There was more of that this week, and I think it goes to show that Lisa has a very peculiar and fascinating effect on the two boys. I noted back in episode 2, during the Mentos Green Tea Cola scene, that Twelve and Lisa were super cute together. Obviously, I’m using specific situations to back up this point, but it wasn’t just the character designs that lightened up-it was, at least for the first part of the episode, the show’s tone, as well. The second one has a much softer face, and one that is displaying a wider range of emotions than we’ve seen from him before. The first Nine is dangerous, threatening, in control. Compare this shot from the second episode to the picture at the end of this paragraph and you’ll see the difference immediately. The angles of their faces and even their expressions were much more childlike than we’ve seen them before in this show. I want to start off this post by noting that the character designs for Nine, Twelve, and Lisa were distinctively less harsh this week. It’s still not okay, but if it continues like this, it just might offset the first few episodes being pretentious as fuck.What a great first shot for the episode. But it is at least interesting in how it tries to turn its own gaping plot-holes and pacing issues into narrative components that actually work. It couldn’t be further from perfect if perfect was a location, and it was exactly geographically opposite of that location. It’s hypocritical, it’s incredibly contradictory, and it makes them surprisingly sympathetic as they try for an impossible middle ground between causing damage to civilian buildings and not killing innocents. Contrasting them with another character who has no qualms with slaughtering innocents by the trainful for equally vague reasons actually makes for an interesting dynamic, and I hope they give her more screen time than Lisa has been given thus far. They still childishly cling to their ideals, even as they coldly do everything they can to undermine those aforementioned ideals. What should be glaring holes in their plans (causing wanton property damage without injury or loss of life) from a narrative perspective start to become essential elements of their combined character, to the extent that they scramble to disarm their own bomb once they realize it can actually kill people. The fact that there’s a third party might even lead them to change their approach altogether, or lead to some kind of introspection that they apparently haven’t had yet. However, the psychological effects of their pre-teenage imprisonment start to show in this episode. All we still know is they had something of a traumatic, probably state-sponsored childhood that gave them ridiculous intellects, and they’re not the only ones who made it out alive. Reservations aside, what this episode does remarkably well is shed some much-needed light on Sphinx’s contradictory motives, while still keeping them cloaked in mystery. To have the show finally succeed at what it set out to do, while incorporating its past shortcomings, is nothing less than surprising.
At the very least, it shouldn’t have focused so heavily on the riddles and Oedipal allusions themselves when the characters are left wanting for any reason to care for them. This kind of puts me in a weird position, because I still don’t think the constant reiteration of the “riddle, solve, boom” formula before now was a smart approach.
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It provides the show with its first instance of depth, and I’m not quite sure how to feel about that. It makes something that spent the last few episodes painfully grinding the show’s pacing to a near halt into a key component that actually works at concisely showing the extent to which Sphinx are deluded, and how contradictory their actions really are. While it still has yet to find anything remotely resembling substance, this episode does hint at a method to the ambiguous repetition by turning the “give a riddle for police to solve, police solve it” formula on its head in a novel way. It has yet to give the characters human motivations, or any organic reason to do what they’re doing, opting instead for what I assume is the approach of letting vague actions vaguely dictate their vague aims, with the only comprehensible result being Oedipus cliff notes and abnormally superb cinematography. It takes too much stock in obscuring important details for the purpose of crafting mystique, without actually building it on a solid foundation. Zankyou no Terror is the one show from this season that I did not expect to like as much as I do.
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