Summary
Shun
disappears without saying anything, and Saki reunites with Kiroumaru and
Satoru. They’ve accomplished what they came to Tokyo to do, but Kiroumaru
suggests this may be their best chance to kill the Ogre. While he goes to lure
their pursuers towards them, Saki and Satoru take refuge in a tunnel.
Saki voices
her concerns about whether the child is really an Ogre again, but Satoru
remains adamant that she is and they have to kill her. Kiroumaru successfully
escapes into another tunnel, while Satoru kills some of the Monster Rats to get
the Ogre’s attention. When they get away a little too easily, Shun’s voice
warns Saki it’s a trap. They escape a cave-in, only to find the Ogre right
behind them. Saki throws the Minoshiro at her, which is destroyed in a flash of
light that allows them to get away. Satoru creates a mirror with his Power.
Given the situation, he’s now willing to test Saki’s suspicion that the Ogre
thinks she’s a Monster Rat. Upon seeing her reflection, however, all she does
is scream with rage. Satoru dissolves the mirror and throws the Psycho Buster.
But Saki realizes he’s too close and will get infected too, so she burns it
away, harming the Ogre in the process. Kiroumaru emerges from a crack in the
wall and leads them away while she’s distracted.
They find a
place to hide, and Saki asks Kiroumaru why he originally came to Tokyo. He
decides there’s no reason to hide it anymore and admits it was to look for
ancient weapons of mass destruction. The hope was that the Monster Rats could
equalize their footing with the humans, or even supplant them. But they found
nothing, and in the end he doesn’t want Power, or the destruction of humanity,
just a better life for his colony.
With the
Pyscho Buster gone collapsing the caves, killing the Ogre and themselves in the
process, seems to be the only option. Then, Saki realizes the solution has been
in front of them to whole time. The Ogre is human, and subject to the Death of
Shame, but if she thinks she’s a Monster Rat…
The Ogre
walks past their hiding place to meet up with Yakomaru’s group. Saki promises
that she’ll save the queen of the Giant Hornets, and once she does Kiroumaru
wraps his face in bandages and charges the Ogre. She kills him, but in the
process the bandages are torn and reveal that she killed one of what she
believes is her own kind. Sure enough, the Death of Shame kills her.
In town,
Yakomaru, who defiantly returns to his earlier name, Squealer, is put on trial.
It’s a show trial, his opportunity to defend himself really an excuse for
everyone to laugh at the crazy Monster Rat. But he says some shocking things –
the Monster Rats aren’t beasts, or slaves, they’re humans! If they kill him,
another will just rise to take his place someday, and then the oppression of
his people will finally end. He’s quickly sentenced to the Infinite Hell, a continual
stream of Power-inflicted torture, to the applause of the crowd. Someone like
him deserves no less. Or so Satoru says, but Saki can’t bring herself to agree.
Saki becomes
chief of the Department of Mutant Management and a member of the Ethics Committee.
Her first act is to try and reverse the plans to exterminate the Monster Rats,
or at least save the Giant Hornet Queen like she promised. In the process, she
comes across some oddities she shares with Satoru. The naked mole rat, the
ancestor of the Monster Rat, has the scientific name heterocephalus glaber, but she’s found an old text that proposes
naming the Monster Rats homocephalus
glaber, seeming combining the naked mole rat name with homo sapiens. Then there’s a reference to the kanji for ‘Monster
Rat’ having a meaning that evolved from ‘monster’ to ‘changed human.’ Weird,
huh?
Actually,
Satoru doesn’t think so. Researching Monster Rat DNA is forbidden, and now he
knows why. The Monster Rats have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Naked mole rats have
30. Presumably, then, the latter was used to give the Monster Rats their
appearance, but they must be based on another species. The only ones with 23
pairs of chromosomes are olive trees and…humans! They finally know the answer
to the question Shun asked the False Minoshiro fourteen years ago.
A small
museum about the Monster Rat rebellion has been built. On the day of a ceremony
to honor those killed, Saki leaves early and convinces the museum guard to let
her take his place so he can attend. There’s a guard because of the museum’s
centerpiece – the brain-like, still-living remains of Squealer. Saki burns him
alive, planning to lie and say she did it in a fit of rage, not as a mercy
killing.
Everyone moves on with their lives. A handful of Monster Rat colonies,
including the Giant Hornets, survive. Saki and Satoru get married. The Impure
Cats are bred again, smaller and in larger numbers, to be reintroduced as
ordinary domestic cats.
Ten years later, Saki has finished the manuscript telling her story.
She’s pregnant, and wonders if their child will experience a better world.
Satoru’s convinced it will.
Thoughts
Well, Satoru
survived. I’d say I was surprised, but in-between watching episodes 24 and 25 I
was actually starting to suspect he would, though the exact reasons why escape
me now (but they probably had something to do with him still being alive so
late in the game), so I wasn’t really. Besides, once the Ogre died there really
wasn’t much left that you could do to kill him, and by then it’s close enough
to the end to feel like doing so is just trying to be sadistic towards poor
Saki. Naturally, it then ended exactly the way you’d expect it too, albeit with
a heavy dose of ‘well, it’s not like there’s anyone else left she cares about
enough to do that with.’
Also, the
Monster Rats. I was right. Me and probably a thousand other people who watched
this show and picked up on the clues, but still. At least, I think I can say I
right. I kept waffling in both directions so much I’m not even sure where I
stood last time I speculated on this. On the one hand, I was catching most, if
not all, of the clues, but then I kept tripping over the red herrings as well.
Which became even more frustrating because, going back over some of the things
I wrote, I appear to have been at least somewhat suspicious that they were, in
fact, false leads. The whole time, I seem to have had this perception that the
answer should be extremely obvious, but things like Saki referring to Naked
Mole Rats as the ancestors of the Monster Rats kept making me hesitate, which
was frustrating because I seemed to believe I shouldn’t be. But still, it turns
out I was right the first time I thought about this, so there!
Meanwhile,
Saki seriously doesn’t get it, does she? Does the fact the Monster Rats were
living in the dirt and had to fight merely to survive mean nothing to her? Even if wiping out a colony really is an extreme
punishment, benevolence wasn’t exactly the order of the day. It’s a classic
case of ‘haves’ versus ‘have nots.’ There’s a minority that has all of the
power (and in this case, literal Power) and lives comfortably, surrounded by a
majority for whom life is difficult and even basic survival isn’t always a
guarantee, and about whom the powerful have some very naïve ideas concerning
how they treat the latter and what their proper place is. The Monster Rats
tried to improve themselves, and even that was met with suspicion on the part
of the humans. When it became clear just how powerful the Robber Flies had
become there wasn’t any consideration of whether the Monster Rats were capable
of more than they’d been allowed to achieve, or whether there should be
negotiations, just a unanimous and near-immediate jump to ‘wipe ‘em out!’ It’s
not that their suspicions were unjustified, since Squealer/Yakomaru was trying to destroy humanity and
wasn’t exactly benevolent even to his own people, but he truly believed in the
capabilities of the Monster Rats and wanted to create a better life for them.
He rebelled against humanity because he felt the Monster Rats would never be
allowed to truly prosper otherwise. That doesn’t make mass murder OK, but it
also doesn’t make it OK to give him a show trial that basically proves him right. These people have no
regard for the Monster Rats or what they do to them.
I’ve talked
previously about the idea that humans represent our more ‘enlightened’ side and
the Monster Rats our ‘baser’ nature. I still think that holds true, though I
don’t mean to say that humans aren’t emotional or cruel, or that the Monster
Rats can’t have lofty goals and ideals, because both are certainly true; it’s
more of a symbolic comparison than a literal one. It’s more of a way of showing
that utopia comes at a price. By distancing themselves from the undesirable
parts of themselves in order to create a safer, ‘better’ society, humans only
became cruel in different ways. The darker side of their society is seen as a
rational, justifiable, and necessary price, whereas that of the Monster Rats is
not. Squealer’s actions are ‘monstrous’ but his punishment is ‘justice,’ never
mind that it’s just as cruel as anything he did. Because they have something
that gives them an edge, the humans see themselves as morally and physically
superior to the Monster Rats, and it leads to a double standard when judging
their respective actions. Their forebears even forced the Powerless majority
into a diminutive, animal form to further underscore this belief and make it
easier to regard them as nothing more than what they seemed to be – mindless
beasts. At heart, they’re no better than the Slave Dynasties that came before
them.
Fortunately,
we don’t need to end things on that depressing note, because there’re hints
that society is changing. Some Monster Rat colonies survive; the Impure Cats appear
to have been phased out; there’s the sign in Saki’s old school about how
imagination has the power to change anything. It’s all vague, perhaps a bit too
vague (that they’re ‘phasing out’ the Impure Cats is just my interpretation),
and not definitive proof that things are headed in a better direction, but the
potential is there. Saki wonders if they’ll be able to change; Satoru says they
have to. And in the end, I think that’s really what this is all about. Humans are
constantly adapting and evolving in response to changes in themselves and their
environment. It’s not always the right kind of change, but what’s important is
recognizing that and moving beyond it, and always trying to make sure the next
changes will be for the better.
Overall, it
was an interesting series, even if the execution actually ended up not always
being as interesting as it could’ve been. That should probably be elaborated
on, but this post is already way overdue and it’s good fodder if I can get
myself to do a proper ‘final thoughts’ post. Still, it may have started
stronger than it ended, but I’m glad I watched it.
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