I love In/Spectre. I really do. The
manga does an excellent job of blending detective-style mystery with
urban fantasy and giving it a unique twist with Iwanaga’s ultimate
disregard for the truth and disinterest in judgment, how she instead
seeks solutions or uses the truth for her own ends. But every week
this show just reinforces my thought that it shouldn’t have made the
transition from text and still images on a page to a medium that has
an unavoidable element of time.
Case and point, this episode. It’s all
about Rikka. Rikka is Kuro’s cousin. She’s kind of pretty and
somewhat creepy. She has the same “condition” as he does, having
eaten Kudan and Mermaid meat, and was kept at the hospital not
because she was sick but because she was being studied. She’s
someone Kuro deeply cares about, to the degree where Saki suggests
she was his “first love”. She’s also currently in parts unknown
and is the creative force behind Steel Lady Nanase, using her
future-determining ability repeatedly to fix many small outcomes into
the single large result that is the Steel Lady. She’s doing this at
least in part to test the limits of her abilities, but any higher
motive she may have is currently unknown and/or unrevealed.
That took me one paragraph. Meaty
paragraph, but one paragraph. And yeah, this is a show, it’s going
to be showing this through narrative and flashback, so it’s going to
take longer than that. Probably much longer. But a whole episode?
We get some extra discussion about how the fight against Steel Lady
Nanase is going to work (Iwanaga versus Rikka with the whole of the
anonymous internet as the jury), but the vast majority is spent on
explaining Rikka.
And, OK, Rikka is important. She needs time and focus. And the manga spent some good time on her introduction as well. But a Manga has different needs when it comes to pacing than does an anime, and while what works in one format can work in the other, it’s not guaranteed to. I’m somewhat reminded of Mekakucity Actors, a show that had well-paced episodes hampered by being part of a bizarrely and ineffectively paced whole show… connected to a set of novels with the same overall story structure, except that it works in a series of light novels far better than it did in the anime.
The problem is, In/Spectre’s episodes
don’t feel particularly well-paced either; they’re padded out,
because the pacing that doesn’t work here is the pacing of each
individual scene and not necessarily the story structure as a whole.
This episode is particularly bad about feeling padded. A number of
notes are repeated in the big speeches, and it feels like we’re
stalling on the cusp of something big rather than building up
meaning. You end up wondering, really, if we’re going to get to
anything. And the answer is kind of a no on that.
I just hope that the show actually
shows us something new and strong as we get into Iwanaga’s four
solutions. I remember that, while it was a little thing, it was
actually new and good to see the intro to Karin Nanase’s show.
Similarly, if In/Spectre does well, we’ll see some new and engaging
visualizations for a climax that is, in an objective sense, an
internet argument. Am I hopeful that we’ll see it? Less that I was
in episode 1, that’s to be sure, but I think there’s still a chance.
We’ll see how that pans out.