Recap

Migi changes his mind about the best strategy to tackle their newest problem. Believing in strength in numbers, they recruit the ever jovial Uda. I was pretty hyped. Back to Tamiya, or rather Tamura now, we find the intelligent Parasyte starting to have human emotions, even if it’s something as despicable as schadenfreude. With her interest in human ethics increasing, might radical changes be happening to her behavior?

Nothing could have gotten me more hyped for a new episode of Parasyte than the early reveal that Glorio fan favorite Uda was coming back on the scene. As always, the interactions between Joe and Uda are a great bit of comedy in a show that has been nothing but depressing since his departure. Both Migi and Joe deciding to turn into the head of the detective was just hilarious. He also serves well as a reference to the change in Shinichi’s own personality. Uda and Joe have always been able to coexist well, without much problem or strife.

I really like this idea of the two of them working together. I kind of wish this would be how they operate from now on, but I know Uda has his own life to lead. The idea of cooperative Parasytes communicating with their wavelengths was really smart. Uda’s Terminator getup and hilariously square jaw also brought some more levity to this episode. I also liked that while Joe certainly is no fighter, he still has the same killer instinct that Migi has. I wonder if this is also a side effect of watching TV, or is it simply his Parasytic thought processes? Either way he also knows temperance just as Migi does when they give the detective a good scare. I also liked Migi’s new strategy in dealing with both Shinichi and the detective. While I’m thoroughly convinced Migi isn’t gaining human emotions quite yet, he understands the thought processes behind them enough to use things like understanding and sympathy to his advantage. We see this done with great effect as he champions his own right to exist as well as defend Shinichi. It’s sometimes hard to divorce a protagonist from his setting, especially since high school aged characters are the norm, but it is truly tragic what Shinichi has experienced at only the age of 17. I wonder how long it will take for some of these concepts to become actual feelings in Migi’s psyche?

The show brings up the interesting and hotly debated subject of altruism. As the resident Glorio biologist I could give you an entire lecture about the theories, but I’ll spare you too much terminology. For many people, especially those who don’t believe in the supernatural, altruism can be boiled down into a function of Hamilton’s Rule, that what we call altruistic acts persist because, evolutionarily, they increase the chance of similar genes to the individual will survive to the next generation. Obviously this doesn’t work perfectly for all acts, and some of the examples in this episode are very outdated. This is understandable, since the source material is all the way from the nineties, but Japan is one of the leading nations in genetic study. One would think with the updating of every other aspect of Parasyte’s timeline that they would also update that kind of information.

While the last few episodes have been good at showing Shinichi’s slow decent as well as the Parasytes’ slow integration into human society, the show has lacked a clear villain. With Tamura we once again have a face to put on the Parasyte menace as she reveals herself again. I wonder how much her first feelings being schadenfreude are supposed to say about the human condition. I feel a little bad laughing at how Tamura treats her host’s child, but it’s such a comically evil thing to do in a show that is normally pretty serious about its villainy. Not that it is dissonant, the Parasytes have always just not been able to grasp human concepts easily, so her casual child abuse is easy to see coming. Her intelligence was always what made her dangerous, and here we see her deductive abilities able to piece together a few facts very easily. I tend to think Villains are at their best when they use their abilities to recognize weaknesses in the heroes or create advantages for themselves. Poking at that old wound while shielding herself with an infant she knows Shinichi would never dare harm was brilliantly cold. Now that she’s back in the game, I’m really excited to see what comes next.

Random Observations

I know I normally don’t use Zigg and Aqua’s little ending bit, but I felt this was an easier way to back-load all the bio facts.

• When discussing outdated ideas, I most specifically am pointing to his example of honeybees. Honeybees, as well as ants and other members of the order Hymenoptera, are called Eusocial organisms. This stems from the idea that the born infertility and behaviors of the sterile class of bees serves as a true form of altruism, and that each individual of a eusocial organism develops to perform a particular task. This is achieved by Haplodiplody, or the idea that sex in Hymenopterans is determined by either having one or two sex chromosomes, not two different pairs like in the case of mammals. This causes the interesting consequence of sisters being more genetically related to each other than their own mothers and fathers. This fascinating outcome is highly hypothesized as the reason why the sterile workers would develop to support each other to the point of evolving into eusociality.
• However, this does not explain the instance of eusociality in termites and the most bizarre eusocial species, the naked mole rat. In these cases, the reasons are not concrete, but the leading theory is that the dry ground which both organisms inhabit would encourage building colonies, as well as creating the segregation of labor unique to those organisms. The idea is that new food sources are only easily available during the rainy seasons, when ground becomes wet and more malleable. Thus, the colonies only can expand during these times, and otherwise must rely on each other, thus developing eusociality.
• Probably the best example of what humans would conventionally consider altruism can be found in prairie dogs, also a communal tunneling rodent species. However, their behavior seems to be driven by a more conventional desire to not get eaten by hawks.