Yup, we really do seem to be moving into an endgame. This time, that means kicking Risa while she’s down!
The episode starts with Risa’s backstory, how she was on a recreational balloon ride with her mother only for there to be a disaster. Mom was killed, and Risa was reduced to just her neural net, but Dr. Sudo (no doubt near the start of his practice then) put her back together again, reconstructing her body from surviving data and reinstalling her into it. So, yeah, the way she kind of hero worships him makes a lot of sense.
In the present, she’s approached by the long-lost sister she never knew she had, a Humanoid her dad adopted after breaking up with her mom and who lived with him in India until his recent death. Sis and Risa bond, but something seems off about Sis and it’s ultimately revealed that she’s a copy of Risa her dad made and installed in stolen hardware, as well as that she killed their dad when she found out and was planning to (though it proved emotionally impossible) kill Risa and take her place in society. Sister is arrested and put away presumably for good, maybe for something related to being a copy but more likely for the murder she admitted to (even if that would technically be another country’s jurisdiction)
As Risa is reeling from this, Dr. Sudo is approached by his old friend and Michi’s offer: in exchange for Sudo participating in the upgrade plan, Michi will use its super-AI powers to locate the copy of Sudo’s mom, which he previously searched for fruitlessly and which might be the key to solving the big case in his life. After getting this offer, Sudo takes Risa out for a really nice dinner date, thanks her for all the help she’s been over the years… and announces that he’s planning to leave Japan to find his mother in a way that implies he might not be back., making it something of a tearful goodbye.
All in all, this episode is clearly setup for the ending movements of the season dealing most closely with Michi and Sudo and Sudo’s mother. We’re now more or less free of anything else that might have got in the way – the episode even revealed well enough that, whatever happened in the procedure room that day, Risa and Breezy are on good terms again. That leaves Sudo, Michi, Sudo’s Mom, and presumably the killer believing he’d thrown a spanner into Michi’s work as loose threads. Sure, we could open new topics or reopen old ones, but we don’t need to at this point, and this episode (while good with character stuff) didn’t give us any new concepts to focus on as had previously been the order of the day.
There’s not much left to Gene of AI, so we might as well greet it when it comes.