Texhnolyze E16-17

This longtime ongoing review was comissioned by @WheelOfFortune. Just as a reminder.


Also just as a reminder, when last we left off the depressing underground world of Terabithia a new villain had revealed himself. I'm not sure at all that more moving parts was what the story needed at this point, but clearly it's been building up to this guy for a while. What we know? He's a member of the posthuman "Class" and the Doctor's brother, he can hack people with taxidermy to paralyze them, and I think the entire village of Gabe might be working for him for some reason.

Meanwhile, members of the Organo and Raccan have been vanishing, seemingly called away to some higher cause that probably involves Evil Class Guy's machinations. Ran was back in Gabe with her grandfather the Sage last that we knew. Ichise, Shinji, Onishi, and their sidekicks have all been blindsided by something Evil Class Guy did either directly or indirectly. The Doc is either dead or paralyzed.

Okay, now on to this next pair of episodes.


Episode 16, "Strain," is...well, I think it might actually be the slowest-paced episode of the entire show, and that's not a statement I make lightly. To be fair, it might also not be a statement I make accurately; it's been a very long time since I saw some of them, after all, and the parts where nothing happens are naturally what I'd remember the least. But still, this one is at least up there.

The first two-thirds of the runtime consists of the people of Gabe talking darkly about fate and how it cannot be fought, Shinji running around trying to figure out where so many of his Raccan underlings have disappeared to, and the Organo saying cryptic sentences about desire and ambition and stuff to each other. The sense of rising tension and foreboding is strong, but...really, not a lot happens. That is, up until the final third. See, at around the fifteen minute mark, Dr. Evil invades the city with an army of full-body replacement cyborgs armed with ray guns. And Ichise suplexes one of them through a wall.

It's a masterful release of the building pressure, I'll give it that. Even if, along with the other recent bits we got to see of the Class' true technological power, it looks like it's from a totally different series.

Right before the cybersoldiers (or "shapes" as Dr. Evil calls them. I feel like that would have been a better title for this episode than the previous one, even though in retrospect the creepy silhouettes that were sighted back then were most likely the shapes' first appearance) start marching in formation through the streets, the Organo and Salvation Union are both dissolved. Dr. Evil somehow reached out to key figures in both organizations and got them onside, with the leader of the Union finally having his own secret trampoline brought out into the open and condemned for it. It's the first time we even saw the Salvation Union since the damned Yoshii arc, and it came back just to end.

The fate that Ran the Seer is seeing for everyone has apparently gotten so horrible that she can't do anything besides stare at a wall and whisper the word "why" over and over again. And, a final scene of Dr. Evil and his underlings suggests that whatever it is he's doing to attract so many people from the different factions of Lukuss to his cause, it ends with them being forcibly converted into more shapes and plugged into his personal brain-internet so he can control them.

Apparently - as explained by the Doctor to Onishi after she recovers from her bluescreen or whatever happened to her last episode - her brother used to be considered a heretic by their people. It seems that times have changed, and they've come to see things his way. Which means they don't have any need for her work, or her life, anymore.

Episode 17, "Dependence," is where the payoff for the last half-dozen or so episodes of foreshadowing starts to really hit. It opens on a big battle between ex-Organo with some fight in them and shapes, and detours to the Raccan having a reunion with one of their own disappeared core members.

I guess they still do have faces under the visors, at least. Or at least some of them do. He's even less friendly to Shinji than he was last time they met, although he refrains from killing anyone who isn't fighting back. In his own words "he used to want to kill Shinji, but now he realizes it isn't worth it."

Or so he says, at least. A few hours later, during Lukuss' simulated night, he comes back and fights Shinji to the death. Apparently, the shapes are under orders to only kill people who are fighting back and/or have specific execution orders. Our poofy-haired friend had personal reason to kill Shinji, so he came back to do it on his own time rather than in his role as a shape soldier.

Well, that does seem to show that the shapes are still individuals with their own decisionmaking ability. Maybe Dr. Evil can assume direct control when he wants, but for the most part they're still more or less who they used to be? I think?

The two other plotlines for this episode follow the dethroned leaders of the Organo and Union struggling to lead a defence of Lukuss against the cyborg horde, and Ichise on a mission from Onishi to track the Doctor down and make her help them. The former is dramatic for a little while, but ultimately leads to no change in the status quo. Kinata, the disgraced leader of the Salvation Union, manages to get the bulk of his old faithful to follow him again and teams up with Onishi's Organo contingent to fight a pitched battle. In which they get crushed, with Onishi as one of the few survivors. Kinata dies, along with the whole Salvation Union force.

Seriously, those Salvation guys could have stopped existing after episode 12 and nothing would change. Why were they even a thing?

The other plotline has less techno music and fewer gore-porn sequences of people being blasted apart by ray guns, but a lot more dialogue. Ichise and his boyfriend, whatever his name was, have an introspective conversation before finding the Doctor that I *think* is supposed to verbalize one of the show's core themes.

Neither of the two of them ever liked the Organo. They joined it to survive. Because they had to.

It gets back to something the recently-dead Kinata said to his followers, about why he hates cybernetics and hid his own from public knowledge. About how they slowly corrupt the person's body and mind alike. I'm not at all sure about the veracity of this, but in light of the above it makes me wonder what the tilapia itself really represents in this story. The willingness to compromise on everything in order to live? Or, perhaps, the opposite; a literalization of how giving up on human struggle and weakness is giving up on life itself, a failed attempt at cheating the ultimate price?

What that means for Ichise, who was implanted against his will, is an interesting question. One made even more interesting when he eventually finds the Doctor hiding in the sewers below her lab, and an ugly truth comes out.

While monologuing about how the Class seems to have decided that all her work - as well as her guinea pig population - was worthless, she lets slip that Ichise' prosthetics don't actually have his mother's cells in them at all. That was a total lie. The canister he had that tissue preserved in was defective, and the flesh inside had died years ago. He never had a living remnant of her. The Doctor just used that false comfort of his to her own ends, twisting it into a tool to make him stop trying to tear his new textiles off.

Ichise doesn't actually strangle the Doctor to death in this scene, but he does come very close. Seemingly held back from finishing her off only by his promise to bring her to Onishi alive. Frankly, I think he went way too easy on her.

Also in this episode, we get some gruesome glimpses at what "the Class" actually is, and at what goes in to the making of the shapes. Respectively, they are this:

and this:

The three old woman clones in hoods plugged into borg wall alcoves are, collectively, the Doctor and Dr. Evil's mother. I think they might be the collective will of the Class or something, because there's no one in that bunker besides him, his minions, and a mass of biotech built up around the three old lady clones.

The man whose severed head is being installed in a shape, meanwhile, is the Organo guy who Dr. Evil used as his emissary to dissolve the organization. He outlived his usefulness as a mouthpiece, and was turned into another mook. Along with all the people who surrendered.

The final scene of the episode has Ran stepping off the train she just took from Gabe back to Luckuss, and telling the dragonfly that's been buzzing around after her that "it's time."

I guess she's managed to process what she's foreseen. And decided to do more than just passively observe, despite what her elders say they must all do. And also talked a dragonfly into helping her. That last detail is very important. At least, I assume it is based on how much the camera has been following those things.


I realize that this probably isn't making the best case for my new style of reviews. The thing is, looking back at my last several Toblerone reviews, they were pretty much just a longer, more detailed version of this. This series is not easy to follow, and even less easy to understand. And...a lot of it is just slow, artsy shots of bleak monochrome architecture. They're good slow, artsy shots of bleak monochrome architecture, for the most part, but they don't really lend themselves to engaging text descriptions.

There are still so many unknowns when it comes to character motivations that I'm not sure how to analyze a lot of them. Why did all those people march off to become shapes? How much independence do or don't they actually have now that they've been changed? When and why did Dr. Evil take over the Class' resources and tech infrastructure? What was the Doctor trying to do, and why was she deemed a failure? What WAS up with the random violent outbursts that various tempura characters have had, and IS Dr. Evil supposed to have been responsible for all of them from the beginning? And hell, what even is his motive for wanting to force-cyberconvert all the humans in Lukuss?

Everyone always seems to be talking around these things. Ichise wanting to live (and also do right by people who have helped him, sometimes) and Onishi's desire to preserve the city are pretty much the only character motives I can grock. And they've stayed pretty much static from the beginning of the series amid changing circumstances.

I thought about watching the rest of Texhnolyze (episodes 18-22) together and tackling them in one or two posts, thinking that seeing the ending will help me maybe retroactively understand what the hell any of the stuff going on even is. But, I tried that, and Texhnolyze is just too opaque and too complicated for me to pick up again after such a long hiatus, and I can't watch through the whole series again right now. So, I've decided to refund @WheelOfFortune for the final five episodes. I just won't be able to do a good job reviewing them in the time I can afford to spend on it.