Here we get it, Iwanaga’s fourth solution and the big climax of In/Spectre. In episode eleven. It’s well-done and at least takes advantage of some of the benefits of being an anime rather than a manga. In Episode eleven. This is the big one – the final push against Steel Lady Nanase and the last shot to foil Rikka’s scheme. This is episode eleven.
I’ll stop reminding everyone what
episode it is now. The plot and structure of this episode is the
same of the last two: Kuro fights Steel Lady Nanase while Iwanaga
argues on the internet and Saki remains a basic “Watson” type
character that Iwanaga can explain her strategy to. And it’s
everything I hoped for out of an In/Spectre anime when I heard this
was coming: Kuro’s fight both to contain the fake ghost and to grab
the future are executed with excellent timing and visceral images
that a still medium simply couldn’t recreate, expanding on and
deepening what was already there.
However, as we already know, Kuro’s
battle isn’t the heart of the matter. Iwanaga has her final plan
and, unlike Saki and Rikka both would have expected, it’s not to chip
away at the support for Steel Lady Nanase, but rather to destroy her
in one fell swoop using the previous three solutions as groundwork.
It’s a clever turn, so what’s the solution?
The lie Iwanaga tells is that Karin
Nanase is still alive: a body double died in her place, and Karin
Nanase stole the body double’s identity to live on. When that lie
might have been unveiled, she started spooking people as a ghost
because, after all, who would believe that Karin Nanase was still
alive if her ghost was prowling the streets at night?
It’s exactly what Iwanaga was looking
for from the start – a fiction more sordid, and thus more
appealing, than the idea of a murderous ghost. The crowd goes wild,
beginning to put the pieces together on their own, using the orphaned
fragments of the other solutions that Rikka never bothered to
contest. Pro tip, Rikka: In many forms of competitive debate, you
have to answer EVERY point your opponent raises, not just counter
their conclusion.
Iwanaga takes a victory lap with her solution as well, accusing the administrator of the website of being Karin Nanase. After all, in the solution, Karin Nanase needed Steel Lady Nanase to be believed and believed to be a ghost, and the wiki popped up early and codified and spread that idea very well. In essence, she uses Rikka’s own actions against her, applying her deeds and surface motive to Karin Nanase.
True, Rikka could probably post a
selfie, but at this point she’s on the receiving end of the situation
Iwanaga started with: the masses want to believe, and it’s not truth,
nor facts, nor evidence that are as important as a compelling lie.
With that, Kuro takes the final upper
hand in the fight with Steel Lady Nanase, knocking her now fragile
existence down and out and, to end the episode, ramming her steel
beam into her shattered ghost face.
Let me circle back to the part where
this is the end of episode eleven.
We do need some housekeeping after that
moment, but the denouement in the manga is pretty brief, especially
in terms of what happens and not how many lines need to be said. The
earlier episodes, before the solutions, did largely have enough meat
to be entire episodes, they just weren’t paced and presented in the
dramatic fashion that they needed to be in order to be a really good
anime.
However, that is largely something I’ll
have to get to next week, even if the concern was glaring from how
this week went down. All in all, I do believe that this has been
possibly the best episode of the show, alongside episode one. A good
episode doesn’t make a good overall show, but it does at least please
and entertain on its own merits.