity. However, it turns out that maybe putting your brain online isn’t a great idea, since people can be hacked. This is discovered only after we’re at something like 90% adoption, so there’s just sustained riot-level chaos the world over, which is another wall in Towasa and her beloved Akira taking the next step.
In order to clean up her Femtoblood mess, Towa creates an Artificial Personality and tasks it with finding the answer. It finds the same answer to human problems that every amoral AI in fiction finds: kill all humans! Thus, the AI war begins. Mankind is devastated, but the only one bright enough to put the toothpaste back in the tube is, of course, Towasa herself. She once again works with her six henchpeople and Akira in order to make the Outside Series, the last of which was Yuugure. The Outside Series, over the course of two years, fights back the AI and destroys it at its orbital mainframe. After shortcutting an entire action anime about that quickly, we get to the establishment of OWEL for providing security and, thanks to Towasa and her femtotech, ecological restoration. Akira is even made the first boss of OWEL, and it’s under his reign that computer technology is sealed off, presumably both because an AI was a problem and because Femtoblood explicitly can’t be removed and operates at the genetic level, so all of humanity would still have hacking backdoors.
Some time after that, Towasa (by this point in the Dr. Franxx club of “ruined the world with well-intentioned mad science, got your right half maimed needing some face covering and a cool robot arm, and did more mad science to make obvious proxies for the biological children you never had”) decides to run off and disappear, taking only Yuugure with her. Akira made an android copy of himself to seek her out, but apparently thought better of it and never woke the android up. Thus, the Akira we know is that copy.
Throughout this, the work with Towa’s guilt is pretty good, and the sequence ends with Yuugure and Bot!Akira kind of hugging it out as she tries to drag him from the abyss with the fact that his feelings and experiences since awakening aren’t fake, explaining why she wanted to marry him (she became enchanted with the idea of her maker’s past, discovered him while he was still sleeping, and decided to wait for a future that might never come because her hope was her own) and offering to become his reason for being if he needs one to overcome his lack of meaning as an android.
It’s very sweet, and thus Akira awakens… after an apparent time skip, because while Amrou is there she’s not looking like her uncomfortably childlike self any more.
And this is a well-executed twist. Like I said, I called this back in episode 1. But I had to go a little tinfoil hat back then in order to do it, and I even started second-guessing my call due to Akira taking hits like a chump in the meantime. I feel like most viewers are going to be caught at least a little off guard when it drops at the end of episode nine only to realize, ah yes, the clues were there from the very beginning and it’s something that makes sense in this world that displays clearly the existence of absurdly human robots but that never otherwise made explicit the existence of cryogenic medical technology that would have been the orthodox hypothesis.
The question is… where do we go from here? Akira no longer has a strong reason to follow his coded mission and seek out Towasa, and even if he did Yuugure presumably knows all about Towasa’s ultimate fate, whether she just croaked of natural causes eventually or did something weird from herself, so even if she hasn’t been telling anyone, even her sisters who felt abandoned by their maker, we now know she could solve that search function trivially. Amrou is evidently okay, and that for something between (given the art styles in this show) something like one to thirty years so suffice to say they’re out of danger from any major OWEL manhunts. And while OWEL still has its track record of employing eccentric villainous lunatics, we now know that there is, in fact, a pretty good reason for most of their more regressive laws, supported by those being instituted by a protagonistic character. So we don’t really have good grounding for a rebellion/reformation arc.
Emotionally, we don’t need a lot before Akira and Yuugure can ride off into the sunset, but just resolving the romantic entanglements (specifically, what place if any Amrou has) wouldn’t feel quite satisfying as the whole thing. It’s sort of like how back in Atri, the show needed to do something for the flooded world even though playing itself out with just the feelings wrapped up could have worked from a different angle; we’ve spent too much time, effort and engagement on the world layer to abandon it completely.
But (barring any more interrupting life circumstances) we’ll see how that continues on next week.