Wonder Egg Priority – 9-12

Wooper: When it comes to original works, Wonder Egg Priority was the most inventive and audacious anime that the winter season had to offer. Whether it be girl-driven social commentary, grotesque monster designs, or a veritable puzzle box of a story, this show had a lot going for it coming into its final stretch of episodes. Even during those last few weeks, as production issues and narrative twists threatened to swallow the series whole, Wonder Egg maintained its must-watch status – and still maintains it now, with the finale having been delayed until late June. We weren’t about to wait over two months before mentioning the show again, though – this is a series that practically demands discussion, so Lenlo and I have teamed up to do just that. Read on for our thoughts on the triumphs, failures, and oddities of Wonder Egg Priority’s final month on the air.

Lenlo: And what a month it was! From Sci-Fi twists to brutal depictions of bodily harm, a lot happened in Wonder Egg. But before we get into the narrative I want to talk about the production. For all that it looked great on screen, and it often really did, the behind the scenes was a mess. For instance, Wooper did you know that an Animation Producer got wheeled into an ambulance and taken to the hospital while working on the final episode? And that it happened twice?!  Or that the actual episode wasn’t even started until a week before it aired? And don’t forget to add on to that the unplanned recap episode and the finale being delayed two months. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, we have a lot to talk about, but to say this production was a tremendous mess is an understatement.

Wooper: Shin Wakabayashi being a first-time director may have contributed to those issues. Despite this being his debut series, he reached for the stars on nearly every episode, setting high standards for both action animation and character acting across the board. Poor working conditions and impossible schedules are industry-wide problems, and when you push back against them with sheer ambition, things (and people) tend to break. Miraculously, though, the show itself didn’t. Episode 12 was the only one that truly faltered in my eyes, with a minute-long zoom shot at the start and some patchy cuts of Ai swinging her oversized pen in combat. (I do wish WEP had gone the Evangelion route and frozen that opening park scene, rather than zooming in to the point of blurriness, but I’m guessing it’ll be replaced on the Blu-ray.) Other episodes in this batch looked great, especially number 9, with its extended chase scene and effects-heavy midair rescue in Neiru’s dream world.

Lenlo: Indeed they did! Ignoring what it took to get there Wonder Egg certainly looked great. Sadly while the production still looked strong, from episode 9 onwards is where the narrative started a downwards trend for me. And after thinking it over I can only attribute it to the shift and hard commitment to Sci-Fi. Suddenly Wonder Egg is trying to explain everything. Explain who Acca and Ura-Acca are, explain the magical landscapes, battles and all that. To force some kind of real world structure onto something that I don’t think benefits from it at all. A fantastical dramatization of child abuse and neglect doesn’t need any of this “Parallel Worlds” or “Eros and Thanatos” crap. It’s not like Kotobuki, Neiru’s friend, needed it to succeed either. An episode about letting go of someone close to you is a strong enough hook as it is. But instead of sticking with something simple and strong Wonder Egg over complicated things and I think Neiru’s story suffers for it.

Wooper: I have the same opinion, more or less – that WEP lost itself toward the end – but not every cast member was affected equally by the change. Some, like Momoe, received gripping spotlight episodes even as the show began obsessing over technology and parallel worlds. As far as Neiru is concerned, though, I’ve got to agree that she got shafted hard. Her involvement at Japan Plati, once an intriguing element of her character, was reduced to a narrative crowbar in episode 9. It forcibly linked her to the Acca brothers, introduced dream-recording technology solely for plot convenience, and served as a justification for all the technobabble in her fight to save Kotobuki. And what was Kotobuki’s importance in the end, anyway? Was she just a friend whose life Neiru had to agonize over terminating? If so, Wonder Egg would have done well to give her some human conversation, instead of the largely nonsensical dialogue she ended up delivering. Even the story of Neiru’s sister, who carved that ugly scar into her back before committing suicide, hasn’t been revisited as of episode 12 – and at this rate, the June finale won’t have time to touch on it.

Lenlo: Oh god I had forgotten about that scar! That was supposed to be her core motivation wasn’t it? Like Koito was for Ai or Chiemi for Rika? And we haven’t progressed on that at all. It’s a shame because as you mention, Momoe comes out of this largely unscathed. Not psychologically of course – things get rather brutal for her and Rika – but in terms of the quality of her writing/story at least. I’m curious what you thought of that actually. Not of the Thanatos and Eros crap, we will get to that and Frill later, but rather of the brutal turn in the story, or at least how it was directed at our leads. These aren’t the first, or even most graphic, scenes in the show of course. The episode 7 focus on Rika, my personal favorite episode of the show, is arguably the darkest of the season. But something about these fights with the Warriors of Thanatos felt very… sudden? And came off all the more brutal for it.

Wooper: “Sudden” is an accurate word for it, I think. Even though it was clear that Wonder Egg would eventually go dark, Momoe’s encounter with Hyphen received so little foreshadowing that it seemed to emerge from nowhere. Yet I liked the scene quite a bit – its ominous choral vocals sold the horror atmosphere, and the ultra-bold shots of Momoe’s crocodile right before its death drove home the brutality of its slaughter. Throw in the disgusting feeding scene that followed and you’ve got a recipe for an effective mind-break. As a matter of fact, I think the suddenness of Hyphen’s appearance was intentional, given Momoe’s successes earlier in the same episode. After defeating a Wonder Killer who overrode his victim’s gender identity, she had achieved some catharsis regarding her own identity issues. The way her struggles were arranged in parallel with her Egg’s made her victory highly satisfying – but then came disillusionment as Haruka’s resurrection was revealed to be a sham, and suffering as her sole companion was butchered by one of Frill’s agents. The abruptness of those developments made them powerful, even if their timing in the grander scheme of things left something to be desired.

Lenlo: Well put and I would agree. Even if I don’t like their place in the overall narrative I do think their introductory scenes were done well for all the reasons you mentioned. Though I have to wonder: Are we sure the resurrections are a sham? As I understand it she just disappeared from the… dream world? Magic world? Whatever the hell Wonder Egg is treating those worlds as. Anyways, she disappeared from it but we haven’t gotten confirmation one way or another have we? I suppose you could look at the whole thing as a sort of parable on grief and that once they overcome their own issues and the issues surrounding that important person they can move on, removing their need to “save” them. But that starts to lead into a very vague territory without any actual answers that I’m really not a fan of.

Wooper: The ironic thing is that WEP was thriving in that vague territory at the start. Blurring the line between reality and dreams helped it produce exactly the sort of commentary it aimed for… and then episode 11 reframed the entire series as a chess game between a pair of genius scientists and their synthetic daughter. That recontextualization raised so many more questions than it answered, which put a huge burden on everything that came afterward. And this is coming from someone who greatly enjoyed episode 11 – I found its themes of hubris, jealousy and revenge to be deliciously twisted. Frill’s combination of intellect and possessiveness made her a commanding character from the outset, and her signature lip smacking went from endearing to menacing as she evolved into the mastermind she is now. No matter how chilling her backstory was in isolation, though, it’s hard to justify her takeover of Wonder Egg’s larger story when the show already had so much else going on.

Lenlo: Maybe you’re right, maybe I have been focusing my ire in the wrong place. Episode 11 as a standalone worked well and the way Frill was presented would have been very compelling – if this was any other show. But it seems to me like her introduction, her plot, her existence goes against everything Wonder Egg has built up. Where before these girls were combating and navigating perfectly normal human emotions of survivor’s guilt, abuse and grief we are now told it’s all caused by… a sentient AI created by our two misogynist care takers? And they are part of the same group that Neiru belongs to but this is somehow the first we are hearing of this? Despite being in constant communication with Neiru’s assistant? Is all of this happening in a fantasy dream world that’s an allegory or is it the real world? Her introduction and place in the plot threw everything out of whack and I can’t properly rationalize this being the same show it was before.

Wooper: This is a show about teenage girls traveling to alternate worlds and fighting societal evils personified as hideous monsters – how many tests of rationality should it be subject to? I agree that Frill’s late game emergence threw an oversized wrench into Wonder Egg’s larger story, but as long as the show could get across its individual messages and emotions, I was down for whatever. That’s why the episode I have the most qualms with is number 12, which was overstuffed on a conceptual level. Too many existing characters took on roles they weren’t ready for: Ai was revealed to have killed herself in a parallel world, Sawaki-sensei was thrust into an overtly malicious position as a Wonder Killer, and Ai’s mom functioned as her saving grace despite their tenuous bond. While watching this March “finale,” I felt as though the show was giving me a preview of its thematic endgame without having truly reached it. The dualism of the two Ais couldn’t convince me that she had come to love and care for herself; the cruel laughter from Sawaki felt so far removed from his careful real-world manipulation that it came off a bit clumsily. It didn’t feel like we were supposed to be here after just 11 half hours (not including the recap), but maybe that’s just me. How about you?

Lenlo: I sort of agree with you. The mom stuff certainly wasn’t built up as much as it could have been. But I don’t mind the Sawaki stuff too much because it was very clear that Sawaki himself was not to blame in this instance. While we were given some suspicious shots, Sawaki was never anything more than a red herring and when you look back on it, he wasn’t actually a bad person. Wonder Egg didn’t pull some kind of retroactive character assassination on him by having him appear here as a Wonder Killer and Ai says as much, denying this version of Sawaki as one created by her own warped misunderstanding. No doubt it’s very similar to how Ai saw him back at the start of the series so I don’t actually mind that much. No, what bugs me about this finale is actually the Parallel World Ai bullcrap. Wonder Egg could have done so much here, used one of the other lead girls or Koito herself, to get the exact same result. But instead we get some sort of… hamfisted parallel world “Look how much I’ve grown” ending? It’s just so on the nose and disappointing I feel. Like this was the first draft someone had for an ending and then called it a day.

Wooper: Sawaki was a red herring? What kind of red herring paints this portrait of his teenage student and displays it at a public gallery? While it’s true that our Ai called his Wonder Killer a product of her own suspicions, that wasn’t her call to make – he was created by the Ai from the egg, who had actually committed suicide with Koito in an another world. Did Sawaki actually preach his monstrous gospel of dying young in that alternate timeline, outside of the dream we glimpsed? That’s impossible for us to know, but until the show answers Ai’s question to him from episode 10 (“Why did Koito die?”), I’m on Team Rika where his overall creepiness is concerned. I just wish there had been a bit more to his story, and Rika’s, and Neiru’s – everyone needed a bit of rounding out, really. Even the place where we left Ai’s character didn’t feel particularly satisfying, as you mentioned. There’s still one more episode to go, but it’s more likely to clarify the show’s vague ‘Thanatos and Eros’ underpinnings than resolve the girls’ personal arcs. I’m sure that will disappoint a lot of viewers, but Wonder Egg made its Freudian bed, and now it has to lie in it.

Lenlo: That’s sort of the crux of the issue here isn’t it? Wonder Egg just isn’t done. We liked what we saw, we want more Rika (Best Girl), more Ai, more Sawaki and in two months we are going to get it. But can a single episode really tie all of these threads together in a satisfying manner? I don’t think so. Wonder Egg was a fantastic ride that got too ambitious and lost sight of what made it work. It wasn’t content to tell a story just about abuse and the feelings of the victims. It had to dive into sci-fi and parallel worlds and try to be something “grand” in scale. Because of that Wonder Egg fell short of even being my favorite original anime of the season, losing out to SK8. And it was nowhere close to landing a place among the all time greats. At least I got some good sakuga and Rika’s episode out of it, so that’s something.