Most of this episode was very expected, but there are still some good beats and interesting possibilities to talk about.
On one side, we have the battle of the
princesses. If you guessed that Endorsi was going to ultimately
attack the fluffy monster-controlling assassin rather than Anak, you
get no prize because it was obvious as hell. She also gets her rear
kicked along with Anak, which allows enough time for Yuri to appear.
Yeah, Yuri. Remember her? Relevant in
the first episode and then subject of a cutaway every couple of
episodes thereafter, most of which only lasted a couple of seconds to
remind you that she was in this and trying to meet up with Bam and
get her sword back? She finally takes the stage. And in terms of
raw, visceral demonstrations of fighting power, she’s pretty good,
taking it to the assassin with her bare hands, which isn’t saying
much as a simple flick from her shatters stone in the wake of the air
moved. Though there’s some intrigue along the way about what she can
or can’t do, she ultimately tacitly supports Endorsi, Anak, and Bam,
including having her retainer finish off the assassin. Yuri takes
Black March and Green April and gives tracksuit guy a token to pass
on to Bam, telling him (and, tacitly, Anak if she wants her sword
back) to meet her on the 77th floor.
On the other line, the goblin and worm
problems are cleaned up by Khun’s master plan, essentially siccing
them and the pigs on each other. Khun is approached by another
apparently disgraced member of his family who offers to take him to
the princess who used him to gain her station. Khun refuses the
offer, as apparently he has bigger schemes in mind, but I have the
feeling that none of that is going to really pay off in the episode
we have left. While, unlike with the princess fight, the specifics
might not be something you could have or would have called, the
general idea of working out the goblin situation is about what was to
be expected.
At this point, I do question why Khun
doesn’t annoy me when high-level schemers so often do. I think it’s
because, while things do tend to pan out Just As Planned for him, he
doesn’t feel untouchable the way a lot of schemers sometimes do. How
Khun was humanized given his background in the episode with
pick-a-door helped a lot, as does the fact that he actually relies on
people rather than using or perfectly predicting them. Lauroe, for
instance, was fully informed about the plan with the pigs, Khun just
keeps this things otherwise on a need-to-know basis that keeps the
audience out of the loop, letting us get the dramatic unspoken plan.
Because of this, it doesn’t feel like Khun’s an unbeatable
mastermind, just very good at playing the hand he’s been dealt. And
that’s fine. There are tacticians, there are strategists, there are
schemers, and then there’s being Tzeentch, God of Infallible
Convoluted Plans. As long as you don’t cross the line into Tzeentch
territory, you’re good.
The thing we will be following up with
(we had better follow up with) is what goes on with Bam and Rachel.
They spend most of the episode having a quiet talk that lets them
interact somewhere in the “maybe friends, maybe romance” bracket
(I lean towards strong friendship), and otherwise not really adding
to the otherwise action-packed episode. This changes when the Bull,
sent by the fluffy assassin in his last moments, appears and tries to
kill Bam and Rachel. Bam fights back with his fancy new wave
controller techniques before being swallowed whole while channeling
Shinsu once again in the golden-red spectrum, and giving the Bull an
explosive case of indigestion. Bam makes it back to the bubble from
that, and offers Rachel his hand, pledging that they’ll climb the
tower and see the stars together at the top. Rachel reaches back…
only to stand up out of her wheelchair and shove Bam out of the
bubble. She and the bubble ascend into golden light as the Dolphin
Queen would seemingly await, and Bam sinks down into the darkness of
the depths, betrayed and alone, visually and thematically mirroring
when Rachel left him to enter the Tower back in the first episode.
This is what we need to resolve for the
thirteenth and final episode, and there are a lot of possible ways it
could go.
The first guess would be that Rachel
has been bribed as part of the circle of backstabbing that’s been
going on, and is betraying Bam for personal gain somehow. That’s
kind of what the visual framing wants you to believe, but the
evidence doesn’t bear that out. Rachel has done very little other
than mope, regret abandoning Bam, and try to protect him. Her
actions in the Crown Game in particular can’t be explained by a
self-interested motivation, since she and Endorsi gave up the chance
to win for themselves in order to help Bam.
The second and most obvious explanation
is Despair. Rachel has seemed to be quite the downer, especially
after getting stabbed, and it’s believable that she might have
decided to hurt Bam in order to “save” him, pushing him off at
the critical moment to see both of them flunk out of Tower-climbing.
If she sees her own dream as dead thanks to her physical condition
(though clearly she can stand for at least a moment despite her
confinement), she might think its better for them, or at least Bam,
to wash out and live rather than continue and possibly have him die
because he’s trying to shoulder both their burdens.
The third and more tantalizing
possibility is that Rachel has been seized by Khun’s
“Never-explain-anything-itis” and is, in fact, trying to help
Bam. In that case either the test, or their position within it, is
some kind of trap, so that something bad would have happened to Bam
and will happen to Rachel from ascending into the light. In that
case she’s set to either die or be incapacitated in a semi-permanent
sense, acting after this as a figure for Bam to either climb the
Tower to save, or climb the Tower to avenge (giving him an anti-order
motivation like Anak, Endorsi, and Khun). In this case, the
currently sinking Bam might power up enough to save her in the
moment, or she could be left to suffer the consequences while Bam
moves onward.
In any case, the storytelling is clear
that Bam’s story doesn’t end this week, or on this floor of the
tower. He’s got a date with Yuri on Floor 77, and all his friends
that are much more interesting than he is (Khun, Endorsi, Anak) or at
least more amusing (Rak, Shibisu) are motivated to climb the Tower
with him. Their stories aren’t anywhere near over, and won’t be
going on the same way if his were to end.
How we reach that continuance, and how
they wrap up enough of the million plot threads to provide a
satisfying conclusion to a season of anime (or don’t) we’ll have to
find out next week.