If you read my episode write-up last week, this week did nothing to really shift my perception of the series as a whole. But, for the same of completeness, let’s go through it.
For this episode, the crew decides to make a pit stop on an inhabited island, hoping to scare up some basic necessities without risking luring EDVA anywhere particularly dangerous. This island in particular is supposed to have been evacuated post-Power Down for reasons of typhoon, but they’re shortly confronted by a man and his daughter, who are still there and who own the general store the gang might have broken into.
We learn that the family is there because the little girl couldn’t give up on a pregnant cat, and after some little tension, they seem to convince the father to take them to emergency supplies. The girls all go with, while Akira stays behind with the kid and the cat so someone vaguely responsible is watching over those two.
The main gang finds the road out thanks to a land slide, and being unwilling to use their Engines to clear it, have to turn back. However, back at base, a larger land slide is triggered, threatening to wipe out shop, cat, and humans alike. Akira naturally engages ENIA in order to divert the slide and save all the relevant lives, but naturally EDVA shows up before he’s even had a moment’s peace. I get that EDVA is a being of pure data and thus can probably be anywhere at the approximate speed of light, but how does she get the crazy skull robots into position?
Anyway, a new crazy skull robot, this one with rotary autocannons for arms, attacks under EDVA’s direct command. Its gunfire might not damage ENIA, but it would be lethally dangerous to the little girl and mommy cat behind him, and still causes incredible pain. If he blacks out, EDVA wins, so Akira struggles to hold on while waiting for the cavalry to arrive.
Before they actually do, the pressure causes Akira to actually bust out a new move, countering a missile barrage from the enemy with some lasers and blowing it away in the process. EDVA continues to say nothing interesting, Akira rejects the idea that life or humans are a mistake, and the girls can gain some respect for his ability to take care of himself. Ultimately, they leave in a better place than they arrived – and with an unspoken idea on how to take on EDVA. End of Episode.
There’s not really much more meaningful I can say about this thing that I didn’t say last week or the week before, aside from the plot summary. So, because this feels a little light, I’m going to do some scifi speculation. And I’ll try to keep it basic, to be on the same level as Vertex Force seems to be.
So, EDVA is repeatedly called out as a bodiless being of pure information that, because of that, can’t be killed with conventional mortal weapons. This is a little odd, but the idea of an intelligence utterly transcending physical form, whether it was a machine or not before hand, is hardly new, so I’m going to run with the assumption that what you see is what you get, and there’s no secret EDVA mainframe on or near Earth or Theia that the gang can smash up.
However, EDVA does seem to have location. She was said to have been trapped in the magnetic fields of the Sun for years, so she clearly hasn’t totally escaped a universe based on physical law. All of the Engines are named after subatomic particles, so while their abilities look pretty familiar, perhaps they have a level of strength that can ultimately interact with EDVA.
Similarly, EDVA seems to exist in the physical world in some sense. She forms her current image-body, and while it’s pretty ghost-like (to my recollection we’ve never seen her touch anything) it can be seen and heard and it reacts, being disrupted when subjected to physical attacks. She’s also clearly got some hands in the world of matter, as she is able to produce and/or transport her battlenoids through some mechanism. Maybe there are a finite number of those drones from the old days, but that hasn’t been brought up so it’s not really a good assumption of any kind
Because of this, we have a few possible ways of defeating EDVA. We could use exotic and/or high energy physics that are able to contain and damage her despite her existing as information. We could take advantage of the fact that she can exchange data with the physical world to infect her with some kind of computer virus (which would be absurd unless the gang was able to get insider details on her cognitive architecture, but fiction kind of lets viruses and hacking be way more transparent than they really are). Or we could go with some variant of the discussed option: causing her to gain a body and then kicking her ass once she has an ass to kick. Obviously, the kids discard just handing over ENIA since EDVA clearly has a plan to not be ganked with her preferred vessel, but perhaps there’s another way to incarnate her.
Suffice to say, we’re pretty unlikely to actually do it in Episode 7, though if we did and kicked the show into a new arc that would be creative and different (more evidence it won’t happen), but part of the contract with the audience that the show has been working to establish would insist that EDVA’s threat be neutralized one way or another by the end of the show, and they’ve gone hard on building up the idea that reasoning with her is a dead end. So we’ll probably see one of these three methods work, whether or not one fails first.
Talking out probable paths done with, we’ll see you next week.