Playing the blame game
What They Say:
Osamu Mikumo is a member of Border, an organization designed to protect Mikado City the from alien invaders knows as Neighbors. One day a mysterious new student named Yuma Kuga transfers to his school and turns out to be a humanoid neighbor himself. The two are supposed to be natural enemies, but could there be more to neighbors than Osamu has bargained for…
The Review:
Content (warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
The arc transition continues onward in this episode and gives us another bout of Osamu focused material. Also like before, it functions mostly as an aftermath to the previous battle, though what we get here is a bit more interesting. Though more importantly it offers an idea of what lies ahead for the anime and it’s taking quite the turn apparently.
After finally waking up from his coma, Osamu’s greeted by his mother (who in typical anime fashion looks young enough to be his sister, and gets mistaken as such) who tells him about how everyone’s visited him except for Yuma. Osamu feels it might be because of what happened to Replica, and that feeling of guilt only increases when he’s told he’s been given a distinguished service award, for what was actually Replica’s sacrifice. However it’s mostly assuaged in a touching little moment when Yuma actually does arrive and tells Osamu not to worry himself over it as Replica was just doing his duty and he’s likely still alive somewhere. While it’s clear he’s mostly saying it just to avoid worrying Osamu further, it still mostly manages to do the job and show how much the two have become friends over the course of the show.
Though it doesn’t take too long for Osamu’s sense of guilt to be put to the test again, but this time in a slightly different way. He gets asked by one of the Border higher ups to attend a press conference with the public regarding the entire Afrfokrator incident. The scene’s handled pretty realistically in that respect as the press tries to place blame on Border for the losses suffered despite them being kept to an extreme minimum and Border emphasizing that aspect much like a real-w0rld organization would. To that effect they deliberately put a plant in the press to ask a question regarding how the Neighbors might have found out about the C-rank trainees not having escape Trigger’s thanks to Osamu’s battle with a Trion Soldier at school way back in episode 3, so that the blame for that can be shifted to him.
The higher-up tells Osamu he invited him to the conference so he could decide for himself what to do about his image and part of him does feel responsible about it. Ultimately though, Osamu’s sense of heroism holds true as in spite of everything that happened because of it, he still doesn’t regret trying to save the people school from the Neighbors back then, and it’s thanks to that the higher-up even offered to give him the chance to defend his position at all. Exactly how that fares for him is being saved for the next time, though more notably it would appear that going by the preview for the next episode, despite my concerns about how sensible it would be to keep following the manga at this point, the anime’s going ahead and jumping into the next story arc anyway. Compared to how straightforward this episode was, I’m much more curious to see how that turns out.
In Summary:
The aftermath of the Afrokrator invasion continues to go through it’s paces as Osamu deals with the guilt from Replica’s sacrifice. However he manages to overcome it thanks to some encouragement from Yuma, and while it doesn’t make for the most interesting episode, it’s kinda nice, and the political shifting of the press conference scene is pretty neat and handled with a fairly grounded approach for a shonen series. With the next arc on the horizon, I’m looking forward to seeing how the anime fares for the rest of the time it (presumably) has left.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
