Here we have it, the last episode of
In/Spectre. IF you’ve been following so far, it’s about what you’d
expect: a faithful execution of scenes from the manga that maybe
should have been revised or rewritten for the new medium.
The basic outlay of the episode is
confirming that Steel Lady Nanase is defeated, Rikka is moving on,
Saki can go on with her life with no further intrusions from Kuro or
the supernatural, and Kuro and Iwanaga can go on with their lives in
pursuit of maintaining the balance that Rikka is set to disrupt. It
takes thirty minutes to do this, which is a matter for some serious
split opinions.
On one hand, as with the poorly paced
elements of the setup, it’s 100% faithful to the source material.
All these scenes and conversations happened in the Manga, and most of
them were still good scenes or felt needed or so on. The problem, as
always with this show, is pacing. This is an entire episode of
denouement and setup for the second season that will probably never
happen because it deals so heavily with Rikka’s goals and
motivations: things that it makes sense to address here in the larger
tapestry of the Manga and would probably make sense to reveal at the
end of a mystery novel (where exposing what the criminal did, why,
and how is the master resolution) but that doesn’t really serve the
purpose it needs to for a contained anime.
The reveal is that Rikka’s ultimate
goal is to create a sort of false god, a being that would have the
power to return her (and presumably Kuro) to being normal humans.
It’s for that end that she’s pursuing iterative future manipulation
and the vast potential of human imaginations to create manifestations
like Steel Lady Nanase. Because creating an artificial deity with
time manipulation would go against the natural order, Iwanaga stands
opposed. It’s actually a decent conflict, and I keep following the
manga in part to see how it will develop when Rikka makes another
major play.
The thing is, the show is over. This
is a contained, twelve-episode anime and in order to be the best show
it could be in that contained space it needed to be structured
differently. We could have trimmed this down to just a couple of
conversations, filling five or ten minutes at the end of an episode
that dealt with the second half of the Fourth Solution. We’d lose
some nuance, but it would be better as a capstone for the show rather
than a bridge between one adventure and the next.
This is, essentially, emblematic of the
show’s big problem in general: In being an utterly faithful take on
In/Spectre it didn’t take enough risks to compensate for the fact
that the base material, while very good and intellectual, is not what
I’d call cinematic. I feel like, if they’d gambled a little more and
actually taken the time to really rewrite the material specifically
for the anime format, we could have had an extremely strong show.
As it is, for all the heartfelt or
interesting moments in this episode, it does little but highlight the
fact that the creators of the In/Spectre anime didn’t do that
diligence.
On the whole, I give In/Spectre a C+. This is, primarily, trying to analyze it on its own as an anime rather than as an expression of the existing manga. It still has good ideas for the audience to digest, but the presentation is a real mixed bag. Some episodes (particularly 1, 10, and 11) are strong on their own and others can have dynamite scenes, but on the whole the production feels bloated, and has a tendency to drag in places that it really shouldn’t drag. The voice performances are all solid, but the script sometimes isn’t, which I think you would notice even if you didn’t know that this was because they were using a text medium’s tricks for pacing and building drama in a show that didn’t need it. It’s not a bad anime, and I wouldn’t recommend viewers avoid it… but at the same time I wouldn’t really recommend it either. You could take it or leave it. In the trial-by-internet of Iwanaga’s big anime outing, this ‘juror’ remains, ultimately, undecided.