Night Head Genesis – 11 – Many, many, many mysteries.

And the Kariya arc has ended. It was quite interesting. We start with where last episode left off: Kurahashi’s assistant, Tadano, suddenly has trouble breathing and nearly collapses. It turns out that someone used mind control on him. Kurahashi meanwhile finally understood the message, and deletes her research records. The visions, however, only stop after Tadano freaks out and attempts to strangle Kurahashi, only to get shot down by a crossbow, coming from a rather enthusiastic fan of Kariya. Quite a nice scene.

Afterwards, Naoya gets a vision of Kariya, disappearing. And indeed, when they leave, the guy behind Kariya’s powers, Sonezaki, finally shows himself. Along with a shady character called Asano-kun. The vision with the gloves, the snake and the elephant never had anything to do with Naoya, but with Kariya’s own death. The gloves are Sonezaki’s. He first shows Kariya a golden elephant, as a symbol that his job is done. Afterwards follows the silver snake who turns into flower, as a symbol of Sonezaki, poisoning Kariya.

The thing I liked about this episode was the huge number of references to earlier episodes. Somehow, the case with the women dressed in purple got addressed again. We’ve got a reference to the suicide-arc, the golden elephant and silver snake of the past few episodes, Shouko gets mentioned again, new information about Naoto and Naoya’s parents turns up. Each of these pieces of information actually contributes something to the individual stories. That’s the beauty of having these arcs who look finished on the outside, but still contain a lot of mysteries on the inside.

Okay, so if I understood things correctly, there’s one guy who hires other psychics, in order to try and understand the whys and hows of Naoto and Naoya’s X-factor. For that, he hired the guy from episode eight, Sonezaki and Asano. Sonezaki was the one who gave Kariya his visions. Probably to make him manipulate Naoto and Naoya. The way Sonezaki laughed at the end of the episode probably means that he’s got some ideas of his own he’ll probably be executing in the near future.

I’m wondering how the next arc will be. This show showed that it can be both a strong drama and mystery series. I wonder whether the mystery-element will be even more emphasized in the next episodes.