Yet another remake of an old episode that I don’t think we really needed. Besides a visual upgrade these remake episodes do seem to feel like a waste of resources and if we must gets remakes of old episodes, it would be wiser to actually pick the best episodes. Colosseum was the weakest story in the original series, a kind land makes a good finale but doesn’t quite work as well without a foundation from other episodes and now we have the country of Adults which basically just establishes Kino’s backstory. However unlike kind country there is at least some intellectual fodder to be gathered from this episode and the message of the day is false maturity. Our story takes place in a country where children are given a operation at a certain age which would turn them into “proper adults” and while the original series did a better job of making this seem to not be quite a bad, the new series turns it into a more black and white affair. You can gather a number of messages from this such as the way parents tend to force their own experiences onto children as that is how they believe children should be raised regardless of whether it is truly correct or not.
But instead I think I will focus on the matter of what exactly makes for a proper adult. As a child, a adult seems like a no brainer concept, they always know what to do, they generally deal with matters maturely and they are bigger and wiser about the world. A proper adult is what we as kids are supposed to grow into and our parents are to be role models to help show us the way to that goal. However as you grow up and learn about the world in your own way you come to learn something crucial and rather terrifying about this world of ours. As a man of 29 years of age, I have worked with a large amount of people, talked with a large amount of people and as I live in a house share, I have also lived with a large variety of people. Thus in doing so I have learned one simple thing. There are no adults, only bigger children. They say with age comes wisdom but I have seen a woman twice my age throw a hissy fit because she couldn’t get her way. I have seen a man double my age who ran around the house making noise like a toddler. Young men with the ideology of teenagers, men in there seniority who act like spoilt brats, men who try to cover up their mistakes by throwing newspaper over it. As I am often the youngest around, these so called adults attempt to lecture me on their so called wisdom as they attempt to convince me that 9/11 was an inside job and there is special electric water that can cure all diseases. In all the teams I have worked with, I find it amazing that we as a species can get anything done considering how humans always find a way to screw up.
Please note that I am not putting myself above this, I am no more a proper adult that any of them. Still I at least would like to believe that I am a little bit wiser or at least conscious of my own failings and how they affect other people. Aspects which a surprisingly large frequency of people tenditively lack. But what does this long winded rant have to do with this episode? Well it’s that in this episode the people of this country assume they have become adults simply because they had an operation and in reality they people are far more childish than the Traveler and the girl who is to become Kino. Much like those that assume they have obtained maturity just by the act of there bodies aging, these people are children who believe they grew up and thus are wholly ignorant of their own immaturity. They only follow the person in power, whenever someone challenges them they shout them down and immediately resort to violence. They are those who flaunt superiority over their indoctrinated values of perceived adulthood. Without true empathy or caring for those around them. Children with delusions of maturity are dangerous things indeed. I apologize for what is likely a rather pretentious excuse for an episode review but my original intent upon covering this series was to delve a bit into the things it made me think about. Sadly this series hasn’t given me as much as I thought it would in that regard and I don’t really feel like taking the easy route and just recapping the episodes content. So I guess I will leave it at this one final note. The original name of Kino is Sakura and that’s why she reacted so strongly to Sakura’s name in Kind Country.
