A new arc starts now
Inspector loses status
Of course it won’t stick
Forgive the cynical haiku, but the introduction episode to Your Forma’s second arc isn’t particularly promising.
Let’s start with the good – the plot. Our new case involves an enigmatic figure known only as E, who has spread conspiracy theories (baseless and otherwise) and incendiary rhetoric to stir up a cult of followers, playing on their rage and fear at the state of the world and in some cases spurring them to take overt, even criminal activity.
If this doesn’t remind you of anything… is there any more room under that rock? I could use a nice, comfy spot like that.
Echika’s attempt to brain dive into some captive E-cultists goes awry, however, as it seems her information processing ability has dropped in the wake of what happened last time – whether because of the trauma or because of the brain hacks she’s taking to suppress it, I have my own suspicions but we don’t really know. What we are told is that this is usually a condition that people don’t recover from, and that it means that Echika is relieved of her duty as a cyber-inspector and downgraded into a different team, separating her from Harold.
Harold is partnered up with the new girl, a rising star whose information processing ability is also oddly on the rise. She seems nice and earnest, so I’m immediately suspicious of miss “so perfect there must be something wrong” as a matter of narrative logic. She does the brain dive (not that we actually get a new brain dive scene) and pinpoints one location to hunt for E or the network growing around E’s teachings.
Meanwhile, Echika and her new co-workers, the exuberant one and the serious one, do old-fashioned cop work and stake out a local eatery. Sure enough, E-cultists appear, first a pair that head on in and then, when Echika is left as rear guard, another fishy guy she notices.
She confronts the fishy guy, he throws coffee on her and runs in to try to murder the wait staff for no reason, and all the cultists are promptly apprehended once foiled. While our former cyber-inspector is still embarrassingly easy to take out, she is at least good at deductive reasoning and manages to pull a lead from what little a rather hostile luddite cultist – with no Forma thread installed to brain dive – does say. This sends her to Norway while Harold and his new partner are going to be dealing with things in France.
The painful bit comes in the form of a few really out of nowhere character scenes. In one, Harold tries to talk to Echika but she’s having none of it, clearly hurt but also trying to go on with what’s left of her life. This wouldn’t be so bad if it were pretty quick. They go on for a rather long elevator ride with what could have gotten across in just a couple of lines, making it feel excessively weighted. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it’s not the only scene of note in the episode.
The other is the last scene, when Echika and her new team arrive in Oslo and meet up with her contact. This contact is someone we saw, however briefly, in the first arc and also saw at the start of the episode as the one providing Echika with dodgy brain hack cartridges to keep her emotions under control and not bleed to Harold through tiny facial expressions that she learned more in the exposition at the end of the last arc than she reported or lets on. Said junior “bio hacker” has a conversation with Echika here at the end that’s… pretty scattered. She goes through Echika’s troubles promising to help and then mood swings incredibly quickly into her own tragic backstory and why she should never dream of helping anyone again. It takes up a shocking amount of meet at the end, has nothing to do with why she’s in Oslo or why it’s important to meet her in Oslo, and clearly didn’t have enough time and effort to get the emotion it wanted, at least with the lack of groundwork the show had done on this character.
I don’t know what the culprit is. Does she throw us out of the moment with this exposition about her dark shame because she’s sloppily written, or because those matters were more skillfully addressed somewhere else in the book series that the anime didn’t have the chance to throw in, forcing her to explain now what we’re already supposed to know? Were multiple conversations about and/or with her welded into one? And what connection does she have to Norway and its Luddite community that’s evidently being overwhelmed by E?
Here at the five episode mark, Your Forma is… uncommonly frustrating. I still want to like this show. I still think it has good material. It has an interesting setting (which it’s actually threatening to use, we’ll see if they do), some solid ideas, and a fair number of scenes that are honestly really good. But at the same time it has some serious issues with pacing and structure that are busily making the most human scenes, the ones that should be the glue that hold the show together, somewhere between hollow and actively offputting.
Since the casting invites comparisons, I’m going to draw back to Psycho-Pass. In that show, we got scenes between the leading cop lady and her friends… but they were friends, they talked and interacted like friends, and those scenes served to humanize the lead and build emotional bonds, at least some of which would later be reaped for tragedy. Here, Echika has friends but they’re all these sort of half-work friends who we never see her interact with in a way that relies on who they are as people rather than what they are as pieces on the board.
In Psycho-Pass, there was a beautifully complicated relationship between our lead and the main Enforcer, a person who was, similar to Harold Lucraft, not really treated as an equal partner or even necessarily as a human. Their relationship felt fairly natural, however you want to read it. Echika and Harold… nothing about their few interactions seems natural. And okay, Harold is not natural, he is a robot, but Echika’s responses go beyond needing, in character, to get her house in order and stretch towards the annoying or baffling.
I think the angle they’re leaning on is meant to be the idea that Echika’s feelings for Harold might be more in the romantic scale, hence why she talks more like a scorned ex-girlfriend than anything after her demotion. But if that’s the case it’s pretty horribly established and badly broken down. Maybe the idea is that Echika doesn’t understand herself, but if that’s the case we needed more material with Echika on her own trying to grapple with her feelings – legitimately, and not just on the phone with her digital drug dealer talking about her next fix. That pulls things back to “What”, reducing her inner turmoil to the sort of debuff you might get in an RPG.
I just hope Your Forma will be able to manifest an upward trend.