Case Closed, as we all expected.
So it turns out that the evil mastermind this whole time was… the new girl we knew from the start had to be removed and who was the only person in the entire story given something like a motive. Shocking I know.
If I sound a little sarcastic, that’s probably because this episode walked back and once again committed the sins that the last summation episode, Episode 4, did. We get a lot of bland exposition and a really lame final struggle when a trap is set for the new girl and sprung on her with extremely minimal hazards along the way. Essentially, a new E post drops targeting her and her brother. This causes her to hint at Harold to go check on the brother, where she accesses his computer (which has E on it) in order to post a retraction. Harold catches her red-handed, reveals he was behind the anomaly post, and pretty much covers her entire motivation and the chain of events of the last three episodes, explaining how she’s behind almost everything.
She got cartridges from Bigga’s dad to up her processing power. She asked him to basically poison Echika. She wrote all the E posts, on behalf of an AI installed on her brother’s computer, and she was pushing this forward because she wanted to get closer to the case that reduced her brother to his current messed-up state. After she halfheartedly has a standoff with Harold and Echika (who just sort of shows up), she’s taken in and we get a brain dive of the brother to find out where E really came from.
This gives us what is presumably our next hook, but seeing how the first two arcs dovetailed like oil and water and this metaphor I’m not going to hold my breath. E is, or was, a hack of an AI program sent to the brother. The base code, freshly introduced, is from a guy we’ve never heard of who seems to be a meticulously maintained not-existing fake. Who really coded it? Why did they leak this illegal AI monstrosity? Who knows. That would be an interesting note to follow up on, but I can’t say with confidence that we will.
Also Echika and Harold are back to bickering even if Harold now wants to call himself her friend. It’s almost like the big talks in the last episode didn’t happen.
For all that… this isn’t awful as a the summation for a fair-play mystery, even a really easy to guess fair-play mystery, it’s just overly long for the TV format. We at least got another brain dive scene. You know, the big deal for the setting that is huge part of the pitch but has only made it to screen a couple of times? It’s a nice scene. I just guess that if Echika is good at something, the writers don’t know what to do with her. In a weird way, I can respect putting a powerful character out of the element in which she has her top ranks, but it would be nice if we saw some of her top capability a little more or if she was able to at least give a little bit of an account of herself in a different crisis situation. She feels like a hyper-specialized RPG character, who gives the GM headaches because she trivializes any scenario where her specialty comes up but flounders pretty totally outside of such scenarios.
Well, the format of the show as a whole is pretty well set: four episodes to an arc, three arcs to the show. Next week, we’ll get to start on Your Forma’s Final Problem. Is it possible that the capstone arc will give the show as a whole a much needed boost? Yes it is… but I don’t expect it.