Cat Scare.
So, I will come out and say that while I still feel kind of lost, this was a stronger episode than the last one… but not entirely enough to restore my faith in the series.
The outline of the episode has us start out following Echika and her friend, Bigga, who gave us a bad case of exposition at the end of last episode. We learn that Bigga evidently has her ear to the ground in Oslo, and can identify a likely hideout of E’s followers just by knowing what’s popular with Luddites and Forma Users. Rather than staking the place out properly while their backup is stuck in traffic, Bigga goes in, and Echika follows her.
We learn that Bigga went in because she saw her dad go in, and that he’s evidently operating as the Herald of E in this place. Bigga confronts her dad, and this gets Echika in a mess of trouble when she’s somehow (this confuses everybody in character) recognized on sight. Luckily, while all previous episodes have suggested that Echika can’t fight her way out of a wet paper bag, the cavalry arrives before she has to try and arrests everybody.
Well, almost. Bigga’s dad flees with Bigga as a hostage/escortee, and they only catch up to him at the airport. He threatens his daughter, refuses to listen to anybody, and then tries unsuccessfully to suicide by brain hack chip when he’s cuffed and taken in. He had a ticket to France, though, so that suggests this might be connected with the other side’s case.
On the other side, Harold and new girl seem to have wrapped up their investigation when some E-goons show up and attack new girl, giving her a sprained ankle for her trouble. New girl gets super cozy with Harold while dropping her tragic backstory so it’s clear she’s going to be dead, revealed as evil, or otherwise indisposed by the end of this arc. Sorry, lady, narrative logic insists you’re in hot water.
Honestly, it seems pretty likely that her “rapidly increasing abilities” are probably due to brain hacking since that was introduced as a thing in this arc and she’s probably going to burn out, go crazy, or have to pay the piper on that score… but the show hasn’t formally revealed that so it’s just my educated guess.
In any case, everybody ends up back at headquarters when E drops a new post to the public: Doxxing multiple members of the agency and calling directly for violence against them, which we see starting as boss lady’s apartment gets bombed with her cat in it. A cat that we had not seen or even had referenced in this show (except for the end credits, so maybe it’s okay) until now but that we get a solid few seconds focusing on just for some immediate pathos.
A big issue is that almost everything in this plot, including E’s supposed conspiracy and new girl’s tragic past, is related to a particular past case that evidently Harold and Echika were involved in. It’s not the first case in the show, but they talk about it in a way that suggests that we the viewers should probably know what it is. We can’t really assess anyone’s motivations or the truth of how much has been covered up if we know even less than the faceless masses in the setting, who think there has been a cover up, do. Far be it from me to say that oh, we need to start at the start – you can have elements from your characters’ backstories come up and be important but then the audience needs some kind of tutorial on what went down in that backstory. Why is this important? How big a deal was that case? Are these E-idiots supposed to be analogous to 9/11 “truthers”? Or are they just getting murderous because a criminal investigation – something that’s usually not overwhelmingly a matter of public record – isn’t being treated as a matter of public record? Is there actually more to it than people are letting on? The CID seems to treat this case as not a huge big deal. Big enough that folks know its name, but most don’t seem haunted by it or anything like that, so what’s the deal?
The pacing in the episode was better. The scenes in the bar, the standoff at the airport, and the bit with new girl bonding with Harold, were done as well as you could really demand. But there are still some macro issues gnawing at Your Forma that I worry aren’t really going to be addressed.