This episode’s Proxy has the ability to delude someone’s mind. You could describe it as bringing its victim in a dream-world. In this dream world, The Usagi has arrived in Romdeau, after which Real turned Vincent in and hid Pino away. Afterwards, she was taken in by Daedalus and his assistant: Swan, in order to become a perfect citizen again. Vincent, meanwhile, turned into Ergo Proxy and was locked up. Real, meanwhile, felt bad for betraying Vincent, so she created an alternative Vincent in her subconscious mind.
The Real Vincent gets to be this alternative Vincent, while the Proxy gets to be Swan. Over the course of the episode, Swan tries to make him believe that he needs to kill Real. She tries to make him believe certain lies about his subconsciousness. I’m not sure what her goal was in doing this. I think that, if this continued on for much longer, Vincent’s mind would break, or something, allowing her to defeat him.
Swan also shows Vincent a bit of his past. In this, Real and Daedalus are brother and sister, Vincent works as the Chief of the Civil Guard with Raul as his subordinate and Vincent and Real who are about to marry. Obviously, this isn’t how it really went. But I wonder if there’s some sort of truth in this. After all, Vincent remembered a few details on his own, before this sequence started (the cup falling and Real cutting her finger on it). Of course, this could also have been the Proxy, trying to play with Vincent’s mind, creating the events so that in both cases, Vincent would naturally act the same way, thus creating a deja vú.
In order to confuse Vincent, Swan creates an illusion, within an illusion. But it makes you wonder what’ll happen once they actually reach Romdeau. The Proxy also made a few mistakes. Pino suddenly looked fancy again. Vincent didn’t know about the new Real, so there also was no new Real in the illusion. For some reason, Swan also gave herself and Vincent the two pendants. Proxy is able to move so fast, why can’t he dodge bullets like that? And why didn’t Real look for Monad? Still, it was a very nice attempt at fooling him.
While an interesting watch, this episode wasn’t really anything special. It was just another Proxy, playing mind games with Vincent. I think the bad thing was that this Proxy didn’t really have well-defined rules. Proxies like in episode 14, 15 and 19 all had certain rules they had to follow, which made these episodes very enjoyable.
This episode was mindfucking and when you say “Swan also shows Vincent a bit of his past. (…)” What it really shows him is the reality that he desires 😛