Garden of Sinners E5: “Paradox Spiral” (part 2)

After getting over his shock, Carrot tells Shiki that yes, he's willing to die for her. As he puts it, he's probably going to get the death penalty anyway, as he can't hide from the law forever. Being killed to give Shiki pleasure would be more meaningful of a death than being put down by the state, so sure, why not.

When Shiki asks him if this is how he's felt all along, he tells his murderstory already. His parents were (at least to hear him tell it) abusive. Then at some point, he started having a recurring nightmare of his mother coming into his room and killing him, followed by herself. I...guess he's still alive and bleeding out when she does that, or else the dream just goes into third person POV after he dies. This happened night after night, and indeed is still happening. But anyway, one night, his mother actually came into his room in the manner the dream predicted, and he responded by killing her before she could kill him.

And um. I guess he also killed his father? Or maybe we're meant to infer that the mother did that before entering his room?

He also asks Shiki if she knows how warm human organs are. Yes, I think she knows exactly how warm human organs are Carrot, have you seriously been paying that little attention? Also, if you killed your mother in perceived self defense, why the hell were you playing with her organs like you said before?

And, um...what was with gouging that guy's eye out and laughing sadistically about it if you're just a normal person who killed once in perceived self defense?

Shiki laughs at him and said he made a stupid decision, and that he should have instead tried to "preserve his day-to-day life." Um. Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, given the context he just provided? Then she asks him where he lives, he gives an address, and she corrects him by asking where he actually feels at *home.*

He takes this to mean that he can't stay at Shiki's apartment anymore. Even though she tells him that he's always welcome.

I don't know how much of this to blame on localization, and how much of it is "dumb college freshman writing what he thinks smart, subtext-filled dialogue is supposed to sound like." I suspect it's around 70/30.

Jump ahead (about a week, according to Carrot's narration) to Carrot sitting on his customary park bench. I guess he's homeless again at this point. A ticking clock sound happens, and he sees his mother carrying groceries down the street.

He reacts in horrified shock, and the clock noises get louder and are accompanied by similar imagery. Then, Shiki comes home with a brand new katana she can't wait to put together only to find Carrot curled up in his old corner of her bedroom. She asks him what brings him back here after all this time. He tells her. She's curious. To the Shikimobile!

...which...she apparently has?

Shiki owns one of those double motorbike pod things?

Hmm. I'm going to assume that this is Touko's, and that she lets Shiki use it for missions that involve a witness or consultant or a rescuee or whatever. That makes the most sense to me.

Shiki says that she'd suspected he didn't actually kill his parent(s?) in the manner he said, as it would have made the news by now otherwise. Um, you sure about that Shiki? Maybe getting hit by that car messed with your memories of what happened in "A Study In Murder." The police in your city must think they're the fucking SCP foundation with how pointlessly secretive they are.

Also, it starts playing really inspirational and uplifting music here. For some reason.

They drive to the place. Shiki notes that it's a really weird looking building, built in a completely different style than any of the other high rises around it.

The fiery orange lights from inside the windows are also unnerving, given the much more normal electric lighting coming from all the nearby buildings.

They go inside. The music gets effectively tense and creepy. As they take the (circular) elevator up through a central column of the building, Shiki comments that it's "twisted." Does she mean that literally? IE, the elevator is rotating as it rises, to open up in a different direction at each stop with its occupants being none the wiser? Or is she talking about something weirder and more magical than that?

Outside of the elevator, she detects something weird and magic-y under their feet. Guess it's not just physically twisted, then. This building is haunted or enchanted or partly five dimensional or something.

She asks him how long ago it was that he last came to her room. Eight days, he replies. She whispers that the timing is too perfect. Too perfect for what, I wonder? Did I miss a pattern in his previous stay with her? Some dates were given, but I forgot exactly which days they were. Or is she just noticing a pattern involving the number eight in the mysteries she's been encountering, like the number of ghost girls back in episode 1? Curious. They arrive at his condo. Shiki asks him for the key, and he nervously tells her that they should just ring the doorbell and leave if no one answers. Carrot what the fuck are you even thinking?

Shiki ignores his protests and tries the door, which turns out to not be locked at all.

We see Carrot walking through the hall, leaving the building.

Then, Shiki is leading Carrot into the condo.

Time travel thing? Starting to seem that way. Seeing an earlier version of Carrot as he leaves?

They tiptoe in, and see Carrot's parents in the filthy living room. The father is drunkenly asking the mother why Carrot isn't home yet. It's Carrot's payday, and he's impatient for that check. Neither of them seem to notice Carrot and Shiki standing in the doorway.

If this is time travel, Shiki and future!Carrot don't seem to be visible to the natives of this time.

As they watch, another version of Carrot comes in, walks right passed them, and sneaks into his bedroom while avoiding the parents' notice. A moment later, the mother accuses the father of forcing them into poverty (there's mention of them having had to move repeatedly. Hmm.) and of Carrot having been forced to quit school to help support them, and at this point he's their biggest source of income. The drunken father slides into an incoherent rage at this, and starts beating the mother. After knocking her to the ground and kicking her a few times, he sits back down and - in traditional abusive husband fashion - tells her to get up and finish making dinner. She gets up, comes back with a frying pan, knocks him senseless, and then gets a kitchen knife and leaves him sprawled dead on the table in the same position that the homeless guy eventually finds him in.

If this is indeed the sequence of events from the night Carrot killed her and ran, why would he have not mentioned his father being independently dead?

Or maybe there are a few different versions of the events, including one in which Carrot killed both of them?

As they watch, the mother then goes into Carrot's room, straddles the version of him that snuck back there, and stabs him to death as she did in our Carrot's recurring dream and in which he believes he stopped her from doing in his own past. She then, as per the dream, cuts her own throat.

Shiki tells him that they should leave. When Carrot protests, she tells him that the dead version of him will wake up just fine in the morning, and points out the mysterious absence of blood after she stabbed "him."

Huh? Is this another magic blade that doesn't hurt living humans deal? No, according to Shiki it's something even weirder than anything I've suspected thus far:

How is she coming to this conclusion? I wish we'd been shown enough ourselves to be able to follow her train of thought in traditional detective novel style, but if not that hopefully she'll at least explain how she knows.

She leads him around the floor, and tells him what she figured out earlier in the elevator. Offscreen, she's had Mikiya helping her research this case, and he came up with some very detailed information about the apartment his family live(d) in, including which side of the building it's on. The elevator twisted around and released them in the wrong direction, and someone changed the numbering on the rooms to create two versions of Carrot's family's condo. Perhaps two versions of the entire hall.

Triiiiiippy.

She further elaborates that she's been noticing details about the architecture that suggest the building was designed to support a "bounded field." Those get mentioned in the later Fate stories as invisible constructs that wizards can create to impose magical, often reality-warping, effects on the space within. If it means the same thing in this earlier Moonasutype story, then that means they're up against a proper wizard this time rather than a ghost or a confused wild talent as in the previous episodes.

Shiki then tells him that this change was made about a month after he and his family moved into the building. He asks how she knows that. She simply responds that she knows the guy who designed this building.

Are we getting back to Shiki's family, now? Or perhaps Touko's family?

In this apartment, they find the months old corpses of Carrot's father (dead in the same manner as before) and mother (stabbed in the midsection in the way we saw in Carrot's flashbacks, where he met her at the door, killed her with her own knife, and then tore her guts out and fondled them for some batshit reason that seems totally divorced from everything else about the story but is consistent with what he did to that one drug dealer guy).

Carrot is in denial. Shiki tells him to deal. Then the elevator opens in the hall leading to the room, and Shiki warns Carrot just before he can be stabbed in the back of the neck by a zombie that just snuck up on them.

Shiki quickly leaps on it and cuts off its head in a single, lightning-fast, mantis-like movement. I forgot how fucking scary she is. The body falls, and it appears to have flesh and a spinal column inside, but there's no bleeding.

She leads the speechless Carrot back out into the hall, where there are a bunch more zombies shuffling toward them. She tells him to stand back, and then her eyes go mother-of-pearl and the fight music starts.

She acrobatically slaughters attackers by the dozen, fighting brutally with hand, foot, and knife. Something I appreciate is that unlike in most anime hero-versus-mook-swarm battles, the mooks actually show themselves to be a threat in aggregate. One of them grabs her while she's dealing with others, and actually starts the strangling process before she can fight herself free. She has to stop slashing and focus on moving away when she starts getting surrounded. Etc. I wish more anime fights of this sort did this.

Also, some of them do bleed when stabbed in certain places. Not the usual places, though, and not actual blood.

We've seen this before! Touko's synth limbs have that same kind of clear fluid and somewhat fleshlike interior structure that we saw with the decapitated one. These aren't zombies at all, they're golems.

So, is Carrot himself a sentient golem? Maybe a full body replacement magi-cyborg, like Shiki with her arm taken to further extremes? In either case, he's clearly not aware of it. The third possibility, of course, is that he's actually human, just like the bodies of his (presumably actual) parents in the second apartment.

...hold on, weren't the police investigating that crime scene? Why are the bodies still laying there and rotting after all this time? I'm confused. Although at least now it makes sense that they took the burglar's account seriously, if he reported another murder on the same floor of the same building at the same time as the one they were already investigating. But, yeah, in that case why are the bodies still there?

Anyway, getting back to the previous subject, I'm pretty sure now the guy who designed this building is, in fact, a relation of Touko's, if his drones are so similar to hers. I'd honestly be suspecting Touko herself at this point if Shiki hadn't specified that it's a "he."

...

Man, you know what would have been really good? If the first fifteen post-intro-credits minutes of this movie didn't exist. Just replace the entire thing up to Shiki and Carrot hopping onto the motorbike with this one very short scene:


TOUKO: Shiki, I have a new case for you to investigate. This boy will fill you in on the details as you drive him to the location.

SHIKI: Will I get to kill anything?

TOUKO: Maybe.

CARROT: ....wait, what?

SHIKI: Fingers crossed. Anyway, if I'm not back by morning can you kick Mikiya in the balls for me?

TOUKO: As always.

CARROT: ...wait, WHAT?

SHIKI: Cool. Okay kid, let's go.


Bam. That's all the intro this story needed. And, with that done, it's now a perfectly enjoyable supernatural action romp.

...

After she finishes wiping out the drones while Carrot sort of eyefucks her and whispers about how awesome she is, the hall door opens and someone else arrives. Presumably, this is the person who just arrived by elevator and sent the "kill meatbags" signal to all the drones in the nearby apartments. And, for the first time in a long while, Shiki's murder eyes aren't showing her any weak points to attack. She STARTS to see them, but as soon as she tries to focus on his vitals she gets some kind of painful feedback. He apparently has magical defenses up, and they're designed specifically to block powers like hers. Dude came prepared, and he isn't shy about why as he introduces himself.

Shiki claims to recognize him, but doesn't seem to have known his name until now. There's a flashback to her and Mikiya in the bamboo forest facing him, which I don't ever remember happening. Do I need to go back and check? That would mean rewatching "A Study In Murder," and I don't want to. Do I have to?

Anyway, it's someone she recognizes, but not the (Touko-related?) person who she was expecting. An incomprehensible exchange follows. As best I can tell, he's using this apartment hall as some kind of experimental laboratory, making the golems repeat the same day over and over. Said day apparently included multiple murders; the people in the hall were all compelled to violence by the bounded field. Um...this would have been nice to have seen any evidence of onscreen, but okay. So, Shiki and Carrot (who is a golem? I think? Not sure why he alone is now free of Araya's control if so, though...) just wandered into this guy's lab and fucked with his experiment. Experiments that have something to do with discovering the nature of death.

Also, Araya claims to have an interest in Shiki because of her deathly nature. Also also, he claims responsibility for Ringu and TK rape victim girl from two of the previous episodes having gained their powers and been pushed to kill with them.

Somehow.

He created them as...either attempts to create opponents who could kill Shiki, or as "sacrifices" to her.

And, he similarly seems to simultaneously have planned this latest confrontation, and to be mad at Shiki for breaking into the lab.

Sigh....

Whatever, he's a bad guy, let's fight him.

Shiki charges him, but without being able to use her murdervision she's not nearly as impressive a combatant, and an experienced wizard like him is an order of magnitude more versatile of an opponent than she normally deals with.

He comes closer and tries to do...something...to her face. She cuts his hand off, but he telekinetically returns it to his stump and heals it back together nearly without missing a beat.

He explains that he gained immunity to her murdervision by appropriating some sacred relics, in what will eventually become typical Nasuverse fashion.

Embedding Siddy G's remains in his body forms the basis of some pretty formidable defensive powers, it seems.

Shiki's attacks just don't do any lasting damage, and with his grabby-spells he has an advantage over her melee focused self. She next tries stabbing some key spots on the walls and floor to ruin the bounded field that he has up in this section of the building, but that turns out to not have much to do with his combat ability; it just makes him madder by fucking with his golem-death laboratory more. Soon he gets another grip on her and...holy shit!

Okay, he doesn't actually throw her to her death; just tosses her over the ledge and then pulls her back in and slams her against the wall hard enough to knock her out. While babbling some pseudophilosophy stuff, but that kind of goes without saying in this series. Carrot sputters in confused terror as Araya sends the unconscious Shiki into some secret compartment hidden inside of the building, presumably to experiment on or something.

Araya is visibly injured in the wake of the fight. He's bleeding prefusely from several wounds Shiki gave him, and has her knife literally sticking out of his head. But he's reciting magic words, and they seem to be healing his wounds. It's not clear if Carrot manages to escape before then or not before we cut away.

To Mikiya. Oh fuck are there really going to be two of them in this movie? I thought Carrot was just going to be standing in for him this time. Fuck. Naturally, he's knocking on Shiki's door and - after there's no reply and he tries to come in anyway - being stunned at her having locked it.

I kid you not: right after this, it zooms in on Mikiya's face for a second, and he looks stunned and outraged.

You see why I was sure we were supposed to hate this kid?

It's just amazing how un-self aware this fucking series is.

Then we see that shot from the intro of Mikiya and Uncle Leaky bumping into something in the latter's car. I still have no idea what relevance it has though, because an instant later we cut to...sometime earlier? Not clear when, but seemingly weeks or months earlier. Mikiya has just gotten his driver's license and is telling Touko about it, and the topic turns to Touko's own teenaged years. She apparently went to "a very special school in England." Was this the first mention of Type Mogwarts in Nasu's work? Looking at the publication timeline, it's possible. She shows him an old picture from then. which shows teenaged Touko poised alongside a pair of now familiar men.

So, red top hat guy and Araya know each other, and they also know Touko and thus could have learned about Shiki from her. Likely without her knowing what they'd do with that knowledge.

She says that Araya was a cult leader or something prior to attending Type Mogwarts, and while she got along well with him she'd never turn her back to him. Redhat, meanwhile, is a more typical wizard, and was Touko's colleague in her invention of magitech robot limbs.

Okay, that brings things into something like sense then. Redhat and Araya are still working together, with Redhat providing the drones that Araya uses for his weird death experiments. Shiki has been introduced to Redhat before, and knew both that he uses the same kind of synths that Touko does, and that he owns that apartment complex. She was probably expecting him instead of Araya.

Though...if she's met Araya in person before, would she not have noticed him in that picture of Touko's and asked for his name etc? Maybe she just never noticed that framed picture.

Then cut to a meeting between Touko and Redhat.

I don't know if this is before, during, or after either of the previous incidents. Seriously, what does this story actually gain by telling itself out of order? Everything about it seems like it would work much better written as a conventional mystery or conspiracy thriller, with the audience learning things in the same order that the characters do.

Anyway, Touko and Redhat aren't on as good terms as they used to be. He tells her that he's salty about her prying into his business in that condominium project. Um...so this is afterward, then? After Shiki's confrontation with Araya? Before it, when she had Mikiya researching the case offscreen? IDEK.

Redhat also reveals part of what he and Araya are doing, and that it involves seeking the sacred book from whose pages reality are derived. Which is apparently something that most wizards have traditionally sought after. It's probably the concept that will later be developed into the "Root" in the Fate stories. Redhat says that he doesn't care or even really believe in the root, but Araya does, and he's just providing materials for his pal's research.

It's also implied that Araya's own magical specialty involves soul manipulation. So, he's the one who captured the souls of the condominium residents and installed them into Redhat's synths. Or...it says "brains" rather than "souls," but the way they're talking about it makes it seem likely that this is a mistranslation. Or maybe it isn't, and they physically extracted the brains of each of those tenants and installed them in the synths. It didn't look like the corpses of Carrot's parents had had their heads opened though, so, yeah, it probably means souls.

Cut to...some other time. Back in Touko's office. Mikiya's little sister is here, for some reason, and asking Shiki if she's a boy or a girl. Shiki leaves without answering. Mikiya tells her that that's not a very nice thing to ask someone like Shiki, and she replies by asking him if he'd still love Shiki if she were entirely male. When he answers yes, she freaks out, asks him "how could he," and beats him across the head with a heavy book.

So many perfectly good reasons for Mikiya to deserve a beating, and the thing he actually gets it for is "being willing to date an NB."

I'm not sure which side the narrative itself is taking, but this is uncomfortable to at least some degree either way.

Touko chuckles at this. To be fair, you could take a sympathetic read of this situation and infer that she's just laughing at Mikiya being in physical pain (which is actually funny) rather than the situation that led to him experiencing it.

Then they start talking and...oh fuck, this is going to have to be its own damned post. Well, we're near SV's image limit anyway, so, I'll pause it here at the movie's halfway point.


The investigation and battle scenes were legitimately really good. I was being serious when I said that this would be perfectly serviceable if the story was focused on just that stuff. Which...well, that's basically what "Overlooking View" was, and I liked it the best by far out of all of these movies.

I obviously can't come to a firm conclusion about "Paradox Spiral" until I've finished it, but so far it's reaffirming my feelings about Nasu's strengths and weaknesses as a writer. He's really, really good at writing dumb fun, but only so-so at anything else, and outright bad when he tries to be super deep or philosophical. Garden of Sinners suffers from youth and inexperience on top of that, but I think this remains true to a somewhat lesser degree even in his later works.

Like, look at what "Overlooking View" was about. The characters did ramble about some confusing psychology and philosophy stuff at the beginning and the end, but the dramatic question of the movie was "how is Shiki going to beat these ghosts?" The problem was a tactical puzzle, and the story was about her finding an effective tactical solution. The haunting atmosphere, lovely music and fight animation, etc were all just enhancers for that very simple and unambitious core, and I thought it worked. "Paradox Spiral" abruptly got good when it started doing these same things, and then lost my interest again when it stopped.

So, if you want to see the entertaining, thrilling, and occasionally touching development of a premise like "lesbian King Arthur vs. tentacle monster Gilles de Rais," Nasu is your man. If you want an exploration of identity or the duality of human nature or whatever the hell Garden of Sinners thinks it's about, look elsewhere.