Unexpectedly, we get not one but two of
Iwanaga’s solutions this episode, leaving me with… a few questions,
honestly. Chief among them being “If we’re going to shortcut
things in this show, why didn’t we do it for some of the setup
episodes?”
The Second Solution (first of this
episode) to undermine the present Steel Lady Nanase is suggesting
that there is, in fact, a ghost but that her actions can be explained
and stopped. It’s clever to include: some people long utterly for a
supernatural answer, but those same people should also still desire
peace, both for the ghost of Karin Nanase and the folks being
terrorized in the night by the Steel Lady. It has glaring holes both
from a logical point of view and a ghostly one, but again Iwanaga’s
mission is not to make everyone believe any particular solution, but
to remove momentum from the image of Steel Lady Nanase that Rikka has
built.
To that end, we also have the Third
Solution, which like the first (the one last episode) is more a “true
crime” story, but one that gives a much more salacious (and
therefore appealing) reasoning for someone to go Scooby-Doo villain
and dress up as a ghost. In this case, the theory floated is that
“Steel Lady Nanase” is a deranged stalker making a misguided
attempt to do something for Karin Nanase’s grieving sister, which is
at least twisted enough to nab attention.
Of course, Rikka isn’t just letting
this happen: she appears in the “Internet Argument Space” (in the
visual storytelling, manifesting out of one of the anonymous arguing
folks to face down against Iwanaga) and also in the “Vision of the
Future Space”, pulling the threads of time out of Kuro’s reach.
The way Kuro grasps (or fails to grasp)
the future is one of the better visualizations in In/Spectre along
with the way his immortality is accomplished through an impressive
rewinding process when we get a good look at it. That said, I still
come back to the fact that this episode forces me to question why,
exactly, we had such a plodding pace up until now.
Because the solutions in this episode
are decently well presented, but that comes from truncating them
significantly for the show. Rather than being walked through at the
exact same pace as the manga did it, they go much faster. Possibly a
little too fast, but then they aren’t really intended to be Iwanaga’s
masterstroke.
The solutions, though, are arguably the
most interesting part of the show. Last week, we saw one play out in
full detail while this week it’s two in half detail. I guess that
gives us two whole episodes for #4 or one for #4 and one for
denouement, but either way that might be a little bit long. And we
spent way too much time on note-for-note adaptation of the slow bits
for me to be entirely comfortable with doing this now.
While I really am set in my opinion
that adapting In/Spectre was at least something of a fool’s errand to
begin with, I think it would have been stronger if it had come at us
at, if not this pace, then at least closer to this pace. They would
have had to include more cases, but they already threw in “What the
Guardian Serpent Heard” on top of Steel Lady Nanase, they could
have done another couple episodes in that vein rather than getting as
draggy as they did in the middle of Steel Lady Nanase. And if you’re
going to compress, why compress the Solutions? This is what we were
waiting to see, so let them play out fully and compress earlier.
In any case, there are still good
points to the show, but they don’t really shine in this one.
Hopefully, Iwanaga’s fourth solution will give us a little more of
what we’re looking for.