Ergo Proxy S1E2: “Confessions of a Fellow Citizen”

I'm going to be doing something that I don't usually do with anime, and switching from sub to dub. I've had some friends tell me that the dubbing did a much better job with the translation, and that the subbed version doesn't explain itself well enough. Given how confusing I found the pilot, I think it behooves me to give the dub a try and see if it really does help going forward.

Open on dimly lit laboratory-like setting, with instructional posters on the walls and doorways that give me serious Aperture Science vibes. Re-I is being shown a very long list of mugshots, one by one, and growing increasingly frustrated when she fails to recognize any of them. Right off the bat, I can tell you that translation quality aside, Re-I's English voice actress is a cut above the Japanese one. She sounds more earnestly emotional, and in just the harsh and demanding way that the character seems to be written as. The parade of mugshots goes on and on, until she finally loses it and demands that they stop showing her these pictures when she already told them she knows the perp won't be in any of them.

Her description of a faceless monster having broken into her apartment isn't getting much traction with the cops. Which sort of surprises me, to be honest. Wouldn't this fit the MO of a slightly nonstandard AutoReiv infected with Cogito? Or a criminal with mechanical leanings who's tinkered with their own unit's platform and hacked its ethical programming? And yet, rather than entertain the possibility that her attacker really wasn't a human, they just tell her she must have been hallucinating due to head trauma and offer to run through the mugshots one more time.

Yeah, this is just weird. It would make more sense if they at least ran her through an album of known android customizations to find a match. Because, like. "Souped up robot with an unusual appearance" is obviously the most likely explanation for a setting like this one, right?

The interviewers tell her that they've gone over the crime scene with a fine toothed comb, and found nothing to indicate a nonhuman attacker. When Re-I tries to get up and go investigate it again herself, one of the AutoReivs present grabs her by the shoulders and forces her back into her seat. That doesn't bode well.

When they explain that her home security footage ALSO showed nothing to indicate a nonhuman, she declares that it must have been hacked. The interviewer just rolls his eyes and tells her that instead of positing wild conspiracy theories, maybe she should reconsider the company she keeps. A young immigrant man was found unconscious not far away, and as the granddaughter of the Regent she'd obviously be a tempting target for that kind of scum.

They show her a videorecording of Vincent being questioned. He says he was called to the neighborhood due to reports of an infected AutoReiv that needed looking at, and the interrogator tells him that there's no record of such a call having been made. Re-I's own interviewer pauses the recording, and tells her that maybe this foreign barbarian stalker was the one who blasted through the roof and used his skinny little 5'5'' frame to beat an experienced combatant like her unconscious before smashing his way out the window for no reason and randomly falling unconscious a few streets away.

Obviously. If she'd stop putting her emotions ahead of facts and logic like a typical liberal, she'd realize that this must be what happened.

And here's another data point that should support the "Re-I was attacked by a berserk AutoReiv" hypothesis, no? Why is nobody proposing that?

After the title card (no OP), it cuts to Re-I and Iggy driving away from the police station, Re-I complaining about the stupidity and stubbornness she just had to deal with. She tells Iggy to drive her to a mall so she can bury her frustration in a frenzy of irresponsible shopping before moving into the temporary home she's being provided with, but he tells her that that might not be a good idea. Presumably, she instructed him ahead of time to try to talk her down from doing things he knows she'll regret. He also reminds her that before the Intel Bureau will let her work again, she's going to need a medical checkup. Her injuries are minor, but still, it's policy. Iggy also implies that she might need a psychological examination, which is not what she wants to hear from her own AutoReiv right now.

Cut to her receiving the checkup, and promptly being relieved from duty pending psychiatric treatment. When she asks them how they can be so dismissive of her claims of a mystery creature when the cratered walls and clawmarks found at yesterday's investigation site suggest something weirder than a berserk AutoReiv, neither the bureau chief nor Iggy have any idea what she's talking about. The former is either lying or in the dark. Iggy's memories have obviously been wiped. The evidence at the investigation site, I can only assume, has been destroyed.

She's been assigned the city's top therapist for her care, which isn't suspicious in the slightest.

This is a pretty powerful gaslighting attempt. It really is easier for her to believe she had a psychotic break. She has incentives to choose to believe it, and appealing lies are the most likely to work. She has to be haunted by the possibility that she actually is just doubling down on her delusions.

On the other hand, though...how many people would have to be "in" on this conspiracy for it to work? Maybe fewer than it would require in our world, due to the prominance of AutoReivs who can be used to do a lot of the gruntwork of covering things up, but...still a lot. And they're really invested in keeping everything about this a secret.

As she leaves the building, leaving even Iggy behind her, Re-I (or...okay, now that I'm watching the dub it was apparently Re-L all this time, not I. Re-L then) muses about how multiple bureaus must be - if not actually in on this - then at least being made to cooperate unknowingly. She begins to suspect her grandfather, the Regent.

So...is this implying that her granddad is the actual ruler of this city state? She's not getting princess-level respect or deference, but if she's the black sheep of the family that could still make sense. Could be that her still being of the dictator's blood is why she's having so much attention paid to her.

Cut to Raul Creed's office. It turns out that the AutoReiv that took part in Re-L's examination was his, which supports my inference that robot workers make it much easier for conspirators to have disproportionately high impact for their numbers. She's now showing him the Proxy's likely course as it moved around the city yesterday.

Surprisingly, it seems to have snuck its way to the immigrant subdivision near an exit from the dome, where they presumed it would try to escape into the polluted wild, but after its run-in with Re-L it followed her back to her apartment all the way back in the city's residential center. They don't know why it would have taken an interest in her. They also don't seem to be aware that the Proxy isn't the only weird monster that's loose in the dome right now, or that it saved Re-L from a third party of any sort.

They hope that things will work out from here as far as Re-L is concerned, and that if they don't that the Regent won't do anything foolish just because she's his kin. Creed also gives the order to release the immigrant "suspects" in the attack. No word on whether that includes prime suspect Vincent.

Re-L has her first visit to the surprisingly young-looking therapist (although, transhumanism, who knows how old he actually is). Who, despite allegedly being the best the medical bureau has to offer, ineptly lets her catch a glimpse of one of his monitor screens by not turning it away from her properly.

Phantastic pseudology, or PhP, isn't just stress-induced hallucinations as her testimony should have let her examiners to conclude. It's a personality disorder defined by compulsively lying about one's glamorous and exciting past adventures, with the patient sometimes managing to convince even themselves after enough repetitions.

I never knew what the name for that was, but I've definitely met sufferers.

Anyway, it's the perfect diagnosis for "don't believe anything this woman ever says, especially about her own experiences." And it makes it unlikely she'll ever be considered sufficiently recovered to work for the Intel Bureau again.

This is where Re-L has something like a breakdown. Some of it might be affected, to garner the doctor's sympathy, but I don't think most of it is. Almost in tears, she says that she isn't sure what's real and what isn't anymore, and that no one will believe her but she's not sure if they should or not. Which is NOT what someone suffering from PhP would say.

It either works, or Doctor Daedalus (what is with all this random Greek?) is playing along very convincingly.

Before starting therapy, he says he'd like to run a full brain scan. She'll try anything that she thinks will give her a chance to get her life back. She's not afraid that he's going to use the brainscan to secretly wipe her memories or something, so either that's not doable with the setting's technology or she's just desperate enough to risk it.

The awesome music starts again as he and his robonurses go off to prepare the equipment, and she uses the opportunity to sneakily access his computer terminal. No security cameras, I guess? Maybe she just doesn't care anymore.

Turns out she knew he'd be in on the conspiracy, and that whole performance of hers was just that. Also, this person being trusted with super duper ultra secrets is a total moron, because not only did he let her see his screen before, but he has a nice clearly marked document about the Proxy that she can just open from his recent files. Maybe he's secretly helping her on purpose or something. Otherwise, he's the absolute worst person to ever bring into a conspiracy. We only get glimpses of what's in the doc, but there's something about a genetic analysis of the captive specimen, and tests of it using "amrita" cells confirm that it's a Proxy. So, it's organic then, at least partly, and there's something involving ancient Indo-European mysticism going on. Weird. By the time the doctor comes back in, she's got the PhP document back up and is pretending to have been sneaking a read of her own diagnosis.

Well, unless she did some sort of hacking bullshit, the doctor is going to know what she had open recently. Unless he already had it up himself in a different tab or some shit, and she just clicked on it. That would be pretty lol.

Cut to the Creed residence, where Raul's wife is telling him via the phone how could the new baby she just received is. After hanging up, her robot daughter that Vincent worked on before walks stiffly up to her and says "everything is ready for us to leave" in a synthesized voice. She tells it to go into daughtermode, and it starts acting like a kid. Spooky.

Cut back to Re-L and Iggy, driving away from the doctor's office. Unclear if she actually got the cranial scan or not. She tells him to access the Intel Bureau's index, which he still has access to despite her being declared unfit for duty. She asks him to look up a biological organism called a Proxy, and rather than just not finding anything he hits a program that shuts down his Turing personality and makes him declare in a flat robot voice that there is nothing here to look for under that search term. Her reaction makes it clear that this is not normal for "no results found."

These are the absolute worst people at hiding a conspiracy, I swear.

She turns his Turing program back on, and he has no recollection of her having said the word "Proxy," still asking her what she wants to look up. She just changes the subject and lets him take her shopping. However, a moment later Iggy gets an emergency summons from her grandfather. She murmurs that "he's monitoring me again." Implying that he monitored her in the past, but since stopped. Wonder what the backstory is here. She has Iggy take her to see him ASAP for fear of drawing his ire.

Meanwhile, Vincent has been released from jail and is going back to work as a probationally resident engineer. The Proxy, which has a bunch of screws or rivets stuck in its face-equivalent that I either didn't notice or weren't there before, is watching him upside-down from a high crevice.

What a rascal.

From that brief interlude, we return to Re-L as she visits her grandfather's office. It's the same room that the ominous lady Creed earlier communicated with was calling from. There are many voices that speak from the darkness all around, which appears to be full of...statues? mummies? Unclear. A person who I assume is the Regent sits on a small throne in the center flanked by a pair of odd looking robots. At least, I think they're both robots.

Anyway, Re-L apologizes for ignoring her grandfather's calls these last few days, and the voice that responds is female. The camera zooms in on the elderly man in a breathing mask on the throne as it speaks, though, so I guess the Regent just uses a female-sounding text to speech system. Or maybe that very feminine looking figure (AutoReiv? Or human with heavy cybernetics?) standing at his right hand does the talking for him.

After the Regent(?) brushes her apologies aside, another voice from somewhere in the darkness says that they have a serious problem they need to discuss with Re-L. When Re-L correctly guesses that it involves the entity knows as the Proxy, they're all silent for a moment before asking her if she can please just cooperate with the authorities and insist that her own behavior is the only thing they want to talk about. She refuses to take that, and they respond by threatening to put her under the authority of the Administrative Bureau if she doesn't start towing the line. From the way they say that, and from her reaction, I'm inferring that being an Administrative Bureau ward is more or less the same as being in jail.

Re-L tries to get some of the hovering, shadowed things to explain things to her, addressing a couple of them by name ("Leconte" and "Berkley" being two of the ones she spoke aloud. Guess there are people inside of those floating statue-things after all), but gets no response. Finally, she's forced to agree to butt out of this whole Proxy issue and be mentally ill until further notice in lieu of being imprisoned. Once she promises, they dismiss her without another word.

Cut to Raul's office. He's analyzing some forensic evidence, brushing off his AutoReiv when it tells him it's time for his appointment. He's just found something that surprises and disturbs him.

There are at least two Proxies on the loose in the city. Not just the one that broke out of the lab.

Well, I guess that's what attacked Re-L then. So, they both have an interest in her for whatever reason, but Skinny wants her alive while Fat wants her dead, and they'll come to blows over this. Curious. Wonder what she did to get their attention?

Returning to Re-L and Iggy now, as they enter her new (temporary, I think?) apartment. Iggy is prattling vapidly on about how great this place looks and what furniture and accessories she should get for it, while Re-L sits morosely by one of the windows. Iggy asks if her audience with grandpa helped smooth things out, and she just darkly wonders if Iggy is only being monitored by her grandfather's cronies, or actually puppetted by them. When she says she wants to go back to her old place and see if the Security Bureau will let her recover a few more of her clothes, he starts really pushily insisting that she should get some new ones instead; how about that shopping rampage she said she wanted to do earlier? When she says she just wants to go out and clear her head, he just gets pushier about how she should take him with her and go buy some things.

Up until now, the camera has framed Iggy more or less as the partner in a cop show. In this scene though, the angles all call attention to how much taller, bulkier, and seemingly faster than Re-L he is, all while his voice and mannerisms oscillate between his usual happy-go-lucky self and something along the lines of "possessive ex-boyfriend who's about to murder you." It succeeds very well at being unsettling.

The placement of this scene in the show is pretty well timed as well. We've been following Re-L and Iggy just long enough to develop a sense of normalcy. It's only now that I'm realizing just how isolated and vulnerable Re-L actually is (and, with what we've seen of the other locals, this may be the norm rather than the exception for this society). She only interacts with other humans when her work forces her to. Her social needs are all attended to by a perfect synthetic companion. And now, with the reminder that Iggy is very much not actually a person and that she doesn't have control over him, her situation is starting to retroactively look like a horror movie premise.

The social commentary of our entire social lives being monopolized by pseudo-benevolent technology that pretends to love us while making us buy shit we don't actually want, calling our attention away from social realities that actually threaten us, and narcing on our every word and action to the unseen authorities who actually hold the leash is pretty anvilicious. But then, this is a show in which there are literal public service announcement telling people to waste more and monster attacks are being blamed on immigrants. Subtlety is not the name of the game here.

Re-L manages to get Iggy to turn his back, and then flees the building. Cut to a shopping mall type place, where another one of those "citizens, please make waste" PSA's is running on repeat. Possibly robotic children are buying balloons from cheesy mascots. People and AutoReivs are milling around, wandering from store to store. Up on the bannister, Raul is walking around with his secretarybot. Suddenly, there's a commotion down on the floor below as Vincent the immigrant is thrown violently backward across the crowded plaza. He pulls a handgun out of somewhere and fires wildly back at his attacker, to seemingly no effect. Skinny just slinks calmly out of his crevice, and then charges, knocking people out of its way by the dozens as it weaves around Vincent's next shots and closes the distance.

Most of the people seem to be frozen in place, reacting only when Skinny knocks them out of the way. Either they've been paralyzed somehow, or this is a bullet time thing and Skinny is just that damned fast.

It gets ugly fast. The paralyzed or speedblitzed bystanders are thrown against the walls and through windows by the heedless Skinny, and we see and hear just enough of their reactions to catch the screaming, thrashing, and sprays of blood. Either Skinny cares absolutely nothing for humans who aren't Re-L, or else its "intervention" in Fat's attack had nothing to do with her and was just an opportunistic strike against a distracted rival.

It seems like Vincent might have a bit of superspeed (or paralysis-immunity?) going on himself. Like Skinny, he seems to be moving at a normal or near-normal speed through the crowd of barely-moving civilians. Well, there has to be a reason that Skinny is taking an aggressive interest in him, and it probably has something to do with that. As he flees, Vincent uses his own powers to try and minimize the number of innocents in Skinny's way, pointedly pushing a little girl out of the way of its advance as he flees past. He didn't manage to push her mother and the stroller containing her baby sibling out of the way, though; hopefully that baby at least was just a robot.

As Skinny chases Vincent out of sight, the camera catches a handful of the civilians they passed dropping to their knees and throwing their heads back in the same prayer position as that hookerbot back in the abandoned building. I'm guessing that the individuals being effected in this way are androids, and that something about the Proxies' presence causes them to bliss out and start worshipping them. This is probably the source of the Cogito "virus;" androids going berserk in the wake of those Proxy-induced religious experiences. Ish.

Back on the upper floor, Raul's PAbot snaps him out of his trance. Now that Skinny is out of sight, he slowly starts coming to. Okay then, it WASN'T bullet time. The Proxies can hypnotize or paralyze nearby humans (and also some AutoReivs, I think, based on the composition of that crowd), with certain rare individuals like Vincent and Re-L being immune. These things are powerful.

Wonder why Raul's PAbot wasn't effected by either the paralysis or the worship aura. Maybe certain rare synths are immune just like certain rare humans are. Weird. What ARE the Proxies?

Once he's snapped out of it, Raul sends out the order for the Security Bureau to lock down the area, close all bulkheads and blast doors connecting this shopping complex to the surrounding neighborhood, and begin sweeping it with teams of heavily armed and armored AutoReivs. The steel shutters close over each window and door. In a sublevel, Vincent struggles to find his way through the closing passageways as Skinny works on battering them down behind him.

Raul's protocols don't help with much, aside from containing the witnesses. Everyone in the mall has been sent to an "isolated facility" to await an unspecified further processing. Lovely. Why aren't they just spreading the "Cogito-infected AutoReiv with custom construction?" story, again. I guess with the heavy-handed satirical tone this show is taking, making the capitalist overlords incompetent and complacent in their imagined supremacy might just be intentional. Anyway, Skinny claimed at least forty-two lives in the chase, and injured forty-eight others, with some of the fatalities specified to be children. I guess at least some of those kids were actual kids rather than fashion accessories. As for the Proxy, even their best lockdown efforts were in vain; PAbot shows Raul camera footage of Skinny punching its way through the steel shutters and escaping the perimeter, still in pursuit of Vincent.

Later that evening, Re-L has snuck back into her cordoned-off old apartment and is investigating. Everything is as she remembers it. The mirror smashed inward just below where the message had been written in condensation. A shard of glass she had nearly cut herself on when Fat was looming over her.

Reassured that what she experienced was real, that a hulking monster really did jam its finger in her mouth, and that she is the victim of a conspiracy that goes all the way to her grandpa at the top, she collapses to the floor and hyperventilates.

It's an assurance of her sanity, but also of her aloneness. Without Iggy, she's got no one.

Well, until she's forced to make an actual human connection with the immigrant who she was bigoted toward in the previous episode. That'll happen pretty soon, I think.

Cut to the Creed place. Robodaughter activates when she hears someone at the door, but then reacts in convincingly childlike fear when two armed intruders force their way in. Weird.

Back to Re-L. Digging through the rubble of her apartment some more, she discovers one of those religious amulets that she told Vincent to ditch. Cut to Vincent in a sewer or something, where Skinny has finally cornered him.

Vincent stops panicking when he realizes there's no other choice but to stand and face his attacker. Just like the little Creed robot girl who switched on from machine mode to human and panicked, Vincent suddenly switches it all off, and turns to face Skinny with an emotionless, blank expression. His eyes have acquired an unnerving gleam.

Back in her apartment, Re-L realizes that the religious amulet she's holding is in fact that same one she saw Vincent carrying. That's why Skinny was chasing him. He's Fat's human alter ego. I guess we can add shapeshifting to the list of Proxy abilities. End episode.

Still a bit disjointed, but much more coherent than the pilot. I don't know if that's the show itself, or just the dub being that much better. Either way, I'll be sticking to the dub.

While it sometimes overshoots its mark and makes itself look more like self-parody than social satire, Ergo Proxy is still managing to make a poignant statement about techno-consumerism. As I said before, the ineptitude of the sinister conspiracy that controls Re-L's surroundings, legal status, and "social" life makes them seem less threatening, but it also makes them convincing. Corporations and corporate-aligned governments might be powerful, but they aren't always smart. The same sloppiness that makes a capitalist dystopia so hard for individuals to safely navigate is also a weakness in the system. It's exaggerated to a fairly ridiculous extent here, but still, for a series that doesn't care at all about subtlety I think it (mostly) works.

The way Re-L was written in the first episode, as a privileged and unsympathetic enforcer of the dome's regime, is classic dystopia stuff. The way becomes more likable as the system rejects her and she it is an engaging arc. I'm not sure what to think of the immigrant everyone is scapegoating for everything turning out to actually be a monster, but I've still got a couple episodes of this show in queue so I won't pass judgement until I've seen where it's going with that.

So, it's a slow, taxing watch, but overall I'd say it's worth the effort.