Recap

Nine turns himself in to the police, but Twelve doesn’t know how to face him after what he did to save Lisa. Meanwhile, Shibazaki confronts the brain behind the Athena project.

Aqua’s Thoughts

The penultimate episode of Terror in Resonance is one that, solidly split in half, perfectly accentuates the duality of the show. The first half is the quiet calm before the storm, in which Shibazaki confronts the man responsible for all this madness, Twelve deals with the consequences of his actions, and the police struggle to figure a way out of Nine’s obvious trap. They’re savvy enough to know that no criminal would ever turn himself in without a ploy, but they can’t exactly let him walk either. Things quickly go haywire when Five regains consciousness and goes on a rampage to try and get back her favourite toy, leading to a second half that, while action-packed, fell a bit flat in the writing department.

Five has never been the show’s strongest character, a rather comically villainous vixen with infinite resources and seemingly no semblance of motivation for doing the things she does aside from her poorly-explained obsession with Nine. Why couldn’t we ever see her compete with Nine back at the settlement, let alone get a glimpse at how far her fixation on beating him ever went? Truth is, Nine is little more than a yandere, and not a very good one either. We never really get to know anything about Five, aside from Mamiya’s revelations making it obvious she’s the intended result of Project Athena: part of a hyper-competent, merciless elite. Yet she could show up in any other context, in any other show, and nothing about her character would change — because her motivations, what drives her to do the things she does, have very little to do with Sphinx’s terrorist attacks, their beef with the police, or even the Athena project.

Throughout the series, Five has mostly just been there, mostly as an excuse to get our protagonists into trouble. I’ll fully admit that I don’t actually even mind that, because her complete and utter defeat of Sphinx admittedly made for some great character development of not only the duo, but Lisa and Shibazaki as well. Sadly, the only one benefiting nothing from this defeatist party is Five herself, who departs from the show the exact same person she was when she was introduced. Her actions failed to augment the ethical law-versus-chaos conflict at the heart of the show with an interesting third perspective. In fact, they all but diverted attention from said argument, so here’s hoping Five’s rather confusing exit from the show will put Shibazaki back at the forefront. They’ll need him.

Too bad, the man in question spent the biggest and best part of the episode confronting Mamiya, the politician responsible for funding the Athena project. The man’s unsettling neo-nationalist motives make for some splendid commentary on the current political climate in Japan — remember the parliament member from two episodes ago, and his explicit association with current actual prime minister, the right-wing nationalist Shinzo Abe — and its crippling obsession with achievement and effectivity. It’s not exactly the super-soldiers or even ESPers I assumed they had in mind, but rather ‘super-employees’ that would bring the nation to new political and economical heights, which I think fits the context much better. Sure, no actual government would ever train children to be soulless, overachieving corporate slaves in some conservative misplaced attempt to regain your country’s former imperialist ‘glory’, but— oh, right. Well, this is a bit embarrassing…

Random observations

• Seriously though, what was with Five’s suicide? Was her goal in life just to kiss Nine once, or did she honestly believe she’d beaten him by preventing the press conference? Is it one of these ‘I’d rather kill myself than lose to this illness’ thing? Is it some sort of insane gambit to traumatize him?
• Important to know: holding the press conference or talking to the police has always been Sphinx’s goal — the terrorist attacks were just a means to the end of being taken very seriously, with the atomic bomb as a final leverage to have their demands be heard. Nine didn’t exactly go mad from Twelve’s betrayal, he was simply forced to skip straight to their ploy’s conclusion, and Five’s rampage caused the bomb to be set off in the first place. if she hadn’t interfered, the press conference would have taken place. Once again, at no point has it been Nine’s intention to kill anyone. He just suffers from some very, very twisted delusions of grandeur.
• The use of an insert song (‘hanna’, featuring Hanna Berglind) during Five’s confrontation with Nine initially isn’t as effective as ‘von’ was last week, but when the song blooms as the tension on screen increases, Yoko Kanno proves once again that she knows best.