Fight or Flight
What They Say:
Kaneki desperately fights the urge to eat human flesh, the only thing that can satisfy his hunger as a ghoul. He meets up with Hide again, joining him on an errand, and is glad for the companionship. But will his declining condition place Hide at risk?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Dealing with the effects of the end of the last episode, Kaneki finds he is not entirely alone in the world. Toka berates Kaneki about complaining how awful his life is now, while pointing out that ghouls, it seems, are born the way they are. You don’t become one, so ghouls don’t know what cake taste likes, or good a can of soda feels going down. But, it turns out – they can enjoy coffee. Toka, as well as an older gentlemen that seems to own the coffee shop she works in, take Kaneki in, as he says “it’s our policy to help our fellow ghouls.” He provides Kaneki with a small piece of flesh, enough to sustain him, and offers for him to come back anytime he wants for more. He also reveals that ghouls, through the ages, have been able to enjoy coffee like humans do – a strange fact, but after all, is coffee not the universal beverage?
Toka and the Old Man (as we’ll call him for now, as he is not named as of yet) also easily surmise that Kaneki was the recipient of Ghoul organs from the binge eating ghoul Rize that tried to attack him, and that explains how he’s a ghoul but at the same time not a ghoul.
After several messages from his best friend Hide, Kaneki finally decides to leave his house and meet with him, and meets with Hide’s roommate Nishiki (who was the ghoul that wanted to kill Kaneki in the first episode for encroaching on his turf) and the three of them spend a very tense and awkward day together before Nishiki punts (literally) Hide down the length of a parking garage, knocking him out, and begins to toy with Kaneki about how powerless he is and how he wants to eat his best friend, and that maybe Nishiki will kill and eat Hide before killing Kaneki.
And that’s when Kaneki snaps. Overcome by hunger, fear, anger, and the desire to save his best friend, Kaneki manifests the same kind of powers that Rize had (those horrible, terrifying, blood-red tentacles) and absolutely brutalizes Nishiki. Kaneki doesn’t just beat Nishiki up, he unleashes a relentless fury that leaves Nishiki shock and on the verge of death, which is apparently very hard to get a ghoul to.
Despite the encouragement from Rize in his head and the overwhelming hunger of his stomach, Toka shows up to keep Kaneki from harming Hide, and patches both of them up back at the coffee shop with the Old Man. Kaneki despairs that he no longer has a place at all in the world, but the Old Man counters by pointing out that Kaneki has a place in both worlds, and exists in a unique place between ghouls and humans. This gives Kaneki some form of hope and he no longer feels alone, having Hide, Toka, and the Old Man as friends.
In Summary:
This episode does a lot to illustrate just how much about Kaneki people don’t know, and teases at what’s to come from our half-human, half-ghoul protagonist. Despite getting the crap kicked out of him previously, when Kaneki hits a snapping point, even if he’s just acting on pure instinct, he is apparently quite powerful and puts Nishiki in his place. However, all that power comes with a price – the voice of a psychotic, hedonistic, sadistic ghoul talking to you in your head, because you now have her organs inside of you. Rize has shown up a few times now to influence Kaneki when he’s weak or scared, but I wonder just how much influence over his behavior, and just how much of her is actually left inside Kaneki that we’ll see her influence manifest in more dire ways in the future.
Toka, while cold and a bit arrogant, is actively watching out for Kaneki, as is the Old Man, who to date is the first ghoul we’ve seen that isn’t a young teenager or 20-something. They clearly want to help Kaneki and take him in, but much of who they are or why they’re doing what they’re doing is still shrouded in some mystery, which I’m sure we’ll learn more about (including what the Old Man’s name is) in the future.
Aside from other ghouls, there’s other antagonists too – the gleeful, murderous human hunting Rize at the beginning of the first episode, with his signature set of pliers, shows up at the end, and it’s very clear that these two anti-ghoul specialists will be showing up again.
I’m enjoying the world building for this show so far, and the creators are doing a good job of slowly adding characters and expanding the world around those characters while also leaving us with enough questions to wonder what will happen in the next episode. The horror elements persist in some very subtle but creepy and terrifying ways, and I hope that continues as well. I think the show is handling those elements very well and it’s what sets Ghoul apart from more traditional “high-school-kids-with-weird-special-kinds-of-powers-trying-to-kill-each-other” fair. It’s not the subject so much as how they’re approaching it, and the backdrop the show has. It’s great, and I really look forward to tuning into the gritty, brutal, terrifying journey of Kaneki each week.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: FUNImation
Review Equipment:
Intel Alienware laptop, Windows 7, 25” HP2509m screen at 1920×1080 resolution
