“Are you trying to reject the basic premise of Gatchaman? You’re way too fierce!”
What They Say
“Asymmetry”
Sugane is irked by the fact that Hajime has interfered with his attack on MESS, despite the unidentified object being a G-team target for elimination. That hardly stops Hajime from continuing to push Sugane out of his comfort zone by cheerfully going against his expectations and assumptions.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With fairly weak Winter and Spring seasons, I thought I might be able to take the rest of the year easy before ultimately naming Flowers of Evil the best show of 2013. The first episode of Crowds seemed rather orthodox aside from its unique visuals and fantastic score by Taku Iwasaki. Now, out of almost nowhere, Gatchaman Crowds makes a mad dash forward with a gleam of ambition in its eyes. Whether it can actually live up to the potential suggested here is unknown, but at the very least it seems that more things happen in this single episode of Crowds than happened in the entire Flowers of Evil series. Director Kenji Nakamura seems to be attempting to beat Summer Wars at its own game, and perhaps update or even deconstruct the sentai series, using Hajime as his assistant.
After three viewings of the episode, I’m convinced everything has meaning and intuitively fits together in a greater message. Viewing the series like Hajime herself is the key. Supremely intuitive, you soon figure out she is a fountain of empathy that figures everything out quickly, though she may have a little difficulty communicating her conclusions. Upon finding legions of stuffed pandas in Paiman’s room, she teases “I knew you liked them!” And when fixing up her room, she sings “D.I.Y… do it… I forget the Y”, forgetting “yourself” or herself, seemingly because she views everything as a team effort.
The episode starts where the first ended, with Sugane and Hajime facing down the mess. Hajime is delighted by her artist supply-modeled weapons, and enjoys targeting the MESS with pastel chalk and scissors. She soon senses something is off, however, and when Sugane has the MESS cornered, Hajime frees it, and lets it escape. Sugane is pissed: Their job is to fight the MESS, not to goof around like idiots, and it’s clear Hajime is not up to the task of being a Gatchaman.
The conflict is thus set up, and now a whirl of activity: Hajime moves into an apartment with the Gatchamen before you can even ask “Does she not have parents?” But the show has outsmarted you already, as she gives a status update to her mother over the phone. Sugane and Paiman watch the local news, detailing a politician’s bribery scandal and the suicide of a popular idol. Hajime immediately empathizes with the suicide, while Sugane accuses the idol of not valuing her life. Joe turns out to be a civil servant in the city government, preparing for attacks on the city. Hajime takes Sugane to a meetup of friends she made after a recent disaster, organized over social networking app GALAX. It’s almost certainly a survivor’s or support group of some kind, organized around the construction of collages, artistic projects that are some kind of moral support for people in afflicted areas. One member of the group is a fire chief, and another is a city mayor, a network of powerful people rivaling that of the grandmother’s in Summer Wars. And collages fit thematically: taking different kinds of media and putting them all together into a single project seems to be Hajime’s (and Nakamura’s) skill in the series. What is a social network if not a “collage” of people?
So we have the city government and Gatchaman, but we have a third layer of social governance in GALAX, which also seems to be supporting the “gamification” of good deeds performed by people for others they don’t know. Berg Katze engineers an attack on some bystanders who then fall down the stairs at the subway station. GALAX is used to call for people with medical training, and thus the need for an ambulance appears to be avoided. Is this the wave of the future? As the billboard advertises “It’s not heroes who will update the world: It’s us.”
Meanwhile, Hajime has had it up to here with Sugane’s straight-arrow heroics, and decides to befriend the MESS instead. It also appears to work, as the MESS releases all of its kidnapped people without any fuss and even snuggles with Hajime. She rejects the fundamental truths of sentai heroics and is rewarded for it. JJ’s poem suggests a bird’s wings have been “sundered” and the bird is “no longer sane”. Is the bird Hajime? Is JJ now her enemy? And what is Katze up to?
The episode closes on a young transsexual who appears to be the developer of GALAX. She’s keeping track of how often the software is used, but to what end? The episode moves so quickly and is paced so well, we’re left with endless questions, with just enough clues and references to the classic Gatchaman to make us wonder where all of this is heading.
In Summary
The standard hero arc is abandoned almost immediately as Hajime lets her first enemy go, and finds out it might not be an enemy after all. It’s clear this Gatchaman has bigger ambitions than just updating a sentai franchise, and it’s looking at all sorts of social networks, both political, technological, and heroic. It’s impossible to know where all of this is going, but Gatchaman Crowds nevertheless impresses with its ambition and the huge check it just wrote out for itself. Will it all pay off in the end? I’m curious to find out.
Grade: A
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: Sony VAIO 17″ HD screen
