Some investigations don’t end so easily.
So, the main thrust of this episode is that the culprit from the stabbings, who was trying to out Harold’s series of robots as dangerous, has escaped custody and fled. He’s headed into Luddite territory west of London, where the towns are picturesque and have no Augmented Reality Wifi nor even telecom past rotary dial. A great place to hide in a world of futuristic surveillance.
While on the trail, we spend a fair amount of time having our leads try to work out their issues. This is, in my mind, really good stuff. It doesn’t make for compelling summaries, but the scenes of just of the two of them trying to understand each other either directly or indirectly are really good.
Naturally, though, the plot approaches. On a deduction from Harold, the investigators find their way to a particular patch of tourist housing (where it’s clearly the off season) and there encounter the getaway car. They have themselves a thrilling little car chase through the English countryside, but since apparently nobody taught Echika advanced chase-stopping maneuvers, she ends up just flipping both cars, at which point the culprit gets a lead and the heroes are only able to follow via a trail of leaking motor oil.
This leads them to a house where they discover the culprit tied and gagged, only to be attacked by one of Harold’s brothers (the one whose body, but not head, was found in the Thames) as they try to free him. Just when you think there’s a chance to breathe, our terrorist pops up, chokes Echika unconscious while Harold is forced to watch since he can’t attack a human, and then takes Harold prisoner.
Echika wakes up and intuits where he’d want to go, leading her to the AI lab at Cambridge, where the beat-up Harold is in an analysis pod and the culprit has his old flame of a mad scientist at gunpoint.
Thus, as Echika finds this dead of night scene, the episode ends.
So, this one sort of dispels the notion that we’d be dealing with a series of tangentially related or unrelated cases. Even if we recapture this guy here and resolve his issue, the main thread is now set in a much firmer way.
Now, there is the possibility that, since Your Forma is adapted from a series of Light Novels, we’ll get a solid break somewhere along the line, but it’s hard to say for sure.
While I find myself enjoying this show, I have to admit there are some cracks showing. The fact that Harold “had to” stand by utterly passive while Echika was getting choked, tied up, or threatened with a knife? I feel like maybe there were a few things he could have done even within some variant of Three Laws Compliance. The characters lean a lot on things that happened pre-story to create various rifts and bonds and introduce some of these folks to each other. It’s fine to have your characters come in with relationships of various sorts, but I think we need a flashback or two about Echika’s sister or this past catastrophe. But, as always, I’ll be leaving final judgment to the end.