The world is in the crosshairs. The safety is released. The trigger is pulled.
What They Say:
Tokyo is in a state of emergency as the country readies itself for the atomic bomb explosion. Will the mystery of Sphinx finally be solved?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
We only have 11 episodes to spend with our favorite terrorists and throughout various setbacks they’ve been split down the middle and almost entirely defeated in different ways. But even at what seems like the end of the road, Nine is ending his terrorist career by going as big as he can, and unfortunately that means putting yet another atomic bomb above Japan. But after spending the series not only ensuring that nobody die as a result of their actions but specifically putting their lives on the line to prevent such actions by a third party, how could Nine do such a thing? Have recent events finally pushed him to the end of his ropes, or is there yet another hidden strategy in play?
The answer to that should come as no surprise, and our proxy into the story, the one who can come to the same conclusions any of us could without seeing the other points of view, Shibazaki, is as quick to gather information and deduce the truth as ever. There may be an atomic bomb looming over the country, but it’s going up, not down, and apparently Nine’s configuration is meant to cause the second greatest tragedy that can befall the holy land of electronics: a nationwide blackout. It’s still a damn dangerous game that Nine is playing, and one that seems a little harder to hit “undo” on than previous exploits, but it wouldn’t be right for the final move to be anything else, and this series has continually demanded a greater suspension of disbelief to accept that the maneuvers of this prodigious kids are all well within their abilities to manipulate as desired as it has gone on. That just leaves a gripping climax and the understanding that, despite some questionable means to ultimately rather vapid ends, Sphinx always means well, to possibly use the phrase a bit more liberally than one should.
While it may interfere with the thrill some may hope for the finale of a show like this, I give Terror in Resonance credit for forgoing the cheap action props and simply letting the event play out while ensuring that, just as Sphinx would always intend, it doesn’t actually cause any damage to the well-being of the people nearby. Now this calls for some further suspension of belief, or perhaps more realistically simply ignorance and shortsightedness on the part of our protagonists. After all, while turning off all the lights may do well to get people’s attention, there are some people for whom that energy is a vital necessity. I’ll admit my own ignorance in regard to the specifics of radiation from nuclear explosions, but that may be another issue that could’ve at least been brought up, not that providing exposition for every potential lack of education is necessarily the best choice.
But a finale of a show with so much mounting tension, particularly one with so few episodes and a general lack of successful opposition in the early ones, would hardly suffice to have everything be nice and peaceful, and in series with similar stories to this one it’s extremely unlikely that the protagonists make it out unharmed, even though these ones are never really villainous. With Five gone and Shibazaki more or less content with Sphinx’s desired outcome, it turns to those damn Americans to screw that prospect up one last time. While there could almost be some longevity of Sphinx following that, the aforementioned sense of justice must be seen through, and despite some qualms with Five’s character in a grand scheme, some of her later moments did well to foreshadow an inevitability for the others of her kind, and the series ends as it should in a lot of ways, and certainly reaches a conclusion from which continuation is appropriately impossible.
You’ll notice a lack of Lisa’s name amongst all this, and I wish that was because there was some big twist I didn’t want to risk hinting at. Instead she remains all too passive right to the end, and after very some very ephemeral happiness, her character continues to exist primarily to suffer hardship and loss (at least not portrayed as quite as much of a damsel in this case) time and again. That the entire series wraps up with some sense of peace from her is probably a greater testament to the merits of Sphinx’s actions than what they had intended by themselves, but as arguably the third main character of the series, the lack of interesting character writing for her is unfortunate. At least the likes of Shibazaki are there to keep the plot perpetually engaging in her stead, and admittedly this short a running time for such an ambitious tale does demand some trimming that may not prove ideal.
In Summary:
In the end, Terror in Resonance doesn’t have quite as much to say as it once seemed it might, or at least not much that hadn’t been explored or at least sufficiently implied before this point. It’s not an especially shocking or exhilarating finale as some might’ve thought based on the many of the moments leading up to it, but unlike a lot of shows, and thanks in no small part to it being an original story, it wraps up everything it had put on the table neatly and, probably to most of its audience, satisfactorily enough.
At the end of the day I can say that while it suffered some minor writing missteps in later portions that prevented it from being the masterpiece I thought it might have the potential for, Terror in Resonance started out good and for the most part got better. It’s proof that Watanabe sitting in the director’s chair alone still guarantees a level of quality you can’t expect from many, and while I wouldn’t quite put it on the level of Kids on the Slope or Samurai Champloo (much less Cowboy Bebop), it certainly isn’t too far off, and that’s higher praise than I could ask of most original anime productions, especially with such short running times. Kanno’s music again proves to complement his direction better than any other, and even when it’s not a focal point it still stands out more impressively than most elements of the series. At its worst Terror of Resonance is at least interesting and slightly unique, and at its best it’s a daring, clever, and engrossing battle of wits that we should probably be grateful managed to make it to air without any interference.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
HP Envy 14.
