| Female middle school student Kadode Koyama can do well on tests at school but sees little point in making the effort. She is vaguely pessimistic and apathetic; "How can anyone really know what the future will bring us?" she asks. She hangs out with her group of four friends, Ai, Kiho, Rin and her closest friend, Ontan/Oran. We see what happened when the alien mothership first appeared three years earlier--how the US launched a nuclear missile at it and scored a direct hit, but there was no noticeable damage to the craft while Tokyo was contaminated with 'A-Rays'. The government assures everyone that the exposure is small enough to not be harmful, but Kadode's hypochondriac mother, Manami, doesn't believe it. The mothership has done nothing but hover over Tokyo for the past three years and the people have gotten used to it. No one knows if there are any live beings aboard or what they want. Kadode is supposedly attracted to her male teacher. Ontan muses about starting a cult to fight capitalism. The release of a new video game is about the only thing that really excites them. They once promised that they'd go to the same high school, but Kadode may not go at all. She worries about global warming and all sorts of other calamities that the future may hold. She wonders if life has any meaning whatsoever. We see what happened to her on the day when the mothership first appeared. Her father declared that Japan was on the brink of a war, but loyally went to work and never came back (see episode 0). A strange noise tormented Kadode as he left. Three years later we meet Takabatake, Manami's boyfriend. A doctor assures them that Manami is physically healthy. Kadode is startled when Takabatake tells the doctor that he and Manami will soon be getting married. Manami wants the three of them to move to a 'self-sustaining village' that a friend of Takabatake is supposedly setting up, but Kadode refuses. Takabatake gets along with Kadode much better than her own mother does. At the end of the episode some sort of small landing capsule detaches from the mothership and attempts to land, but it hits a high voltage line and crashes. We see two human-like bodies lying alongside the wreck. |
