Flee from Togetsu
Tell us something we don’t know
And learn what to show
I think, perhaps, the biggest crime of Scarlet Nexus is that it doesn’t know what to spend its screen time on, and it’s becoming ever more obvious that it’s stumbling in adapting a game to the screen.
In a game, if you’ve been playing with Kyoka as a party member for roughly half the game until now, you’d have a good sense of her, both in cutscenes and in game play. You’d know her fairly well and feel something about her. In the anime paced as is, she’s really a tertiary character, distinct enough to remember but not really developed in any strong sense. So when, after Kasane and Yuito’s teams help each other bust out of Togetsu, Kasane encounters Kyoka and talks her down from madness brought on by the implanted memories of her genetic originator, it kind of falls flat here when it could have been a powerhouse scene.
To tell the episode more in order, Kasane and Kagero come to the door to the central computer, where Yuito is currently being brain-hijacked along with his team. Kasane calls out to him, allowing him to break the control effect and save himself and his friends from being brainwashed. Then, they use the central computer to throw open all the locks so Kasane and Kagero can go rescue their friends and get the hell out. On the way out Yuito gets almost stopped by some Kasane Clones (or design children on the same template, if you prefer) while after getting out Kasane and company run into Kyoka and, as previously mentioned, talk her back to her old caring self in a big long scene that would be emotional if you cared the least bit for Kyoka. They then rendezvous with Yuito’s crew and have a talk in a sort of safehouse Kagero leads them to.
There, Kasane spills the beans about Future Yuito and the Kunad Gate, explaining why she tried to murder him before. Yuito takes this surprisingly well (including her declaration that she no longer wants to kill him) and shares what he learned about society having recolonized Earth from the Moon in the past, to found the world folks now know. Nobody wants to believe that at first, but Kyoka affirms that the people of Togetsu believe it, only to have her affirmation one-upped by Kagero, who says he knows it to be true because he was there, and his safehouse (one of the weird cubes we’ve seen repeatedly throughout this world) is an Ark spaceship that delivered him and presumably others from the Moon to Earth.
And with that slice of what the hell, the episode ends. Well, it doesn’t exactly end there as we have to cut to dour men saying cryptic things a couple times, but in terms of the meat of the story, that’s really where it ends.
Every episode, essentially, I have the same problem with this show: it retreads too much material, rather than either forming investment or introducing new stuff, meaning that it’s moving ahead at a slug’s pace. The plot moving at this speed would be fine, though, if we were getting a lot of good character development. We’re not. The show has its audience barely invested in Kasane and Yuito, and doesn’t show off characters like Kyoka, Kagero, that guy with the glasses, Arashi, mission control pair, the girl on Yuito’s team who kind of but not really resembles Arashi… you get the idea. We don’t know them well enough for them to even really make it out of the red shirt bracket because we don’t often get to see the characters interact as people. Kagero, Arashi, and Tsugumi came the closest to having real recognizable personas, and even then having one of them suddenly step up to reveal he was somebody different just fell flat. It’s not that you reject it, it just doesn’t have much of an impact because both he and the world were blank enough to shrug and allow it.
The revelations from Togetsu should be world-shaking. They mean vast, sanity-challenging things to the characters. Kasane has to come to terms with having a past before she was Kasane Randall. Kyoka has to come to terms with and define being Kyoka rather than being her progenitor. Everyone has to react to the fact that those two, at least, aren’t really normal. We have to get through the should-be-shattering revelation that the history of the world is something insane, and the fact that a kind of normal guy is actually an ancient moon man. That’s all in this episode and maybe the last one. There are more of these game-changers earlier (most notably around Naomi’s transformation into an Other) and will surely be more to come, but we don’t really feel like any of them are game-changing because we aren’t invested enough in the game to care how it changes.
All the same, I’ll be seeing this through next week and beyond, even as a fall Seasonal Selection gets added in, and I hope you’ll join me down that road, looking for something of value here.