“It was me, last episode villain!”
The trouble with seasonal entries is that I have to do them as I’m able to watch. Well, I have gotten to the end of Metallic Rouge now, and this is what I saw.
Most of the meat of this episode was the doctor taking credit for every negative thing that happened in this show, hijacking everyone else’s motivations, even when it doesn’t make sense. He claimed he programmed the Nine to do everything they did, from Noir’s love for Gene’s mother to Silva’s rebellion, all dancing on his puppet strings. He even takes credit for his own murder despite Silva and Giallion having memories of their roles. How? Current version is a Nean copy with uploaded memories. He gets taken out, but then just jumps into Cyan’s body. This is of course just as planned.
Silva gets dead, and Rouge at first doesn’t do well in a fight against Cyan/Junghart. Naomi then gets the bright idea to sacrifice herself by having Rouge overwrite the borrowed ID. This “kills” Naomi’s normal body and leaves her as a voice in Rouge’s head forevermore, while powering up Rouge with a second stage transformation. The doctor tries to do the same thing with Cyan but she resists him and thus gets the both of them killed.
Rouge then decides, rather arbitrarily, to go ahead and use her original ID to trigger Code Eve and free the Neans anyway. Because apparently that will be just fine as long as it’s not the baddies doing it? I guess a mysterious event rather than a deliberate attempt to start a war is a rather different situation, but it still is a quick turnabout of what we’re going for.
There’s a moment where it seems like this is a terrible idea. The Usurper contact of the doctor gloats about the downfall of mankind as a secret virus hijacks the minds of all Neans… only to stop just about immediately because Gene deduced this off screen and (at least somewhat on screen) prepared an antivirus while everybody was struggling over the last two episodes.. Thus, the Neans don’t rebel but are free from at least the strictest Asimov Code since one is able to lightly shove a human jerk and this is taken as an object of wonder. In the epilogue, it’s clear that the Usurpers still have the war being on, and Rouge fights against them for the protection of human and Nean society.
I guess there is the Nectar to consider as a control mechanism that wasn’t disabled, but whatever.
Metallic Rouge finished… weaker than it could have. I do think the show knew what it was doing, but I will contend that it didn’t have quite the time to do it. As such, there were elements at the end here that felt really rushed or wasted. The twist where Doctor Junghart was behind everything, even things other characters remember doing, going so far as to kill his past self, is especially poorly constructed.
I’ve talked about this before in longer reviews, but when you get a good twist there are clues and a scenario that make it clear that the twist could, even should happen in this story. There were no real hints that the Immortal Nine were being controlled, or that things didn’t happen as they remembered. The memory archive was set up, but on the whole it feels like the writers were desperate to make the puppet master feel like the real evil, and thus just assigned to him even the things that didn’t make sense, taking agency from Silva and our favorite murder clown that didn’t need to be taken from them. If there was longer to do the setup, the unreliable narrator aspect could have been established.
In the end, Metallic Rouge is an… acceptable show. It’s not as great as it could be, but it’s got a few classic ideas and a nice style that carry it past what it might otherwise have fallen to. On the other hand, while it could come off as confusing, the latter acts helped give the story a clear theme and drive that it didn’t exactly start with. It’s sad that it didn’t quite get to the pinnacle of its potential, but at least it salvaged itself well enough.