Wednesday, 27 February 2013

From the New World, Episode 19: Is its true form a giant spider?


Darkness

Summary
Saki and Satoru form a group with three others – a woman and two men named Fujita and Kuromachi. The woman is worried about a friend in the hospital, so they decide to head there. On the way they wonder why Yakomaru would start a fight he can’t win. There’s Kaburagi’s suspicion from earlier, but Kuromachi refuses to believe Power is Yakomaru’s trump card.

The hospital has a gaping hole in the front door, and not one made by explosives. They see a light in an upper window and Kuromachi gets out to investigate. Satoru realizes the Monster Rats might be waiting in ambush and tells Kuromachi to go on ahead while the others set fire to the nearby fields, proving his suspicions correct. In the hospital Kuromachi is nowhere to be found, until they see his body while using torches and a Power-created mirror to investigate the top of a stairwell. The Monster Rats guarding the landing are quickly killed.

The room the light came from contains three people trapped in cocoons made of bandages. When freed, one man flees in panic while another is a woman who can only gibber and scream. The third, another man, says ‘it’ killed everyone and took them hostage. They head for the front door and see the man who fled running around blindly and ignoring the assurances of Fujita, who stayed behind to watch the boat. Both are suddenly consumed by pink and purple flames. The others run, and Satoru demands to know what It is. The man says they should already know – they learned about it in school, after all.

At the back door the man says everyone should split up, insisting that staying together will only guarantee that It will kill them all. They hear a scream of rage – It knows they’re gone. The man heads into the bushes while the others run back into the hospital. It almost opens the door on them, but then It spots the other man, kills him, and leaves.

Saki and Satoru decide they need to warn the town. The woman from their group refuses to leave the other one behind and takes her off to hide while Saki and Satoru lie down in the boat and slip away. It’s clear to Satoru what happened to the Giant Hornet army, and what Yakomaru’s plan is, but before he can elaborate he suddenly tells Saki to keep still. Another boat is following them, and only one person, or rather, one thing, could be piloting it.

Thoughts
During that bit in episode 18 where Maria says ‘besides, two girls can’t have children, right?’ I thought to myself “good god is this going where I think it is?” Now…yep, this looks like it’s totally going where I think it is. I wasn’t sure how to reconcile the revelation about the bones with that comment or narrator!Saki’s earlier stuff about Maria being responsible for many death or how the faceless boy said she needs to die, but now it’s looking a lot clearer. Hey, no one ever said when the bones were found. In other news, Yakomaru is still one scruple-less bastard, but y’know, can’t let something like its biological parents get in the way of raising your precious little walking weapon of mass destruction! I’m just wondering how he keeps it under control when it’s not needed, or for that matter how he turned the child into whatever weird mix of Ogre and Karmic Demon it seems to be (the rampant killing suggests Ogre, the purple-black aura Karmic Demon, since K wasn’t shown with anything like that); either way, I doubt it’s pretty. Hey, wait a minute, this is assuming he’s the one in control here…

No idea what else to say about this episode; it was mostly a bunch of horror tropes, albeit not very scary. There was a mysteriously empty hospital late at night, the unseen monster who killed everyone and whom the people who have seen it are conveniently vague about, and even someone dumb enough to seriously suggest ‘let’s split up.’ OK, I should probably cut him some slack on that since none of these people have ever seen a horror movie and wouldn’t know that’s the perfect way to get everyone except Saki killed. Because her being the main character and the one whose pain and struggles we’re supposed to empathize with makes her definite final girl material, even if she doesn’t fit every element of the trope (unless I’m grossly misinterpreting some bits of episode 16), to say nothing of her status as the narrator.

Hmm, doesn’t feel like much, but I got nothing else.

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