I must point all your attention to the kitty in the featured image. It is cute and fluffy. I love it very much. Nothing bad happens to it. That is the one spoiler I will give above the fold. That is all. On with the review.
Spoilers ahead.
1. Abandoned! At The Murder House.
I feel very little sympathy for Adolf. He’s a real schmuck. Still, he doesn’t deserve most of the stress he’s put through in this episode. OK, maybe he does but his family doesn’t.
This is a roundabout way of saying I found it very funny when Gesicht leaves him at the safe-house and fucks off back to the city without even making sure he’s, you know, safe. Of course Adolf would be mad at that. I would be too. Would I then go try and find a murder canon? No. No I would not.
2. Fly! In A Car.
I never commented on Gesicht’s very cool car before. That was a mistake because this car is SO COOL. It feels like a future car normally, with kinda sorta self-driving, which already feels like a pipe dream. Then. THEN. Oh boy. It converts into a fucking flying car when he has to get somewhere very fast and very direct.
That detail specifically is why I love it. It feels real, like an extrapolation on how the world would actually adapt to cars that can fly. Why doesn’t he use that mode all the time? Because it’s so much more complicated!
3. Wash! The Blood Off Your Hands.
I’m skimming through this episode a little not because nothing happened – that’s never a problem with Pluto – but because it’s still developing plots and themes from past episodes, thus giving me more opportunities to take fun detours. One less fun detour is in Hercules’ conversation with Epsilon about the 39th Central Asian War and the value, or lack thereof, in Epsilon’s pacifism. We already knew the war was bad; we just didn’t know how Hercules felt about it.
Rather than say it outright – he’s too macho for that – he tells Epsilon about one of his compatriots, a robot who apparently kept his unit alive for much of the fighting. Near the end, they came across a spigot of water. His buddy stopped by it and started washing his hands, something he didn’t have to do as a robot and didn’t have to do because there was nothing ON his hands. He kept washing. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over again.
It’s a powerful, if not particularly original, symbol; “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” and all that. It conveys to us not only the toll the war took but the regret Hercules feels about it. He’s a fighter. Fighting’s what he knows. But just because you can doesn’t mean you always should. In this case, refusing to fight may have been the correct move. It would be a fight all the same.
Yet we also see Epsilon struggle with his choices as well. When is pacifism standing firm for peace and when is it standing by during tragedy? There’s no answer as of yet. There may never be one. Still, in light of the sacrifice Hercules makes, it remains important to ask.
4. Cry! For A Lost Cat.
Uran is back in the spotlight after losing her brother tragically last week, though only for a brief section of the episode. While I love everything that Uran does, it’s a shame that so much of it revolves around Atom. This is actually one of the big critiques of Pluto, and to a lesser extent Urasawa’s work more generally, the dearth of prominent, important female characters.
Much of that blame has to lie on Tezuka as Urasawa pulled from that original story and tried to be as faithful as he could in this reimagining. Yet when 99% of the female characters, robot and human, are “wife who cries over dead husband” or “wife who worries about live husband” with little interiority or focus, that defense holds less water. I’m sure an argument could be made that most of the characters can be boiled down to a single archetype with limited motivations, and Pluto is no slouch when it comes to doing a lot with very little. It remains true and obvious that the only notable, well defined female character is Uran.
Continued belowAll that aside, Uran’s exploration of grief over the loss of her brother remains a high point of the episode. It’s textured and singular, highlighting once again what drives Uran while reminding us that she is far more human, and more mature, than the world thinks she is. She cannot cry, she’s not sure what grief is. She runs to save the cat, to give the old man his wallet back, to talk to the boy at the bridge because she feels they’re sadder than her. Really, she does it to avoid processing her own sadness.
The same is true for Dr. Tenma, creator of Atom. For all his bluster and mystery and proclamations of Atom being a failure, he too is deflecting his grief, only this time at the loss of his son Tobio, whom Atom was a recreation of. Only, as we see, he isn’t. He tries. He pretends. But he doesn’t understand tasty, or its inverse.
“Episode 2’s” diner scene seems quite different now, doesn’t it?
5. Hate! Until Your Last, Dying Breath.
While we have some forward motion on Darius XIV’s role in the Pluto affair, complete with a cryptic and creepy field of flowers, the plot largely takes a back seat to Gesicht’s search to understand hate. Specifically, why HE hates. Why this hatred overcomes all other senses and thoughts and drives him to act. Why it drove him to kill.
To that end, we get some more of the dulcet tones of SungWon Cho’s Brau-1589. Briefly, to be sure. After that, and his quick visit to the prison housing Darius XIV, where he nearly causes an international incident, Gesicht’s is once again wrapped back up with Adolf and people hunting him. All of this links Gesicht to the various hatreds of the current moment, including his own. Hatred, as this episode and this series explores, is not one thing but it is very, very human.
Atom does not hate. He does not hate his father. He does not hate doing chores. He does not hate the casserole. Adolf, by contrast, does hate. He hates robots for arresting his father. He hates Gesicht for what he did to his brother. He hates himself for feeling such hatred and causing – a word I use loosely since, you know, he didn’t choose to have his car blown up – his family’s suffering.
Urasawa believes that hatred can be overcome but never removed. That is the crux of the brief conversation Adolf & Gesicht have after Gesicht saves Adolf’s life. Hatred, once there, remains, even as it can be tempered and made inactionable. To do so, we must actively deny it, root it out, and act to bridge gaps. Left on their own, those gaps will be filled with hatred because it flows like wine and corrodes like acid.
Pluto is pure hatred. Destruction and death incarnate. It is all that moves him. It is all consuming. He is a cautionary tale. And the final tragedy of the series.
Best Line of the Night:
Gesicht: “Does hatred ever leave you, or does it stay a part of you forever?”
