Gesicht is dead. Atom is in a coma. Abullah’s revenge is nearly complete. All that remains is Epsilon, and Pluto, and a showdown neither of them wants.
Spoilers ahead.
1. Puppets Beyond Puppets
With Gesicht dead – actually, truly dead – one would think the mystery is over. That’s it folks. Go home. The main character is dead and the mysteries are solved. Except…there are still some loose ends that need tying up.
What WAS the purpose of the Bora fact finding mission? Clearly it was a pretense but there’s something more to it than that. The general who was there, and is now “protecting” Epsilon, indicates that Thrasia and the UN sent the team to find something, without telling them of course.
Then there’s the weird talking bear we keep seeing. Is it real? Is it in someone’s head? What does it have to do with Goji? Is GOJI real or is Zahad Goji? Are they both the robot seen at the start, that Tenma talked about back in “Episode 5”? WHAT THE FUCK EVEN IS BORA???
These questions are largely left unanswered. It’s not surprising, seeing as how we’ve got one more episode to go. You’ve gotta save something for the final hour of the series. It ends up leaving the episode lighter on plot than previous ones but that just means it gets to drill down into our final remaining robot of (potential) mass destruction a little bit more.
2. Ring Around the Vasily
The things kids will turn into a game. Vasily starts singing a very unsettling song, the rest start dancing and singing it as if it’s the most brilliant thing in the world. Bless these kids for not being absolute shits to the very traumatized child. Double bless ‘em for constantly being there for him in that pseudo-asshole way children are.
Vasily and Epsilon are the deuteragonists of “Episode 7.” After being off to the side, it’s great to see them take center stage. It’s a shame center stage in Pluto usually means something horrible is going to happen.
Case and point: Vasily gets taken by a man with a horrible mustache to a VERY eerie castle overlooking a river after he effectively threatens the caretakers when Epsilon isn’t at the orphanage. He’d just started to heal dude! He saw Epsilon demolish Pluto and was coming out of his shell. How dare you. How dare you.
Worse still, he’s just bait for Epsilon by Abullah. At least Zahad gets the chance to stick it to his father and protect Vasily from being hit.
Good on you Zahad.
And no, I won’t be calling him “Wassily.” Fuck you.
3. Uran and Gendered Power
I’ve praised in previous episodes Uran’s power to detect sadness and the way it informs her character. I stand by that. However, it is a fraught association, one made more obvious by the ways Tenma and Ochanimizu dismiss certain “feminine-coded” emotions like love or compassion. Every time Tenma talks about “strong-emotions,” he invokes ones that are often coded as masculine, particularly hatred. I like to think that, in some way, this is on purpose.
Urasawa, whether consciously or not, is repudiating male-dominated approaches to the world. The hatreds, the posturing, the ways these world-views make ones such as Tenma myopic to alternatives or what is most important, it all gets revealed to be hollow and destructive. It’s why Epsilon makes it as long as he does. It’s why Uran is the perfect person to be in the room when Atom wakes up. They both embody traits which are dismissed by the masculine-coded establishments that are making callous and dangerous choices.
Atom needed to be woken from his slumber by strong emotions. It never had to be hatred.
4. Final Fight
I like keeping these thoughts on the philosophy of Pluto or the character’s motivations or what it says about our world but sometimes, I just want to see a sick fight. And y’all, Epsilon’s fight with Pluto is SICK.
Do I think the full reveal of Pluto’s body is as soon as the build up? Nah. The sacrifices of making an animatable character model means the really eerie details get lost. Does that mean they don’t make the most of it? Hell no! When he speaks, and the jaw opens? GNARLY SHIT.
Continued belowIt’s everything I wanted from a fight with Epsilon. High intensity with a solid core of empathy and tragedy. Pluto begging to die and Epsilon trying to get through to him was brilliant and I don’t care if it’s melodramatic or cliched as hell. It just works. What also worked was him FIRING HIS HANDS OFF TO PROTECT VASILY AND HOGAN. Oh, I never mentioned Hogan. He’s basically the commentary bot and he’s wonderful.
Hercules mused on whether or not Epsilon was right to not fight, to be a pacifist during the war. At that point, I wondered what the show had to say about pacifism, and the answer was that Urasawa does not believe in a pacifism which renounces fighting no matter what. Only a pacifism that sees violence and fighting as a last resort, as the “break in case of emergency” moment, only to be used sparingly and with great care. I think some leaders could learn a thing or two from Epsilon’s approach.
He does not refuse to fight for Vasily. He does not refuse to fight when he must protect children, children who have done nothing to deserve such hate, from indiscriminate slaughter. He has always fought, just not with fists and guns and photon beams. Those he saves for when it is impossible not to use. And when that fails? His final actions, with those hands, are to protect.
I was crying at the end and I’m nearly crying now. What an excellent end to the episode. Wait? There’s still five minutes left? What could possible hap–
5. Atom Reborn
This is maybe the scariest part of the entire episode, and the series thus far. Atom’s “rebirth” sells just how messed up the process was and how Tenma is earning his “I will become the devil” speech. It’s a real “darkest before the dawn” moment. Yes, Atom is back in the land of the living but is he still Atom? Is the boy who wanted to know what tasty meant still in there? Or has he been shocked into nihilism and wiped of all instincts save aggression?
I don’t have much to say on that, as we’ll almost certainly find out more in the finale. Instead, I’ll end with his final line, which I think sums up how haunted he is: “I understand you Epsilon. I understand you detective. The Earth is going to shatter.”
Best Line of the Night:
Epsilon: “He could never be my enemy. Even if we fought a thousand times.”
