| Title: | Silent Mobius |
| Episode: | 10: XRP-77 |
| Synopsis | |
| Episode 10: XRP-77 / 迷宮の記憶 = Meikyuu no Kioku = Memories of a Labyrinth Two young women were mysteriously killed, and Yuki Saiko has to face a past than she hoped to have buried forever. | |
| Comments | |
| Spoilers ahead - beware! - - - - - - - - - - Three little children sneak through the night. Sirens howling, light beams flashing ... one child looks sharply at these lights, and the bulbs explode one by one. When they kids are chased to the shore, they can see the other side of the river, and decide to jump down the rock and dive ... At AMP headquarter, the news on TV report the killing of two young women, Hiroko Yamashita and Lisa Emelfer, none of which seems to have shown any resistance against the killer. Yuki grows pale, then leaves office, telling the AMP she has caught a cold. With her not around, there's something missing in AMP office, and the mood is not too light. Katsumi and Nami wonder what's the matter with Yuki - could it be that she is in love? Yuki is sitting in her cafe, remembering her childhood friends. Suddenly she gets a gloomy feeling ... the door opens and a wounded woman tumbles in: "Yuki, help me - someone is after us!" Annie has been a childhood companion of Yuki as well. Yuki treats her wound; Annie replies "You are as kind as 12 years ago." Yuki tells Annie she had lost contact to her friends after the flight and didn't even know that Annie had escaped as well. She promises to protect Annie, and is surprised that she is so timid now - didn't she use to be the strong one back then? They share quite some history: Children connected to wires, forced to take certain medicines, trained in mental skills like telekinetics or teleportation - the Tajima project. And one day Yuki refused to take the pills, while Annie continued to play along ... Later, they still talk about the old times. Annie teleports a musical clock from the table into her hand; when Yuki offers it to her as a friendship present, she wonders: "So we are friends, eh? You didn't change at all." All of a sudden Yuki senses danger: Some explosives connected to a time fuse must be quite close. Annie gets focussed and teleports the bomb outside the house before it explodes. Yuki remembers this had been Hiriko's primary skill ... Annie suggests to leave the place, as the situation has now turned out to be dangerous. Mana Isozaki returns to AMP headquarter. When she reads the news about the two mysterious killings, she rings the alert, commands to inform Yuki and makes Lebia hack into the computer network of the Tajima organisation. But contacting Yuki turns out to be impossible. Annie and Yuki run through the streets of Tokyo, being attacked from all sides. Annie stands off a huge fire blast ... who else but the Tajima laboratories could know about the four of them? The AMP use their spinner to search for Yuki, who is a psychic mutant created in the Tajima labs, as Mana now reveales to the girls. But when Yuki learned clairvoyance, she could tell her own future there as well, and decided to run ... and Rally Cheyenne was the one who found her. Having faught off all attacks, Yuki tells Annie she had always envied her. But all of a sudden, Annie blames her for hypocrisy: Why didn't she ask her to join their escape? Annie releases her mental shielding, and now Yuki can feel who killed her friends! Tajima's system allowed for the transfer of skills to other people, and Annie already took over those of two victims, while Yuki had originally been chosen to finally receive them all, becoming the perfect human weapon. Annie attacks - the spinner arrives, Kiddy jumps and saves Yuki from falling down the rooftop. The showdown can begin - and Yuki just keeps looking at Annie with her sad red eyes ... Helpless and mentally broken, Annie ends up in a sanatorium, with a musical clock standing next to her bed. Stretch: This one seemed slightly better than Nami's episode but not nearly as good as Kiddy's. Learning something about Yuki's past was interesting, but the murder mystery less so. The motive for the murders didn't make sense until we are told that it's possible to "absorb" somebody else's psychic powers, and even then whether that's true or not is anybody's guess. The thought had occured to me fairly early that Annie might not be trustworthy (perhaps because no other characters who might be guilty are ever introduced, other than a certain "Dr. Tajima"), and without this shocking revelation there wasn't much to make a satisfying conclusion. At least Annie didn't die a stereotypically tragic death! Devil Doll: as for the absorbing of abilities, remember how Yuki noticed that teleporting the bomb away had been Hiroko's primary skill. episodes 10 and 11 will be a similar pair of character features as episodes 6 and 7 have been (and you'll then know the background of all lower AMP staff). Of these, I like 6 (Kiddy) and 10 better than 7 (Nami) and 11. Both Silent Mobius movies begin at a point in time where Katsumi already wields Grospoliner but most of the content of both movies is a flashback to the time when Katsumi joined the AMP (just very different from series episodes 1 and 2). Movie 1 still reveals one big spoiler about something you've not yet seen in the series. Stretch: The thought once occurred to me that in order to be entertaining and fun, a show needs to be either A)Plausible (I understand it; it makes sense and is interesting); B)Cool (it has a sense of excitement and adventure which grabs my attention even if it doesn't "make sense"); or C)Funny (it has good jokes). An ideal show might have all three attributes. My initial impression of SM was that it had some "coolness" but little plausibility or humor. Since then I would say that all three attributes are looking up, with the plausibility lagging a bit behind the other two. Devil Dol: Plausibility is in fact the weakest aspect of Silent Möbius if you ask me (we never learn how Katsumi suddenly was able to apply magic at the beginning of the series even though she had no clue that she can do such a thing), so your impression wasn't wrong. Of the humor you've seen the biggest part already (episodes 5 and 9; about two more lighter episodes to come). So the second half will have to rely on the "coolness". Like I indicated in my review, episode 12 will be the milestone where you'll see whether the second half is your style or not. This is where the real show begins. How much have you accepted the characters up to now? Would you be able to suffer with them? Would you root for them if they get in serious trouble? You've seen Kiddy's solo - did you worry for her? Try comparing Katsumi and Kiddy to Shinji and Asuka from Evangelion - whom do you like better? Stretch: I'm not saying that there's more humor than plausibility; I didn't expect SM to be funny so I'm pleased with what humor has turned up. Devil Dol: Do you consider the second half of Mai HiME "funny"? Ah, just now I see you have Shuffle! "on hiatus", and given that you liked Mai HiME despite its more angst/gloomy second half I recommend Shuffle! to you (lots of silly- ecchi harem fun, then suddenly turning into serious fantasy/sci-fi drama). Xenoknights calls Shuffle! "most unforgettable"; KBanger, Forbin and I have it at "Buy". It might in fact be a good next watch after Silent Möbius. Stretch: I guess I DID expect it to be plausible, since it was supposed to be sci-fi after all. Devil Doll: Yes, but it is fantasy as well, and gone is much of the plausibility. Then again, we never learn what exactly is in the Dead Sea Scrolls of Evangelion or who is sending the Angels, so a story can be exciting even if it isn't fully plausible. GitS SAC 1 is very plausible, and that's one of the strengths of this series, making up for its less impressive characters; GitS SAC 2 is weaker in this aspect (we never really understand what exactly Kuze is able to do), and this Gouda as main opponent is too one-dimensional and annoyingly arrogant. But both GitS series are very "cool" as well with their action and suspense elements, and that's probably why they're widely popular. Shuffle! I consider quite plausible as well whereas Mai HiME is lacking in the plausibility department in the end (as you pointed out in your review). Stretch: One of the things which turned me off about the first couple episodes was the way I knew nothing at all about these strange women, yet they were behaving like superheroes and it seemed that the message I was getting was "hey, just accept them as awesomely cool anyhow". Devil Doll: it may not be easy to read in real-time speed but Silent Möbius actually tells you quite a bit about these characters during the OP sequence of episode 1 already - see for yourself (five JPEG images attached; the Wikipedia reference is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylem, spoiler-free in terms of the anime). (I remember having written that you can't watch Evangelion, you have to excavate it... looks like part of this is true for Silent Möbius as well.) | |
