This week Inuyashiki fulfills last weeks predictions in a rather unexpected way. Strap in for some suicide, mass murder and the tail-spin of everyone’s favorite sociopath. Lets jump in!
Rather than being a parallel between our two heroes like usual, this episode is focused almost entirely on Hiro. To me, this episode hits loosely on the 5 stages of grief, thought I admit its not a perfect fit. It starts off with Hiro in denial, not recognizing or refusing to acknowledge what is happening. He just sits in a room of the girl who confessed to him, doing nothing. Most likely just watching TV. We see him consider killing the girl and her grandmother, yet remember he swore last episode to stop killing people right before the police found him. I believe he was still hoping things could return to normal if he could only fix it somehow. Then however, his mother comes back into the picture, denouncing him to the media.
With this Hiro, finally seems to give up and shuts down mentally. He watches comedy TV with his robot eyes, barely eating or talking to anyone. Yet even here he can’t escape the news, eventually learning that his mother killed herself. Here he starts his transition into anger, finally getting up and leaving the apartment. There is a quick scene of him flying into the air, weeping, is a light parallel with Inuyashiki’s space journey. After this outburst, things start to head downhill. He starts to lash out on those he believes drove his mother to suicide, not accepting it was him. In an act violence somewhere between comical from “badadadada” and brutal, Hiro guns down a group of reporters, but chooses to leave his father alive. Does he still have some humanity in him, or is the father simply not on his hit list?
Next up on Hiro’s list is all of the users of a 2Chan board that he has been reading. This section was thrilling, yet it also broke my suspension of disbelief with the killing through monitors. I could except their air/light gun coming from Hiro’s alien robot body, but a computer monitor? The lack of explanation behind that turned the technological sci-fi aspect into a loose magical feeling. In regards to the 2Chan murders themselves though, these were great. The actual trolling, their “just do it then”, “Ill beat you up kid” attitude really felt like how an internet troll would act in real life. Even when pleading for their life, their voices were filled with sarcasm, as if they didn’t believe anything could happen.
The actual act of picking them off one by one, in order of their posts, was great. We were shown their posts as it was happening, asking “Is 2 still alive?”, their slowly increasing panic. It was a veritable montage of justice porn, shot by shot showing us these users and their deaths. A case could easily be made that it was violence for the sake of showing violence, but I think it does a good job of showing Hiros fall. He is no longer killing to try and feel emotion, like he did before. Now he kills for revenge. I suspect that his next targets will be more of the media, the police who came after him, and most important of all the witness who set this all in motion. That witness, of course, is Ando/Inuyashiki, putting our two leads on a crash course.
Speaking of Inuyashiki, our favorite old man didn’t do much this episode, but we learned more about his body and its abilities. He learned a lot from Ando, who in turn was shown a lot by Hiro. There was some slight body horror, with Inuyashiki’s nail popping into a USB, but I liked it. Inuyashiki acted appropriately horrified and made the scene a whole lot of fun. It also fixed a future issue of their communication, with Inuyashiki turning himself into a phone. His time floating in space, with the astronaut, made for some subtle comedy. He didn’t do much, but he used his time in this episode well.
All in all, a good episode. Hiro’s CGI body looked odd, just like Inuyashiki’s, but the facial expressions still work. The music didn’t stand out, and the sound design on the Hiro’s murder spree worked well. While it lost the suspension of disbelief with the shots coming out of the computer monitor, the building sense of dread was just as terrible as Hiro’s murder of the family in the early episodes. So far, Inuyashiki is one of my favorite anime of the year, not over taking Rakugo’s 2nd season yet, but it still has time to pull it off.
Hope you are looking forward to next week just as much as I am. See you then, and make sure to tell me what you thought down below!
It was a good episode. The Inuyashiki/Ando scenes were great fun, and the Hiro segments good drama. The show really did an effort to pit monsters against monsters here. Hiro is a killer and psychopath, but so are the losers who bullied his mother to suicide and his father into a ruined life for him and his family. There was great commentary on the need of society to blame deviancy on someone else than the deviant, and on the cyber-bullying. People expanding the circle of accusation from the actor to well innocent parties. I think they also wanted to point to us the hypocrisy of the viewer. Most of us probably understand Hiro is monster, but I bet not few of us (me included) saw some justice in his action against the trolls. So what does it say about our moral stance that we have no issue with a monster dispensing catharsis?
Very good episode.
This anime is engrossing me on a Death Note level. So far it has kept a level of serious actions with consequences with the notion of things steadily scaling.
At the same time, it does changed my expectations since until he was caught I thought he was going to be like Light and be able to keep his heinous crimes a secret, for way longer.
My only worry like with Gantz is if it gets out of control in terms of direction, since Hiro, seems to no longer have a long term goal.
My belief is that, with Hiro now the most established character in the story, we will focus more on Inuyashiki and his struggle against him.
Its only slated for 11 episodes this season, so with only 5 left, I think it has used its pacing well. Its on track to hit a major conflict in the last 2-3 episodes.