Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Destroy everyone around you like a tulip.
Spoilers ahead.
1. Lying
“Episode 6” is the Gesicht show. After weeks and weeks of build up, he’s finally fully on the case and getting close to answers. Who is the mysterious figure in Pluto’s memory? What is driving Professor Abullah NOW? What’s with the creepy bear?! WHO IS ROACH MAN???!!!!
We don’t really get much on the last two. There are still two more episodes to go, after all. What we do get is intense. Gesicht begins the episode by meeting with and interrogating Professor Abullah about his relation to Darrius XIV, Goji, and the Bora fact finding mission. As to be expected, he gives Gesicht little to go on. They also talk about what it means to be a robot or human respectively, since Abullah has a mostly robotic body at this point.
The magic of the conversation is in how it escalates. At first, it’s pretty standard stuff, lots of pleasantries and somewhat philosophical musings. Then it starts to ratchet up and the production gets a lot more tense. We never get to yelling and a “confession” but we do get some heated words, a lot of meaningful glances, and a pin drop by Gesicht about Abullah’s lie regarding the boy in the photo.
It’s an excellent way to kick off an episode that dives back into the noir/murder mystery aspects of Pluto’s conceit while also acting as a bit of a feint for what’s to come.
2. A Tulip By Any Other Name Would Be Better
There’s nothing quite as haunting as an image of a singular, beautiful, undying flower in the middle of an absolutely field of necrosis. It’s truly one of the standout images of the episode, and that’s no mean feat for something like Pluto. The story that accompanies it isn’t quite as standout, seeing as it’s very, very on the nose but hey. No one ever said that serial killer stories were subtle.
Yes, the tulip is named Pluto. It follows the mythological naming convention Zahad, the boy in the photo, had for all of his flowers. I love it. No notes. Properly menacing.
3. Gesicht’s Last Case
It’s all been building to this. Gesicht has all the pieces needed to stop Abullah and the mysterious Pluto. He knows where it is. He knows what it wants. He knows he’s the only one who can stop it. The only things standing in the way are some creepy roach guy and whatever plot Abullah has cooked up for killing Professor Hoffman. Oh and Europol leadership, I guess. Why’s that? Well, because Gesicht isn’t living up to his moniker of a Robot of Mass Destruction.
Pluto has made no bones about its anti-war stance and its multifaceted approach to its central characters. Abullah and Pluto are no exceptions. We got a taste of Pluto’s inner conflict way back in “Episode 3” and Abullah’s always had tragedy written into his now-metal bones. “Episode 6” deepens that complexity and provides Gesicht with a moral choice that tests his humanity: Kill Pluto or spare Zahad.
Zahad the tulip maker. Sweet Zahad, who wanted to turn Persia into a field of flowers. Bringing life to the lifeless. Abullah’s other son, as Atom is to Tenma. Abullah’s only family.
Abullah’s source of revenge.
Abullah is a villain, for what he forces his son to do. Yet Abullah is no monster. He’s no scoundrel. He’s a hurt man who lived through hell, a hell caused by greed and hate, and can only see the desert, watered with blood and dyed with oil. A good man, now shaped by hatred, now shaping others with it, too deep to escape but hoping he can be free soon. That is his tragedy.
Gesicht must now decide if he too is to be shaped by the hatred of others or if he can, with his zirconium frame and recovered memories, choose to be human in the ways Brau and Tenma don’t consider powerful enough: through love and compassion. Through putting down his gun and choosing, choosing to stop matching hate with hate and escalation with overwhelming force and try. TRY god dammit, to make things better and kinder.
Continued belowTo fill the desert with flowers and not rivers of blood.
4. Fathers & Sons
Besides the continuing anti-war theme, the major theme of “Episode 6” is fathers and sons. Abullah and Zahad. Tenma and Tobio/Atom. Epsilon and his orphans. And, of course, Gesicht and his unnamed kid. That’s right! We finally learn what sent him off the deep end with Adolf’s brother. In “Episode 5” there were hints but it’s all but confirmed here that the child whom Adolf’s brother killed was Gesicht’s own kid.
It makes sense, right? What could have pushed him that far? Before, it was implied that this was simply the last straw. Seeing all that callous death of robot children, experiencing all that grief, combined with his experiences in the war, he finally understood what it meant to hold hate. Yet without the personal angle, it is difficult to figure out why this night was so different from all other nights. Why was it different from the war?
Because it was personal. Because to lose one’s child, one’s family, as the show reminds us time and time again, is to lose a piece of one’s self. To have it ripped away so violently and so callously? It creates hate and contempt. Tenma, Abullah, Gesicht. All hate because of who they lost to violence, each hatred unique. One directed inwards. One outwards. And one suppressed by the cops and the state, so that the unfeeling killing machine could once again return to duty.
At least, for a little while.
5. I Am Become Death. Destroyer of Tear Ducts.
I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I refuse to believe it. Gesicht is dead. Killed by a cluster cannon attached to a flower robot, a survivor of the 39th Central Asian War, on the streets of Amsterdam. If Atom can maybe come back, so can Gesicht, right?
Well, regardless of if he does or not, his death was both completely unexpected and weirdly telegraphed from the get go. You don’t go talking about a big vacation or retirement in a noir story and expect to make it out intact. Gesicht’s main character status, though, made it seem like he’d be just fine. Not so in Urasawa land!
To be fair, I knew it was coming, even if I remember little about Pluto’s twists and turns from when I read it lo those many years ago. So it didn’t hit me as hard as it could have. What did hit me like a metric shit ton of bricks was the aftermath.
That’s right. The episode doesn’t end on the cliffhanger of his death. Instead there’s an epilogue of sorts, tying together Atom’s death and Gesicht’s. Helena takes the trip to Japan they had planned, accompanied by Ochanomizu and Hoffman. It seems like it’s going to be a moderately sad meditation on memory, another motif. Then Helena meets up with Tenma in secret at the inn they’re staying at and the series brings it all back to what it means to be human and the purpose of grief.
In their shared grief, Tenma and Helena are able to support each other and learn. Tenma, that Atom is not Tobio but is still his son. Helena that grief is there to process loss, both for oneself and for others. As a robot, Helena felt her loss, could identify it, but could not process it. She could not express it because, like a child, she was not sure how. Tenma gives her permission to try. “It starts with imitation, then becomes real.” That is how many things are learnt in humans. Why should it not be true for robots too?
Best Line of the Night:
Gesicht: “What’s your name?”
Persian Flower Robot: “Muhammad Ali. They say he was the greatest.”
