Well, it’s been a long and strange trip with too few updates, but we’re finally at the end of Sparks of Tomorrow.
To quickly summarize: In Episode 9, both Inako and Kihachi try to pull the “I want my beloved to be happy” trade, ending with Kihachi dressing in drag to get into a party and buy Inako back with the catalog, a deal that Yosuke is more than happy to accept. This puts a temporary rift between Inako and Kihachi until they mend their bridges on the force of the fact that Kihachi isn’t actually giving up his dream. They also help Kengo and Inako’s big sister reconcile.
Yosuke, meanwhile, finds the secret circuit diagram for the “Electric Brain” and gets it into Kihachi’s hands so that he’ll crack it. At the same time, a mysterious “Electric Nishiki” turns out to not be any sort of electrical device, but a recipe for sake – the secret recipe of Inako’s mother, which she wants to re-create.
Yosuke and Kihachi end up putting their differences aside to create the Brain, a gigantic computer built in a sprawling complex beneath Yosuke’s amusement park, and a fair chunk of Kyoto. Inako makes sake, racing with Kihachi to see their dreams become reality. But as Kihachi works himself to the bone even with Yosuke’s nearly unlimited funds, Inako realizes that maybe she needs to convey a better message to someone special.
Her decision to get involved couldn’t come at a better time, since Kihachi and Yosuke’s differences about what to use the brain for (specifically, Yosuke’s idea to resurrect Seiroku) come to a head and, when the machine sentience seems as soulless as knowledgeable, turns Yosuke to the idea of giving it a human sacrifice for that missing spark. The related genius who knows and might object to the idea is an obvious mark. Yosuke is a bit overly theatrical about it, though, which affords Inako the chance to get in and rescue Kihachi from a Snow White style glass coffin with loads of wires and a Yosuke who starts looking like something Junji Ito would try to give us night terrors with.
Rescuing Kihachi causes some major faults in the Electric Brain, which starts to run wild. Yosuke is trapped, and afforded a vision of the Seiroku he wanted. Though Inako and Kihachi get out, they ultimately decide to go back and rescue Yosuke, which gets one last big action set piece, settling things with the brain and making both an impressive entrance and exit to the gigantic sinkhole where that underground base used to be.
In the wake of this, Inako’s sake is a success, Kihachi still has his dream and we’ve seen he has the technical skill to do it, Yosuke is off globe-trotting in an obsessive rage, and we get a not so subtle flash forward that Inako and Kihachi, having the intense chemistry they do, are probably going to get hitched in a few years. The end.
Sparks of Tomorrow was a very solid ride. It had visual ambition, strong characters, a reasonable bit of humor… There’s really a lot to like here.
If I was to have one major criticism of the work, it would be something related to Yosuke. He’s the hardest character in this to watch. As an antagonist, he is kind of unique in a good way, in that he’s actually on the same philosophical side as our protagonist, set against him mostly by petty personal grudges. There’s more potential interest there than in just a random rich megalomaniac who would probably want to step on the little guy. But by the same token, it becomes a little unclear why and how he sustains such intense hatred. The scenes where they’re ignoring the mutual grudge and growing a little close even, building the Brain, are good, but they ultimately lead nowhere. Yosuke is the kind of antagonist who has the door open for him, and slams it in the faces of the protagonists.
I respect his design from a theoretical point of view, but in a practical sense I think you could have an antagonist who was at least as unique without being such a frustration.
For a second option, I guess there’s also this bait-and-switch element. Inventing the light bulb is totally plausible in this setting, and there was actually a fair amount of research clearly done on it so that the process deeply resembles what happened in the real world. Most of the other Catalog inventions are much more fantastical. And you might say that was just the first, but it took a lot of show to get around to it.
Part of me would have loved more of a grounded catalog of early electrical inventions. Telegram/graph/phone would likely have been another solid entry (or two) and we had a bit of a hint of a motion picture projector that never manifested as a full thing. But that’s not the show we got. The show we got fully embraced its steampunk genre and the weird implausible science that goes with it, diving deep into speculative fiction rather than alternate history, ever more as the story went on. I guess the world is so loud and we get things like Kengo and his insane superhuman strength from the start or near it. It’s not wrong, but it does feel a little odd that we spend time with this very grounded idea and then move to this very fantastical one.
And, while there’s little to fault in Sparks of Tomorrow, I also have trouble finding really intense high notes. The chemistry between Kihachi and Inako is good. The scenery is good. But what’s great in this show? What really stands out?
This is one that I think, because of that, is probably going to become a sleeper. Media doesn’t get lost all that easily these days, so Sparks of Tomorrow is likely to be discoverable for the foreseeable future. People who come across it later are liable to enjoy it, but I don’t think many people have been talking about it and I don’t really see that changing. It has the makings of a cult classic: flawed, but original and overall quality. Seek it out if you will.