Review – Some spoilers:
I very nearly had a complaint about this episode but by the end of its run I was more confused as to whether this episode worked or not with what we already knew and with the tone of the story. After a rewatch, I liked it a bit better but I still have a lot of question marks.
As to what my complaint was, it was that we spent six minutes of the episode (minus the opening song and a brief recap) watching the formation of the universe. Pretty and all and the text discussion over it was kind of entertaining, but really, the whole thing is entirely skippable and by the way didn’t we leave our protagonist in a life or death situation so is this really the time for a walk through fictional universal history?
There is a point and eventually we get to Tsukai’s childhood where her father exposition dumps some cheesy dialogue about using our limited time to live the best we can and apparently this makes it some sort of profound statement that deeply affects her after this.
I was actually wondering if Tsukai had actually been born at all or whether she was just using the family as a cover, but it appears she’s actually been moving her way through lots of life forms in this universe and learning so we did get something out of this sequence. That said, I would probably put the first half of this episode as my least favourite sequence so far in the series. Sure it fills a couple of gaps and tries to give some motivation to Tsukai, but basically we knew she loved the world as it was from her monologue two episodes ago and everything else is just kind of filler.
And so we move into the second half where we finally get back to zaShunina apparently threatening Shindo but he’ll take the time out to deal with Tsukai first even though he actually blocked Shindo from moving at one point with the weapon he was trying to kill him with last week so it makes no sense why he didn’t just cut Shindo down then and there.
So let’s skip to my favourite part. Nope, not the bit where Shindo does the stupid protagonist thing and shoves Tsukai out of the way after her shield fails and takes the injury. We already knew from last week’s preview he was going to get hurt and this was just kind of a stupid, anime standard way to do it given, as I said earlier, zaShunina had plenty of opportunity earlier to make a clean hit of it.
My favourite part happened after Tsukai takes Shindo and flees and zaShunina is left with a copy of Shindo and a pool of blood.
If we weren’t already convinced that zaShunina had been changed through his encounters with Shindo, this sequence clearly shows the depth of that change in a very short time frame with only one word being spoken. Sure, zaShunina is cold, calculating, and utterly does not get what it means to be human. Sure, he was going to kill Shindo, use his copy, and move on. However, I don’t think even zaShunina realised that Shindo dying would affect him. He seemed incredibly surprised.
Then again, the show clearly wants to hammer this point home. Later in the episode when Shindo-clone is presenting the new device to a room full of excited journalists and scientist, zaShunina walks away and onto a roof top where he stares into the horizon. Nothing new about that given how many times we’ve seen a similar scene, but in this situation the expression on his face and the music really drive home his internal conflict and sadness.
And let’s all just ignore the cliché situation Shindo and Tsukai end up in after she heals him. Okay.
Hey this show has had a good run with 9 episodes that have just been great to watch and very few complaints. Even this episode in context isn’t so bad but as a stand alone is definitely weaker.
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Karandi James.
I finally got caught up on this series, but this was an odd time to have jumped in. Your comments about the intro portion being unnecessary for the most part is something that I’ve seen happening for a while now. As I mostly binged it, this the great amount of needless complexity this show goes through was really noticeable to me.
A lot of the key points that made this show enjoyable for me – revelation of the objects, the international response, and the characters’ struggles to process the changes going on around them felt to me like small moments in each episode surrounded by a lot of slow paced and ultimately inconsequential screen time.
zaShunina’s turn hinted at the end of ep 8 was satisfying enough to see, and it looks like his aim is to get humans to the anisotropic whether they want to or not. I am interested to see where this goes and will hold my judgement to the end, but for the time being the series as a whole seems to have a problem with focus.
That’s interesting that you are finding there to be an issue with focus. I haven’t really found that myself.
As I talked someone in the real world into watching this show at the halfway point I restarted the series and binged the first six episodes with them and I actually found I enjoyed it more. That said, depending on how this ends it really could change how I have viewed everything up until this point and regardless of how it ends, I will rewatch the show in its entirety later in the year to try to sort out whether I liked it so much because it was a bit different or whether it actually just works as a story.
I also watched the episode twice myself, and did feel things click into place more during that second watch. Pretty much every point in this post, are things that were going through my mind as well, during the exact same times. Why start the episode with the formation of the universe? What a great moment with the touching of Shindo’s blood. Even though this series has been very entertaining, and yes despite it’s flaws I do include episode 10 as well, I do really still hope the series will end on a high note. But we will wait and see. Right now, I can’t wait for the coming episode 😊
That second watch really did help. The first time through it really felt like the show had taken a radical shift and I wasn’t sure things fit at all. Second time through, I could appreciate that it wasn’t that big of a shift. Certainly at episode 9 this show start veering in a direction none of us really expected but it isn’t just jumping into a totally different style.
I’m happy this review was a lot more tame than what I initially expected and I’m even happier that you didn’t turn on this show like a decent chunk of Kado’s fan base over this episode.
Good job keeping a level perspective here.
As I said on Twitter, I wasn’t sure how I initially felt about the episode, and watching it a second time with someone else definitely helped see how it fit with what we’d seen. While I am disappionted that KADO won’t be the show I really hoped it would be because it is going a different direction with this ending, it has still be an absolutely superb show and while it might have different ideas about how to end that really isn’t a reason to suddenly hate something that has been pretty special up until now. Even if the ending ends up being average, that still makes it a fantastic show with a minor let-down at the end rather than a terrible show.