What They Say:
Episode 7 – Gray Boundary
Saikawa meets Miki, Dr. Magata’s sister, and realizes that Dr. Magata’s unique mind has remained unchanged since childhood. Meanwhile, Moe experiences virtual reality with the help of another member of the institute’s staff, Shimada. As she does, a mysterious voice forces her to confront her own past.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Sets of encyclopedias that stop at volume fifteen, replacement parts for an old, obsolete television… these bits and pieces continue to confound professor Saikawa and his plucky student as they work to try and solve the murder mystery before them.
Saikawa speaks to Mizutani, the programmer, one of the few people already in the lab fifteen years ago. He wonders, could there be something, anything in the lab worth committing murder for? Mizutani proves to be less than helpful, even speculating that the murderer might not even be human. Following that, Saikawa-Sensei seeks out Dr. Magata’s younger sister, Miki, and they have a long conversation about the enigmatic type of person that Shiki was in life and the odd but profound memories she left to Miki.
Meanwhile, Nishinosono Moe and lab employee Shimada let loose a bit using the virtual reality sensory deprivation chambers in the lab’s rec room. Moe’s fantasy version of her beloved Saikawa-Sensei slowly melts away and she finds herself in a gray room bordered by several video screens. A scrambled face appears speaking with Dr. Magata’s voice but calling herself “Michiru.” She leads Moe through a survey of her memories prods her towards a fairly dramatic revelation. Emotionally compromised, Moe finds herself drawn to the “other side” being presented to her, before Shimada wakes her up.
I’m not normally a person who enjoys endlessly speculating on an anime series’ plot, because I think it’s better in most cases to let the story unfold on its own the way that the creator or writer intended it and to accept it on its own merits. Mystery stories, however, actually invite viewers to participate in the story in a way – the best mysteries present the same information to the audience as to the characters and allow them to use their own wits to reconstruct the scenario, whether it be a murder, a theft, or even something more mundane. I say all this because, though I always attempt to remain neutral when viewing and writing about anime, this series has done quite a bit of ground work to lay out what I believe might be at least part of the “answer” of what’s happened at Magata Shiki’s lab, and I simply couldn’t help but try to put two and two together. So what following might be totally spoilerific, or it might be completely off-track, in which case you can feel free to have a good laugh at my expense.
One of the motifs that has been presented several times over the past few episodes is the idea that human bodies and human minds are separate entities that often coincidentally inhabit the same space. All the allusions to Shiki’s doll-like existence, the vessel she became for personalities both real and imagined, and incredibly blatant visual cues that focus on her childhood doll’s lifeless visage, have all helped to reinforce the importance of the distinction between flesh and personality, body and mind. In this episode alone, Miki’s memory of her sister is colored by Shiki’s insistence that the “self” remains even if the body is changed and warped beyond recognition.
From a different angle, there is also some sense that individuals’ selves are in constant flux in response to the ways in which they’re thought about by others. Shimada comments that she’s not really romantically interested in real-life men, but Saikawa-Sensei seems like something different to her, almost like he’s not a real person. As a self-avowed anime otaku, this reaction makes sense; who among us has been an anime fan for a significant amount of time and not nursed a crush towards a character who is anything but realistic? It’s human nature to take that empty vessel, one which might be visually appealing or present some basic, rudimentary personality attributes that we find attractive, and fill that entity out with our own ideas of what they might be like if they were our romantic partner? Nishinosono Moe does that very thing when reveling in her virtual-reality fantasy – the Saikawa-Sensei of her dreams is flawless with a more agreeable personality; he’s a product of her feelings towards him rather than a representation of an actual person.
This is partly what makes this story so fascinating; one of the main characters of the story, one who appears often enough in flashbacks and whose image dances in and out of the anime’s opening, is known to us only through the perspective of other people. We’ve heard her speak, but only in flashbacks narrated by other characters and through memories which are clearly filtered and skewed by emotions. Saikawa-Sensei obviously has some hero-worship going on; as he converses with Miki he remarks that he never met Magata Shiki, but as we know he seems to have a very clear idea in his mind of the person he thought she was. Whether that was completely accurate or not will forever be a mystery in and of itself, because there’s literally no way for him to ever confirm his feelings… Or at least I would normally be inclined to say that, but this episode in particular makes some very strong suggestions that the death of Dr. Magata’s body was perhaps not the end of the line for her.
Much of what Nishinosono does during this episode is pretty humorous, but her most important role is to help suggest something which is quite shocking – Magata’s self, or at least some aspect of her personality, may be present in the virtual reality world that the lab members have been using for recreation all along. This theory makes a lot of sense; Magata’s continued insistence on bodies as vessels, her technological prowess, her development of a robot AI and they seeming incomprehensibility of her death all seem to point towards her shedding her body (by choice?) and taking up residence in a place with literally zero boundaries between human beings. The “Michiru” in the virtual world implores Moe to cross the boundary and join her in an existence that human beings were always meant to have. While Moe declines the invitation at this point, the mere suggestion of the possibility that the option exists seems to lay the facts bare.
In Summary:
As seems to be usual for this show, an episode that’s primarily dedicated to quiet and almost mundane character interactions is transformed by a few key scenes and some newly-uncovered information. If I had more time and space I could likely talk at length about Moe’s relationship to Saikawa-Sensei and what her new memories do to elaborate upon that (though I don’t doubt the subject will come up again and present yet another jumping-off point for that conversation, so I don’t feel too bad about leaving it alone for now), or about how Miki’s scene totally changed my feelings toward her character (I was almost certain before this episode that she had something to do with the murder, the timing of her arrival seemed just a little too convenient). Now that Miki is set to stand in for her sister during the upcoming business meeting for the lab, it will be interesting to know how that unfolds considering how much the concept of “self” in this show seems to be built not on the vessel (Miki does resemble her sister to some extent, so it’s not appearance that will give her up as fake) but on the mind (something much more difficult to emulate. As always, I look forward to the ride.
Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Samsung Galaxy S5 running the Android Crunchyroll app at 1080p
