Indifference to Life and Death
Part of me kind of wishes that some writers would realise less is more. Early in this episode we see the veteran visiting the injured rookie in the hospital and she asks if she could ever enter the well or her own well and after claiming not to understand it he then prattles on about the unconscious and conscious minds and essentially not being able to return. He could have just stuck with ‘you can’t because it’s dangerous’ and the conversation would have amounted to much the same thing and it wouldn’t have given the viewer so many reasons to roll their eyes as the story seems desperately hard to mystify the human psyche as well as their explanation-defying technology that sits at the core of the story. Amazingly enough, I wouldn’t even question the whole using some machine to enter the well except that this anime keeps forcing me to consider what they are actually doing from a practical point of view and that opens itself up to a whole bunch of holes.
Be that as it may, the rest of the episode runs in a seemingly straight forward manner. The opening of the episode has Sakaido remembering his wife and daughter though we have the current version of Sakaido narrating the situation and commenting that how he’s seeing things isn’t how they happened. It paints a bleak picture and one that we already kind of knew was going to end tragically, though I’m guessing there’s more to be revealed on that story. I’m okay with them drip-feeding us information as long as they don’t stretch it out too long.
Then we get to the case of the week which is pretty ordinary as far as mysteries or detective stories go and you kind of wonder why they even needed to dive into the well to catch the guy. Surely normal evidence would have been enough but they didn’t even try to explain that the case was stalled or anything. We just jumped straight to it. Anyway, the killer this week blows things up but includes fireworks. That’s all we know and then we are inside his intent to kill with Sakaido and it looks like a tower surrounded by a waterfall and all the people on the tower are getting shot at by a sniper.
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On the bright side, the idea that each person’s well looks quite different is going to keep this fairly fresh. On the other hand, there just didn’t seem like much going on this week. Last time there were all sorts of little hints and clues that the analysts picked up but this time they mostly just stood around until Sakaido more or less confronted the guy and then we cut to him being arrested in the real world. Again, not much of a mystery.
Where this episode got my attention back was when they put the guy in the cell opposite Sakaido. There’s a serious security issue in this jail because clearly no-one is paying attention to what the prisoners are doing, but outside of that the conversation between Sakaido and the killer gave a fairly clear look at Sakaido. Much as the start of the episode where we saw his corrupted memory of the past this part of the episode made me really curious about him and what’s going on inside his head.
For me ID:Invaded might go one of two ways. Possibly it will be an intriguing watch with some interesting ideas or it might end up being a fairly pedestrian detective story with delusions of being deeper than it is through psycho-babble. At the moment it is kind of standing on the line between the two and I guess I’ll find out in a few more episodes which way it is planning to go.
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Karandi James