Deca-Dence – 03 [Steering]

Another week, another clean hit at bat. Deca-Dence is fast becoming the MVP of the summer season and for good reason.  Every new episode connects multiple threads the previous one left hanging, imparts the setting with more painstakingly created detail while disregarding any expectations and doubling down on the established status quo. It does all that as it builds upon the world we know and gives us a whole lot more to ponder about till next week.

This is smart, intellectually challenging storytelling which is unconcerned with alienating mainstream viewers for the sake of the story it wants to tell and I can’t ask for more.

Firstly, to get the technical praise out of the way, Deca-Dence looks absolutely stunning. The animation is incredibly fluid, the direction and cinematography keep coming up with new tricks to make the movement on screen stand out, the character expressions – especially Natsume’s – are very much life-like and I would even go so far as to say that it is arguably the best looking show of the year (mind you, I have only seen one episode of Great Pretender). Generally, I say that I can only hope the studio is able to maintain the consistent level of animation but from what I have seen there hasn’t been any dip in the production quality. If anything, every subsequent episode looks better that the one which came before. And I have full faith that the same standards will be maintained throughout its one-cour run.

While the previous installment of the series put to rest many viewers’ concerns that this was an Attack on Titan rip-off, this week’s episode cuts off any speculated connections with Sword Art Online. To put it simply, humanity has not perished and there is no VR world.

Around the year 2400, as humans neared a possible extinction due increased air-pollution levels (Heh. Can’t see that happening), corporations all across the world developed cyborgs to help sustain life on earth. In time, the cyborgs grew and the remaining humans dwindled in number. The biggest corporation back then, Solid Quake, acquired rights to a part of earth and turned it into an entertainment facility filled with actual humans and hosts controlled by these aforementioned cyborgs and the whole establishment came to be known as Deca-Dence. An organization was created to make sure that there were no anomalies who didn’t behave as per expectations and people like Kaburagi have since been tasked to find such anomalies or ‘bugs’.

Last week, Kaburagi found out that Natsume was one such bug so he looks into her past (quite literally) to find out the possible reason for it. He gets to know that it was on the day when she lost her father and her right arm that the system started recording her as ‘Dead’. In the process of replaying Natsume’s life, he gets a video call from the head of the organization – a figure still very much shrouded in mystery – who you can tell has started having suspicions about Kaburagi for not reporting bugs in the system in a good while. Putting the ramifications of that conversation to the back of his mind, Kaburagi focuses on the task at hand: drilling that good ol’ warrior spirit into Natsume. The two develop camaraderie over anti-gravity battles, puking, stealth attacks and drowning to death. During all this, Kaburagi takes Natsume to a shady back-alley workshop and remodels her right arm into a Chekhov’s Needle-thrower.

Which means that she is now more or less ready to take on the Gadolls, several of whom seemed to have come to play at the end of the episode with teams of Gears deployed to fight them off. Among the many other elements still shrouded in mystery, the nature and existence of the Gadolls still feels one of the most interesting aspects of the show. Their blood is essentially Oxytone which not only fuels the anti-gravity tanks but is also necessary for the sustenance of life among the Cyborgs. This gives Kaburagi and Pipe’s Caretaker-Pet relationship a very ‘Pure-blooded virgin living with a Vampire’ duality. The story behind their origin is something else that’s yet to be revealed and even though I don’t want to draw up this parallel, as someone who’s watched Shin Sekai Yori, I can make a cautiously safe bet to what it might be.

But of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if Deca-Dence again defies my expectations about where it’s headed and offers up plenty more surprises in the weeks to come.