What They Say:
Episode 9 – Yellow Blind Spot
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As day breaks, the island is once again connected with civilization. The ferry arrives to take Saikawa-Sensei’s students back home (and some of them leak information of the “incident” to the police officers who have also started to disembark), and allows Setsuko, Sensei’s love interest (?) to make landfall and wander to the lab. Gido-san wants info and she wants it now – suspects, motives, what have you. Nishinosono isn’t forthcoming for obvious reasons, and Sensei explains that there just aren’t that many details. Since she’s there, Gido chooses to get drunk with Shimada while they wait for the dream team to figure out some more details. Nishinosono’s uncle is also on his way, though whether he’
Saikawa-Sensei and Nishinosono still feel as though they’re grasping at answers. Sensei even writes a script to search for missing minutes of video from the surveillance system, hoping to find something out of synch that might give them a clue about when the killer entered the room. He comes up empty. The sun is setting when the two go out for some air, and their conversation turns to how someone could have gotten into such a protected room. How was the yellow door breached? Moe becomes absolutely frustrated trying to talk things out, but Sensei appears to have a rather compelling thought about that. Eventually Moe begins to reach the same horrifying conclusion – the killer was in the room from the moment that Magata locked herself in; in fact, they were her own flesh and blood.
As the pieces begin to make more sense, Sensei follows a hunch and asks the security officer to run his script on the video recorded that day – and there’s a minute missing. While the system was reset, the clocks (which had been altered at some earlier time, they realize) readjusted to the correct time. The killer switched the time, a minute of video was compiled and saved over itself, and the details of their escape were lost forever. They then took the elevator to the roof and killed Director Shindo. As Moe’s uncle arrives, Saikawa-Sensei sits down at the computer and tells the room that he’s about to call out the killer, and that the killer’s pride will prevent them from remaining hidden any longer. The screen name on the monitor is “Michiru,” but Sensei greets them as “Dr. Magata Shiki.”
I think some of the previous episodes lulled me into a trap; I was so sure I had everything figured out and that the last few episodes of the series would only confirm some of the very strong suspicions I’d had for several weeks. Well, the joke’s on me – the mystery aspect has taken yet another left turn, and while I’m annoyed at myself for taking the bait laid out in previous episodes, I find the new facts to be compelling (and sensible, thank goodness) and my excitement to see the plot unfold has been renewed once again.
As I mentioned in a previous episode’s review, this show seems to have a pattern of spending an episode upping the tension, revealing a lot of facts, and putting its characters through the drama of putting everything together into a logical whole, and then spending the following episode giving us all a breather by filling in the gaps in their characterization. This episode fell into the first category and did an excellent job of building the tension by instituting an informal (and then a formal) time limit. Both of the protagonists played their ideas off one-another, and because of all the time spent building their personalities, Moe’s incredible bout of mental math (and Sensei’s congratulatory words) really felt like victories.
This episode marked the return of Gido-san, who I had entirely forgotten about in the seven or so episodes since her previous appearance. I recall being irritated at the dynamic between her and Nishinosono, since it seemed overly “typical” and sexist to pit them against one-another in competition over a man. It’s very interesting to me how a little bit of character development goes a long way towards filling in the gaps in this sort of relationship. Nishinosono is infatuated with Saikawa-Sensei, but we know from having seen the rest of the series that their bond isn’t the typical, trope-y “student having a crush on her teacher for the purposes of comedy” type of relationship. He’s played a very important, complicated role in her life (as she mentions in conversation during this episode, part of the reason that she was able to cope after her parents’ death was that Saikawa-Sensei was present in her life), and she’s the type of person who doesn’t hide her emotions. Allowing a character back into the picture who sets off some of the same reactions but with fuller context is, at the very least, an excellent way to demonstrate how far our understanding of the characters has come.
I have to say, as a woman of a certain age, the revelation that Magata Shiki was most likely pregnant when she locked herself away in the lab (at least, it’s the hypothesis that makes the most sense this week!) brings up a lot of complicated feelings for me. To give birth in complete isolation and to raise a child in secret would be a daunting task for any normal human being, let alone such a person as Dr. Magata, with her (to me) incredibly odd view of humanity and our ways of defining our existence. I don’t doubt that she lacked tenderness; the interaction described by Miki in episode 7 speaks to her own brand of kindness. But I do wonder, for someone so connected to the various people inside her own mind, when one of them manifested as a separate entity outside her body, could this have caused a strain? Is this enough of a motivation for murder?
In Summary:
It’s difficult to say whether or not the next episode will be able to offer us the “breather” that we’ve become accustomed to, especially since “Michiru” is on the line and Saikawa-Sensei seems poised to come forward with any theories about the situation that he’s been holding on to up to this point. It gets more and more difficult to wait a week between episodes at this point, and as I feel incapable of solving the mystery on my own, I’m looking forward to having the characters achieve this on my behalf.
Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Samsung Galaxy S5 running the Android Crunchyroll app at 1080p
