Gakkou Gurashi! – 08

Well this episode starts off with a dark revelation and we see that Megumi is not buried on the roof but instead is roaming the school as an undead corpse. Her location seems to be the door where Yuki talks to her. From the looks of things, after taking a picture with the group she was bitten in a sudden zombie attack and turned. The girls then left her locked up in a room in the school. One particular detail is when the girls were camping indoors a Megumi came to check on them. So was that Megumi the figment of Yuki’s imagination or the zombie Megumi walking past the door? There was some cheap fanservice this episode with the girls bathing Taromarou but frankly I am willing to give it a free pass. After all they got to get them Blu-ray sales somehow. This episode had Yuuki and Miki searching for the Lock the key they found last episode opens and I was surprised to see Yuuri prodding Yuki out of her comfort zone by bringing up a traumatic event of the past. If anyone I thought Miki would be prodding, not her. Still we have hijinks ensue as Yuki plays around while trying to find the lock and happens to really find it in a secret compartment in the staff room. While Yuki was playing around and got a picture taken of her I thought the picture might set her off as it shows the cabinets broken behind her but even in photos its seems Yuki sees what she wants to.

I must say the reveal at the end of the episode caught me off guard. It’s true that I found the schools facilities to be oddly convenient, the solar panels in particular, but I just wrote those off as the mangaka compensating for the odd situation. I thought the whole purpose of these things was to justify why these girls were staying in a school as opposed to more ideal locations like a Mall. I would have never guessed that the schools convenient facilities would be a plot point. While I admit there is still some scepticism over the school being some kind of weapons testing facility but the story potential for this is just too good so I will roll with it. The second thing that surprised me is that this series is actually going to explain the the zombie outbreak. Most zombie media tend to leave the cause of the outbreak ambiguous and only lend vague theories such as it being a act of God or, like this episode did, a biological weapon. But few actually confirm the cause. The implications of revealing this could lead to some interesting theories such as the outbreak being intentional and the girls are unknowingly taking part in a isolated psychological experiment. But one thing is for certain here. Even if there are people outside the city and this incident is isolated to this one place, those people would have no desire to rescue these girls. That is because there is a risk that they are infected by the weapon as well and are therefore abandoned. It’s one thing to believe that that you may be one of the last remaining humans, but another entirely to know you have been left to die by the rest of the world. This does depend on whether the outbreak was done on purpose or accidentally and how far it made it out.