Just when you thought this thing looked normal, Yoko Taro decided it was time to remind you of his involvement.
So, this episode has three major scenes and a couple assorted moments. In the first core scene, Kouki fights the brother of the wheelchair girl, and kills him, only for the brother to get back up as soon as the power-neutralizing power Kouki wields is off. He impales Kouki, impales Honoka, and then Chika prepares to fight him after having a little battle of words. This ties into the flashback that played nearer the start of the episode, where we see a suicidal Chika saved from her despair by the wheelchair girl, establishing their bond.
I’ve also learned better than to consider someone with a trident through the chest dead in this show, but that’s neither here nor there.
In the second scene, Goro and Iyo are talking with Lall. Iyo starts to catch on to the fact that Yoko Taro has his name in the credits, points out the contrivances in the plot so far, and demands an explanation. Goro defends Lall a bit, offering her trust, which almost gets her to say something important when we segue into what I consider the third scene.
For that, it begins to rain blood. Goro, however, can’t tell, and reveals that his uses of Fool’s Sutra have been removing his senses: he can’t smell, taste, feel heat and cold, or even really see color any more, so he can’t tell at first that the rain is blood. The source is revealed to be a giant sphere of crimson humans slowly emerging from a rift in the sky, some of the sleepers shedding off, and we cut to the brother (evidently having beaten or at least disengaged from Chika. She’d better not be dead from offscreen.) talking to his sister about Schrodinger’s cat and getting increasingly incoherent about how she’s the god who can see every variant of a cat without opening the box. I guess her power was established to be parallel world based, so sure. Goro, realizing the apocalyptic scene and being weirdly comfortable with it calls on Fool’s Sutra, puts his faith in Lall to continue helping him whatever his price ends up being, and flies up to the titanic sphere of bodies. Both he and the scene vanish, restoring normal blue skies with no hint as to what’s become of our protagonist.
Of course, I can’t see the future, but I’ll predict this: the second of this episode’s three meaty scenes is a critical turning point for the show. This is where we start to chip away at the facade, are instructed to question what we’ve been led to believe, and get shown that there might be something far, far stranger out there. I could kind of see Jin’s handiwork at work from the start, though more with the feeling of a writer for hire than someone pursuing a project with passion, but it didn’t really seem to have that patented Yoko Taro madness – which to be fair only does tend to come out in his works after they’ve had some time to lull you into a false sense of security.
But now we have it: everything is or could be a lie, everywhere you find secrets, and some visuals that could probably have appeared in a Drakengard ending. It took ten episodes to get here, but this is the madness we signed up for. We’ve got three more in this cour to really go as off the rails as they care to, and then a whole second part in which we’re liable to have to revise everything we think we know again, and even if we don’t there’s still going to have to be some esoteric insanity going down.
And you might be thinking when I’m all but saying “This is where the show really starts” that ten episodes to reach this point is a phenomenally slow start. If that were all, it would be worse than Revisions… but compared to that show we’ve had a watchable lead and early arcs that in their own right had value as entertainment and as stories. And of course, second cour, we’ve got longer to use the new version.
I can’t really claim to be able to accurately say where the show is going to go from here. I’m prepared to be surprised for better or for worse, even as I hope it’s going to be a rabbit hole of madness. What will the truth be? How will we discover and engage with it? Those sorts of details do not lie within the scope of whatever little clairvoyance I may have. But I can say this – assuming we do, one way or another, take the express train to crazytown from here, I’m all for it. I’ve been begging this show to give us something big, something wild, something that distincts it from its predecessors and validates its existence as a separate thing, and clinging to smaller pieces that threaten me with a good time. Now it actually feels like there might be some progress in that direction, and I am looking forward to next week with far greater relish than previously with KamiErabi.