Understanding, reconciliation, and cliffhangers.
So, this episode was rightly enough spend primarily on processing the previous episode and coming to terms with it before throwing more mayhem our way.
We get some of Rime’s backstory (she was the daughter of a scientist behind the Fragment system, who was pushed off the edge and into the deep end by her mother’s murder, eventually turning him into a Tesseractor) and spend a good deal of time grappling with how the needs of the many and the needs of the few may clash, where they must, and how a person feels about it.
Kafu is surprisingly reasonable about the situation, but still gives the Section Chief a lot to think about… which results in the Section Chief (identified as a “living computer”) taking human form to better comprehend humans. They hang out with Kafu a good deal, and seem to make a good deal of headway on giving mercy to their morality, providing hope for the future of Kamitsubaki City’s defense system.
Then, after an episode almost entirely on downtime, as Kafu and the Section Chief prepare to shake on their newfound understanding, a mysterious outsider shows up and stabs Section Chief to bloody death in an instant. Cut episode!
Credit where it’s do, the show knows how to deploy a cliffhanger. What happens now? Why did this just happen? All these questions and more will be answered next week if we’re lucky.
I think the most compelling question is in who or what the interloper is. It’s brief, but we also see an intelligent humanoid malicious entity in Rime’s backstory, the one that seemed to deliberately drive her father into madness by murdering her mother. These beings have a look and feel similar to the partners of the witchlings, but are obviously of different motive and alignment even if they turn out to be the same sort of being. Given that the partners are pretty mysterious, digging into their evil counterparts could be fairly fruitful.
I will say, there are parts of this show that do feel like they’re on autopilot. But that’s not always a bad thing. Autopilot rarely thrills, but also rarely crashes and burns, and at least the standard parts they’re using are more tried and true ones than tired and reprocessed ones. This isn’t the first time the average viewer will have seen cute girls dealing with emotional trauma while pitted against an apocalyptic threat and it hits a lot of the same notes as other works with the same sort of creative DNA, but there’s only so much I can fault the show when it plays them with competence.
I think I do have to highlight this episode as better than it might have been with the interactions between Kafu and the Section Chief. It would be easy, so very easy, to make Kafu a shrieking moralizer who refuses to listen to the fact that her boss actually has a point about trying to save everybody who can be saved, and/or to make said boss an obstructive and useless authority figure who refuses to listen to Kafu or acknowledge that there might be an issue with a plan that has such a steep required cost. Instead, they both have their own stances, but are capable of seeing the other and considering it as something valuable. It’s more emotionally mature and way more watchable than the typical ideologue shrieking.
But, of course, for all that I’m giving the talking some credit, it’s clear that this show intends to keep the hits rolling. I guess, to an extent, the body count being racked up is also a little off from the standard template.
In any case, we’ll know more soon enough.