You know, the organization that created you… ring a bell?
- In the last episode, we found out who are in cahoots with the 1st Division and what their goals are.
- Summary of Episode Eight: Ibara and company, while en route to the hospital, meet the Ozu sisters who are the rest of the Cleanup Crew led by Haruto. They seem to have lost their minds as they promptly attack the truck Ibara and the others are traveling in. The team is forced to play a deadly hide-and-seek game with the sisters who bear a grudge against Ibara. They seem to have escaped in a tank, but the sisters are hot on their trail. A show-down ensues in which they are neutralized. The episode ends with the wind picking up, carrying traces of the contamination throughout the old capital.
- My impressions: Long story short, while this episode wasn’t bad per se, it could’ve been better. I would’ve liked it if it expanded on certain things more in depth and put a curb on certain things which I think were in excess. I’ll try to explain what I mean by that.
- We now know that the genetically engineered children are in fact clones of existing people. I guess human cloning is more credible than completely artificially created humans, which up to this point I believed that’s how the children were made. On the other hand, just how much a person’s nature or personality is decided by their genes and how much by their upbringing is a really interesting topic of discussion, even if this show takes a shortcut and simply states the children inherit the personalities of the one they were cloned from.
- Let’s say for a moment that personality is encoded in genes, then having identical genes would mean identical personalities, which is exactly how the show explains the deviant behavior of the Ozu children. In real life though the answer is anything but this simple. Studies done with twins suggest that genes do affect personality, however no specific “this gene encodes this trait of personality” has ever been found, and if I can hazard a guess, no one will ever find so. – I do like when anime makes me pause for a moment and go look up some stuff on the web (in this case, the genes vs personality issue or in the case of the previous series I’ve been following, Silver Spoon, agricultural stuff), and it would’ve been great if the show cared to explore this question a bit more in depth. Unfortunately Coppelion is not the kind of anime to do that.
- I guess the military’s plan to implant all genetically engineered children with superpowers backfired. Once someone with enhanced powers goes on a rampage, it’s pretty much impossible for regular humans to get them under control.
Yeah, that’s basically how strength and intelligence is related in your usual human.
And they didn’t do their homework either, cloning an actress who’s a serial killer come evening. Well even military personnel can make mistakes; nothing new here, let’s move on.
- The other theme I liked (or would’ve liked) in this episode is the old “puppets turn against their puppeteers” trope. The “we are a race supreme to humans who should just die out” has been used in countless works of fiction, and it would’ve been interesting to see how Coppelion handles this idea. The next line the Ozu sisters spouted was, however, a self-referential “oh, that is like totally from some manga”, which I was, oddly enough, also okay with.
- We got another glimpse into the children’s past and found out that they are not expected to live long. I can somehow see how this revelation helps twist the sisters’ personality a bit more. On the other hand I don’t see how the sisters’ killing the principal would help them live longer, at most, it’s only taking revenge for what has been done to them; but then again, this kind of thinking actually fits in well with their obviously twisted personality.
You should learn from Haruto, he’s like totally cool with the idea of prematurely dying.
- And now let’s move on to some inconsistencies, so to say, that irked me in this episode.
- When Haruto’s so called new type grenade goes off, which is just a stun grenade, the sound waves incapacitate the two sisters, but Taeko and Kurobe standing only a few metres (maybe a few ten metres) away are not only unaffected, they don’t even seem to hear anything.
- The tank vs motorcycle chase sequence. I always find it irritating when movies, TV series, etc portray a car chase on a long, straight road and there’s no nitro involved, the cars are traveling at the same speed; yet suddenly the driver of the car behind steps on the pedal and catches up with (or overtakes) the car in the front. I mean if you are chasing another car you’d want to catch up as soon as possible and you’d be down on the pedal as much as you can; conversely, if you are chased by baddies and you’d want to get away as soon as possible you’d put the pedal to the metal too. In neither cases would you go slower than the top speed of your vehicle. So where does the inexplicable speed boost come from? Oh yes, I know, it’s much more dramatic that way. The chase sequence in Episode eight suffers from the same symptoms as well, which doesn’t make it dramatic, only ridiculous. Now before anyone points out that a tank can’t possibly go as fast as a motorbike can, I’d like to counter with the argument “why is the motorbike shown as struggling to keep up with the tank then?”
- As much as they were in a hurry in past episodes to get Ibuki into a hospital, they seemed to have forgotten that they are in the nick of time. Gennai even suggests that they scrap the whole excursion and return to their hideout, although it turns out to be an excellent idea because of concerns of rising contamination.
- Also, when Ibara makes one of the sisters hit the hydrogen canister and she is thrown backwards on the bike, it slows down so much that in one moment the bike is side-by-side with the tank, the next moment is like a hundred meters back. And I don’t think a tank driver can step on the brakes with so much power that the vehicle performs something reminding me of a nose-dive. The whole chase and the ensuing show-down scene seemed so much exaggerated to me that I couldn’t take it seriously any more.
Okay, I’ll stop the nitpicking here.
- The household robot trying to initiate conversion with Aoi by bringing her sweets, especially Aoi’s reaction (“leave the sweets here and go away… are you really going away? come back!”), was funny. It was nice to see her get a tiny bit of screen time just to show she’s still around, but I felt this episode, too, was centered on Ibara.
All I see is some phony map and innocent-looking triangles.
- All in all, this episode was nice because I got a little bit more insight into the characters which was offset by some laughter-inducing scenes.