Welcome to another week of Inuyashiki! This week we have incredible sequences of terror, fearless Directors and death flags! Lets jump in.
Obviously, the first thing we need to talk about this week is Hiro. A lot has happened in the few hours since Hiro attacked the Station. Interestingly, yet weirdly, Hiro has garnered a fan club. I don’t understand this. Do mass-murderers in real life gain admirers? Regardless, whatever fans he had at the start Hiro has since lost them. The first half of his murder spree is basically a public shooting. An opening salvo, of 100 people, to declare his war. Had they done it any other way I would have no problems with it. As it is, I can’t stand Hiro’s TV gun. Air or Light bullets I can accept, but what is the explanation of shooting through screens? The fantastical nature of it is too much for me. Everything else at least was explainable as Alien technology, but this is modified Earth technology. It makes no sense.
However the second half of his murder spree was fantastic and used his already established abilities. Taking over a plane is a logical step up from planes. They did a lot right and a only a little wrong in the whole segment. The build up was brilliant, taking a few minutes to establish the passengers. A crying child, a perfect english speaking passenger. There is even a bait and switch of showing the baby the phone, so it can watch a show. The slow roll of the plane flying through the city, even with the scale being all over the place. All this time taken just to crash a plane into the city. On episode 9 out of 11. Remember when I said fearless Directors? That’s what I was talking about. Coincidence or not, it’s made for some great reddit posts.
As far as Hiro’s emotional state though, he is clearly getting more and more deluded with himself. We see him latch on to Shiro, sending her money, not understanding why she doesn’t use it. Why she doesn’t approve of what he does. He can’t seem to understand anymore what it means to be human. Badgering her about moving with him to Hawaii or someplace once hes done, as if everything will disappear once Japan is dead. It’s a very childlike mentality. I am curious what is going to happen, what Shiro will say, to finally have him grow up. I say this because Hiro has to die. Thats the only way Inuyashiki ends, and it inevitably includes the asteroid once again mentioned in this episode. Most likely with him sacrificing himself to stop it, thus “redeeming” himself to the world.
Meanwhile on Inuyashiki’s side, we have minor family developments and some death flags. The main culprit in both of these is Mari, Inuyashiki’s daughter. Since discovering Inuyashiki’s secret last episode, every time Hiro and how he will be stopped is brought up, she looks to him. She has clearly gained a newfound respect for her father, both as a hero and as a parent. Throughout this entire episode though are little flags. Her growing love of the dog, her comments about rather dying than not having her phone, and walking the deserted streets with her friend. I would be surprised if she it alive for more than a few minutes in the next episode. As brutal as Inuyashiki has been, no significant named characters have died yet. That means we are due a character death to raise the stakes and Inuyashiki needs motivation to start proactively going after Hiro.
All in all, I very much enjoyed this episode. It had it’s problems, yet the good portions easily made up for them. The final plane scene did its job perfectly. It managed to keep my attention and made 25 minutes feel far shorter. I have found that time dilation is usually the sign of a good episode. Most of all I am looking forward to what Mari’s death does to Inuyashiki. I only hope she doesn’t survive, as with only 2 episodes left it’s time for our two leads to finally clash. And boy am I looking forward to it.
But tell me what you think! Am I alone in having issue with Hiro’s TV screen murders? Let me know! Meanwhile, I will see you next week for the penultimate episode of Inuyashiki!
There isn’t a point in trying to make sense of a anime whose whole basis is stupid, I mean, whatever reason the aliens had to reconstruct these two was totally idiotic and illogical to begin with, leaving them dead was the best solution after if they wanted to pass by unnoticed. Which brings me to the fact that the meteor itself might be a alien thing. I don’t think Mary will die, she’s called Mary after all, I do hope Shishigami’s actions keep escalating for a little longer though.
I have no contact with the source, but I did read Gantz almost in it’s entirety, so I can kinda guess where this is going, and it will most probably not be good.
“whatever reason the aliens had to reconstruct these two was totally idiotic and illogical to begin with”
Indeed but I believe that’s the point. This isn’t a highly logical decision by some super intelligent being but rather the way they went about it was more like teenagers trying to hastily cover up a fuck up. I actually really like this idea as aliens are often considered some superior entity when compared to mankind but here they can screw up just as badly as humans can.
I agree with Aidan. The premise of a galactic hit and run setting off a chain of events that might destroy a species? Its interesting because it A) Marks the Aliens as more advanced than us in technology alone and B) Is a comment on just how small we really are, that a single bit of new technology can destroy millennia of evolution.
The alien bit is to start this story. Like Alfred Hitchcock once said, Film triumphs over reason. If in a story the solution is simply calling the police, in most cases it’ll be boring, which is why characters don’t do it. It’s also like in John Carpenter’s The Thing. If they didn’t shoot down the norwegians and knew about the dog being the alien, there’ll not be a movie.
My basic explanation behind the TV bullet is that Hiro’s bullets aren’t so much a physical thing but rather a kind of sonar signal. Sort of like a intensely concentrated blast of sound. So it’s not so much that these TVs are modified to be able to shot these bullets, be rather TV signals can transport his bullets due to the bullets nature. But again this isn’t really hard Sci-fi.
My problem is simply that I dont see how Earth tech could possibly allow that. I will acknowledge, its not hard Sci-fi, so this is really only an issue for people like me who read a lot of hard Sci-fi.
I’m not at all a hard sci-fi fan, and the screen bullets drive me insane. Bringing them back was a poor decision, I think. I was just starting to forget about it. Still, it’s not all that different than often-omnipotent “magic” seen in fiction, so I’ll extend a pass to Inuyashiki for this one. I also agree about bringing back the Automobile Orchestra ability, so at least the screenshot power was utilized twice, too. Hijacking a plane requires a lot less suspension of disbelief because the flight computer already has some control of the throttle, flaps, etc.
I also don’t at all mind the 9/11 parallels, except that they likely had to do some wiggling of content to make it fit for the episode numbers. Hiro is a terrorist, absolutely, by definition. They also spend quite some time showing how difficult it is to kill 100 people with a full-auto .. uh .. machine gun I guess? Killing his quota of 1000 with the hijacking highlights just how massive and egregious of a tragedy it is, since it’s approaching the scale where we lose our sense of sonder and start thinking about those lives as statistics. Most humans don’t even intimately know 1000 people, to imagine how that effects everyone is almost impossible. To see a reference to it in a production from another nation kinda says, “Hiro intends to make an enemy of his whole nation, but doing such a thing makes him the enemy of the entire world and of humankind itself.”
Also, I really like the lackadaisical attitude of the aliens that precipitated this whole thing for the reasons Aidan mentioned. Negligence is extremely dangerous, especially if you have a lot of power.
Also I was confused about how Shiro and her grandmother were alive last episode, but now I realize that they’re dead and a delusion. Whoops
From what I have been told, they are not actually dead! Hiro healed them with his Robot Jesus powers and is now sending them money.
Personally, I would have much preferred delusions.
Okay, so what I thought last week is correct!
It’s all very confusing