Akudama Drive – 09 [The Shining]

For all the sex and murder featured in this episode, it left me a little cold. Last week’s focus on Swindler didn’t just make her more sympathetic, it painted a way forward for both her character and the story: the rescue of Brother from Kansai’s clutches. “The Shining” didn’t seem to care much about that, opting to split its focus between a sudden civilian uprising and an homage to its namesake film. With just four (and now three) episodes left in its run, narrative momentum is of the utmost importance, but Taguchi and his team went in a different direction with this one. To be fair, that decision resulted in a lot of stylish images – assuming your X-ray vision penetrated the black fog censoring all the bloodiest bits.

I’ll start with my favorite part, which was Cutthroat’s pursuit of Swindler through the halls of Executioner HQ. After being excluded from last week’s story, his murderous rampage may have been triggered by isolation, which forms a striking contrast with Swindler’s kills in “Black Rain.” In that episode, her use of violence was as much to protect Sister as it was to defend herself; in this one, Cutthroat is the aggressor, not the defender. Was it necessary to go quite this far in order to create that dichotomy? Probably not, but Cutthroat’s unhinged expressions here were still fun to watch. Less enjoyable but more thought-provoking was his continued obsession with the color red, especially the idea that he sees a bloody halo around Swindler’s head, which points him to her at all times. Maybe it’s just the episode title playing tricks on me, but I wonder if we’re meant to interpret this as legitimate psychic inference, rather than a metaphor for his bloodthirst. I didn’t spot any hints that pointed to the red halo being “real,” but given all the gaps in our knowledge of this post-war world, it may have been more literal than it seemed at first.

What bugs me about “The Shining” is its first half, which explored Doctor’s motives and kickstarted a plot about vigilantism before sidelining them in favor of horror and gore. It was simple as pie for Swindler to send all of Kansai into a panic – she just had to post a vague threat on an imageboard and suddenly people were killing low-level Akudama in the streets. The city-wide alert that went off when she tried to use her personal ID last week would have been the perfect foundation for that kind of unrest, but only if the show had maintained that societal focus, rather than the personal one it ended up taking. With Swindler’s harrowing experience at the garbage treatment plant serving as a huge break between the public’s initial scare and subsequent uprising, the link between them is tenuous at best.

As for Doctor’s role in all of this, she denies seeking immortality in her pursuit of Brother’s miracle genes, but still delivers a monologue about controlling the life and death of all things. I hope this made more sense in Japanese than it did in Funimanglish, because their subs had my eyebrow fully cocked during that scene. More straightforward was the event that preceded Doctor’s speech: her hookup with Hoodlum, which was less than stellar if her megalomaniacal pillow talk was any indication. It’s the sexual context of her monologue that actually sold it to me, as well as the wine she poured in lieu of a post-coital cig; she’s a woman of vice, and she wants more time on Earth to enjoy those vices. There was a line somewhere in there about her age, which she was sure Hoodlum would be unable to guess. Given her ability to stitch herself back together after terrible disfigurement (as confirmed by her many scars), she may even be skilled enough to live for hundreds of years via organ swapping or some equally fantastic power.

One last note and then I’m out. The intensity of Cutthroat and Swindler’s game of cat and mouse distracted quite thoroughly from her primary mission in this episode: raid Executioner HQ and rescue Brother before he’s shipped off to Kanto. I feel that in the aftermath of Cutthroat’s death, there should have been a minute or two of tension before their failure to secure him. Instead, the climax of the overarching story was crunched into 16 seconds. Courier and company bust through the door to the rooftop, see Brother in handcuffs on an aircraft, it immediately flies away, and the ED starts to roll. Obviously the extended film homage took priority here, but it did so at the expense of that momentum I talked about earlier. With one less character on the show’s roster, I’m hoping the next episode will more concretely point toward its conclusion (which is coming up fast)!