What They Say:
Things come to a head as Nine and Twelve go their separate ways and Shibazaki talks to Mamiya, the man behind the Athena Plan.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
It’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t too many weeks ago that everything was just going swimmingly for our Sphinx boys. They had their fun little playmate in Shibazaki and may have picked up a stray that could be risky, but as long as everything kept going as planned, it shouldn’t have mattered. Five showed up to deliver the real challenge, and after a few moves ended up putting Sphinx at the opposite end of the game, facing real defeat for the first time since starting this game. Obviously a couple of kids who decide to be terrorists, however dark their pasts or rosy their ideals, weren’t just going to succeed every step of the way, even if the audience was still in the dark about much of the later details. But perhaps this show’s strongest skill, even if one that’s been done countless times in the past and came as little surprise each time it was implemented, is to constantly shake up the perception of who’s in the right both for the participants on both sides of the screen. Now things aren’t great for anyone, and hey, that’s how drama should be.
The first big shock of the episode is Nine’s surrender, but you probably having been watching the show closely enough if you expected him to really intent to simply give up. Of course it was all part of the plan after all, albeit executed in a method he likely never wanted to employ. Although he doesn’t initiate the eventual contact with his other half or the relative bystander he’s chosen over the team, he’s ready to keep moving forward and getting into contact with Shibazaki, but even in diminished condition, Five isn’t going to sit idly by and watch him get his way to any extent. After several acts of using her US government connections to commit the kind of real, dangerous terrorism that Sphinx would never dream of, she finally starts to get some backlash, and she solves this by simply becoming an unsanctioned terrorist of her own. If there’s anything Five won’t stand for, it’s losing the game that all of this madness still appears as to her, and through her treatment, any sense of morals that might get in the way of that seemed to have been successfully purged. Needless to say she doesn’t allow Nine’s most highly preferred of the unfortunate options left to him to play out, but she does get possibly her first moment of having some semblance of humanity and likability beyond that of a villain, if only for a brief flash. She’s over the top and fit for an action blockbuster to the end, though, for better or worse.
Meanwhile, Shibazaki is always hard at work and always consistent in his drive amidst all this madness caused by the brilliant children whose past he intends to unravel and the unhealthy politics involved doing its best to impede his progress. Despite all this, he presses forward, and with little time left before Nine demands his immediate attention, he finally reaches the final boss: the man behind the plan that created the tortured beasts wreaking havoc on Japan in one way or another. He gets his answers, and they may be as satisfying and/or disgusting as anyone could hope for. Everything continues to be tightly tied together, and this is probably the last big chunk of information indicating just how far the web reaches.
In Summary:
The plot continues to rush forward with all sides in disarray and more secrets and connections being revealed. We get little crescendos of minor catharses, but it’s all building to a big finale and with Nine’s final plan in place, there’s still a lot more to be told and worked out before it’s over.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
HP Envy 14.
I don’t get why Five did what she did. This better be explained in final ep