What they say:
As the festival finally arrives, Lena and Shin have a chat about the legacies of the eighty-six. Later, Lena learns just how horrifying the true history of the Republic is behind closed doors from everyone around her.
The Review:
Content: (Please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Talk about twisting the knife in deep. If there’s one thing I can commend 86 for, it’s not backing down from beating you over the head with it’s blunt messages about racism. The series goes deep. Deep and dark. In episode seven, we’re treated to a brief moment of rest with Lena and Shin having a relaxing chat as they watch the fireworks and Lena says she will never forget them. After that it’s all downhill from there as Lena starts learning the true history of The Republic from the three different main contacts in her life; the eighty-six themselves, her uncle Colonel Karlstahl and her friend Annette from the military’s research branch.
What Lena learns first from her Spearhead unit is that the eighty-six are meant to die off. There’s never an end to their suffering as soldiers and The Republic’s selling point of leaving after a few years is just a lie to get them on board. The ones who do survive are sent to harsher conditions deeper into enemy territory so they can be killed off as fast as possible. The longer you live, the harder it gets to do so. However, that won’t stop them from living the best they can. If they’re gonna die either way, may as well go down fighting for their home country. “Does a man hang himself knowing he will die the next day?” The eighty-six just have to keep moving forward until their reaper can carry them into the next life. Lena, of course, isn’t as ready to accept that. But what can she do? It’s all so ingrained in everyone’s minds that to the eighty-six dying is their freedom, their ending. They just want to be able to choose how they do it. To Lena it’s all so wrong, but how can she expect to change a whole country’s system as one person?
That’s what her friend Annette tries to tell her when Lena goes to vent about the issue. Annette just snaps. She flies into a rage about Lena’s idealism and in doing so reveals her own guild and insecurities about her own acts of prejudice. She recalls how she used to be friends with eighty-six before she was bullied at school and in following the crowd, once blurted out a hurtful phrase “just get out of here you colored!” Side note here: as much as I respect for 86 being straightforward, using the word “colored” is probably a bit too on the nose. Her father also helped develop the Para-RAID technology using eighty-six as human experiments, the irony of which (as they are not considered human by the Alba), is not lost on her and her father was so sacked by guilt he…yeah, you know where this is going. After that Annette just asks Lena to leave and never speak to her again. It’s obvious here that Annette has her own insecurities here. She mentioned she had opportunities to help the eighty-six but she did not take them. She needs to assuage her guilt by making Lena just as guilty even though their upbringings and experiences are clearly different. Lena had a liberal father and from her childhood, Lena never held any animosity toward the eighty-six. But that doesn’t work for Annette so she brings up the other irony that by doing a diligent job as commander, Lena is actually prolonging the suffering of Spearhead since their missions get harder and harder the longer they live, a fact Lena did not know until almost that moment.
Talk about mask off. Annette’s ramblings of how difficult it is for one person to change the system dig deeper into the real problems of how hard it is to change a society. Not because one person can’t do anything, but because everyone else is convinced nothing can be done. If multiple people acted together, they could generate more power but they choose to ignore the issue instead, believing they are powerless. Aside from that, though, it’s also about the environment. People are not born harboring hatred. It is learned, and that’s what happened to Annette. She’s an unfortunate case. She initially had friends who were eighty-six until she followed the crowd to protect her skin and eventually she became what she pretended to be. The act became real.
It would be better for Lena to ignore Annette from this point on and instead show her with actions that change is possible. Of course, a breakup with a friend over ideology is never easy, especially if it’s rooted in envy and resentment. But in the end, the foundation for their relationship wasn’t that strong for an outrage like this to occur. However, there is a part of me that wishes the two of them could make up.
This is after she heads to her uncle Colonel Karlstahl and his reasoning is far more horrifying. To him. wiping out the eighty-six is a necessity for the nation. If you thought Annette took the mask off, buckle up. Uncle doesn’t really have any resentment toward the eighty-six. He’s just fully complicit and encourages their demise. If word gets out about how The Republic has treated the eighty-six to the rest of the world, The Republic’s legacy will be tarnished forever, and they’ll be remembered around the globe as oppressors. The nation at that point may cease to exist. So the “final solution” (not words from the show, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they came up) is to kill all of them off as nonhumans, bury all the evidence and never acknowledge their deeds. And to the public, the eighty-six are scapegoats because all they consume is the government’s news and media. At the end of the day, Karlstahl can say they’re following the will of the people, but under the surface, are they not manufacturing that will for their own goals? It does get into how the rest of the world may respond with regard to the situation (and I’m glad the series addressed it). I wonder if this show chooses to go full beat-you-over-the-head World War II symbolism by having a world war with The Republic acting as Germany.
Anyway, this is all very deep. It’s still good content but if there is one nitpick I have of this series it’s that it twists the knife a bit too much. It’s hitting the same beats repeatedly. Racism is bad and it’s hard to change it. That’s the message. But there hasn’t been much expansion on that so far. How does a nation get to that point? If the authors want to make a statement and prevent this kind of prejudice or warn us, they need to show how it happens too. We got a small peek of that but it needs more added to make an impact. And adding more development certainly helps.
Time has passed in the series and now only a few survivors remain among Spearhead which was kind of a whiplash, to be honest. All of a sudden only a few crew are left. This makes me suspect they are speeding along through the adaptation by skipping over all the character deaths and what is probably rinse and repeat storytelling from the novels. Mind you I haven’t read them myself so I don’t know if a similar gap exists there. With that on top of the strong visual direction and a solid soundtrack, this is definitely one of the better adaptations of a novel series out there. It’s taken advantage of the medium in ways others haven’t.
Heading out to their final mission, Spearhead goes off to face Shin’s brother, now a Shepard fused with technology and a twisted psyche of protecting his brother. This seems like it would have been a good stopping point for the first cour but it seems like we’ll finally get a solid narrative beat before that happens.
In summary:
86 continues to twist the knife deep into the hearts of its viewers. It’s a solid visual series with solid directing, music, and thematic heft. However, it does tend to hit the same beats again and again without a solid plot to carry it forward. That said, it is approaching territory that will improve as time goes on, so I’m eager to see where it goes from here even if it took a bit too long to get off the ground.
Rating: A
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
