This is the madness I wanted to see – something on screen more strange and engaging than the panel with Yoko Taro in a leprechaun mask hyping it up.
So, here we mostly get an existential experience. The actions in the episode are that the mysteriously okay team of Chika, Honoka, and Kouki show up at the intersection, find Ryo and Goro dying (not quite dead yet), and try to decide what to do. Honoka, being Honoka, gets stabby. Lall takes the knife for Goro, explains herself, and then barters away her existence to get Goro up and operating at max power. He goes into some weird zombie god mode with the Fools Sutra light effects covering his face like a mask, jump cuts people out of existence leaving only their cell phones behind, and then gets owned by Ryo who seemingly drops him in a black hole and restores everything. At the end, the incident is blamed on terrorists, a sketchy non-NPC politician promises to bring order to the nation, and we learn that something weird is apparently inside Candidate cell phones when a couple get broken.
However, that’s not the meat of the episode. The meat is a deep dive through Goro’s memories and psyche as he encounters the wishes of those he’s faced off against like Little Angel, Kyo, and Akitsu. We get a lot of twisted imagery as Goro figures out what his own deal is, ending with his realization of his and Lall’s true nature: his wish is to be needed by others, to be relied on and to hear their wishes. And the first wish that Goro took up was that of his unborn little sister, who his mother was all set to abort for being born of an affair, who wanted to be born. Said little sister is Lall. In this way, Goro’s wish (to answer prayers) makes him the closest to “Godliness”, and Lall’s maintained memory of that truth is a big part of why she’s been so insistent that Goro has what it takes to be God.
It may still not seem like much, but this was actually an episode that felt loaded up, rather than a little light the way some KamiErabi episodes have. We’re of course left with a lot of questions, like what was in the broken phone that our teleporter and the hacker (stranded in Antarctica) both saw? There’s not a really clear shot that tells us what the big deal is so I don’t think we were supposed to understand yet.
And then there’s the Ryo/Goro confrontation. Goro had already deleted the other real characters as well as the NPCs, evidently “taking their wishes”. Ryo snaps to attention when he approaches her, declares her wish her own, and then zaps Goro, leading to a return to the real world where only Goro, rather than everybody but Ryo, is missing. We don’t follow up with any of those characters in the last couple of scenes, just the politician and the hacker candidate, so it’s hard to say what Lall’s sacrifice and Ryo’s defense really did in terms of them.
I also want to call on the animation in this episode: it looks much better than the show generally has up to this point. Maybe because it was doing mostly weird, surreal imagery rather than trying to pretend to be a normally-shot and ordinary show, or maybe because the animators are finally learning how to wield their program properly. I honestly don’t know which it is, and it might even be a little from column a and a little from column b, but I’m glad for it in any case. The high-saturation otherwirlds where the movement is supposed to be surreal look fine, and they actually managed some better rigging for Lall’s face so she could emote for her last big speech.
Hopefully, the final episode of the season will give us a better hook for season 2. There’s still clearly a lot of story to get through, and I’m just glad that it seems like the wild ride has started in earnest.
UPDATE: It seems 12 was the last episode of the first Cour, contrary to early leaks, but that makes as much sense as anything. The show will continue some time in 2024