Last week, and ending
This week, new bad from nowhere
At long last, silence
So, after the previous episode in which
Beta was destroyed and our hero flew off into the sunset, what more
could you possibly have to do, show? Why aren’t you over?
It turns out that there’s one more
avalanche of stupid twists that the show has yet to unleash. Some
mysterious hacking attack, tangentially linked to the mad scientist
who first created the Ex Arm #00’s in an earlier flashback.
Said mad scientist, it turns out, is
still alive somehow and is or is possessing the redhead scientist
that’s been part of the peanut gallery this whole show, which might
have been cool had she ever had a character of if the re-awakened mad
scientist ever did anything other than glow and dump exposition. The
real culprit for the hacking attack is some sort of AI tainted by
Beta’s influence, which takes over computer systems the world over
and starts acting evil because it’s powered by human malice or some
crap like that. However you slice it, Escaflowne did this sort of
ending better.
Alma, Ygg, and Akira go into cyberspace
to fight the swarm, but apparently there’s just too much for them to
handle as is. Alma and Ygg ultimately put their processing power
into Akira’s hands even though that could mean the end for their
consciousness as thinking beings, which is a little nonsensical for
Ygg and a poor non-existent follow-up to what we were told two
episodes earlier about how Alma could be something really new and
special. But that was the cyberpunk ideas badly executed two
episodes ago, they need to get swept away for the cyberpunk ideas
badly executed in this episode.
We don’t actually get to see super-Akira fight the monsters representing servers corrupted by an AI that is incarnate human malice, and cut to some shockingly dry narration from our police lady. Bit by bit, it seems like the evil is choked away from the rest of the world, but Akira just can’t deal with the mass he’s restricted to Japanese servers.
Because of that, his last play is to
launch a nuke. Detonating it high above Tokyo will cause an EMP that
will fry every electronic device in Japan, destroying both all the
evil AIs and our main character. He tries to have a tender goodbye
with Minami, as much as the rushed pace and poor animation allow, and
then goes ahead and does just that.
We abruptly cut to the credits, but
there is at least a stinger scene in which Minami is shown to have
kept Akira’s webcam on her car’s dash in the aftermath, and it moves
slightly before we fade out again suggesting Akira may have
impossibly survived.
But whatever, it’s over. Done with.
Finished. However you slice it, this show was garbage.
In a sense, it’s actually in rare form.
Everything is wrong. The animation is atrocious, the writing is
confused, the directing is obnoxious, and even the voice acting,
while technically good in a lot of places, doesn’t fit what’s going
on and is thus, in its own way, entirely wrong. At times it has a
good idea, but it never follows through with any of them. It’s not
even really so bad it’s good, because the affront of laziness on the
screen is so unpleasant that its hard even to mock. This is a clear
Fail, one to avoid even for some sort of “bad anime night”.
I honestly love cyberpunk, so it’s
really frustrating just how much Ex-Arm fails at going for anything
it brings up. Watch Serial Experiments Lain, Ergo Proxy, Beatless…
basically anything other than this that at all touches on the topics
that Ex-Arm touches on does it better. Even bad shows like
Shangri-la are still better than this.