Garden of Sinners E5: “Paradox Spiral” (part 4)

Okay, hopefully the last segment!


Return to the Nice Guy Power Duo. Mikiya has taken Carrot to an abandoned building that his family lived in when he was a child, and presumably before it was condemned. For all his many, many flaws, Mikiya really is a good researcher; Touko told him to look into the backgrounds of that floor's tenants, and he did a good and comprehensive job of it.

It's moments like this that really make me wish that KnK was just a supernatural CSI show. The characters are all consistently at their most enjoyable when they're handling the current case, and the plot beats are easier to follow.

Oh hey, it's that theme that was awkwardly shoehorned into the early dialogue scenes coming back! I can see how that was trying to be thematic foreshadowing, which is normally a thing I'm fond of, but in this case it was just way too forced.

They stand outside of this house whose significance hasn't been hinted at even slightly for a really long, dramatic moment, before sloooowly creeping their way inside. Once inside, Carrot has some memories resurface from his early childhood, when his father was seemingly less drunk and abusive. It looks like the key he dropped when being chased by the drug dealers at the beginning was actually a key to THIS house, given to him by his father in that time period.

The emphasis on keys is proooobably leading up to Shiki being the key to open up the Gates of Bullshit that the bad guys are after. I guess.

Another memory follows this one, of his father telling his mother about how he got laid off. He needed his driver's license for his work, and he got it revoked due to a DUI. I guess he had a bit of a drinking problem even back then, though it got much worse after this point.

Or...wait, it turns out that he actually KILLED someone during this drink driving incident. Ah, that makes losing his job over it seem a lot more likely.

...erm. What doesn't seem likely is how they apparently have to keep moving apartments after this, and he isn't able to hold down a job of any sort at all, because people keep finding out about the manslaughter charge. Like, they get death threats taped to their door even after moving multiple times. Carrot had to quit his running teams because the other boys keep beating him up because of what his father did. Etc.

Did his dad plough right into a sidewalk full of kindergartners or something?

Also, all of these memories are apparently being triggered by stepping into this old house. Even though most of them are from after they moved other places.

-_-

The parents then start praising him, and his father talks about how Carrot is more mature at his young age than he himself will ever be, etc. This prompts Carrot to drop to the floor and start crying as he regrets how harshly he thought about his parents and how he should have done more for them. Erm. Alright.

Also, did he just forget about having overheard all these conversations until now? He's reacting to them as if he's learning new information that recontextualizes how he thinks about his parents. I dunno, maybe he was just repressing all these memories until he set foot in the house that most of them didn't happen in.

Sad music plays, and I guess this is supposed to be. Like. Deep. Or something. Then Mikiya gives him a pep talk that's too badly translated for me to even summarize, and then they drive off to start the rescue mission.

Why did Mikiya decide they needed to stop here first?

Did he think that letting Carrot see the abandoned shell of his childhood home would help him concentrate harder on the mission or something?

Isn't this situation supposed to be kind of time sensitive?

I guess not THAAAAAT time sensitive.

-_-

They drive to the tower. Mikiya says that he'll distract Alba at the entrance while Carrot sneaks up to the secret tenth floor to rescue Shiki.

...

Um, couple of problems with this plan, Micky boy.

First of all, what makes you think Alba cares enough about you to consider you worth confronting? Why would he bother meeting you at the entrance? How do you even know that he's in the building at all, at the moment?

Second, why do you think Alba is holding Shiki on that floor of the building? That's where he and Araya were doing the experiments with the ensouled drones, sure, but how do you know there aren't other secret areas of the building? What if she's being kept in the basement? Or on another secret floor? Or hell, what if Alba moved her to a different building entirely to hide her from Touko?

I'm not going to hold it THAT strongly against Mikiya for taking his word for it that Araya is dead. It was gullible of him, sure, but it was at least a plausible story, so I'm willing to chalk that up to the villains' cunning rather than Mikiya's stupidity. Everything else is on him though.

...

Carrot asks Mikiya if he's a private eye or something. Lol. Mikiya just gives him Shiki's +4 katana of fieldbreaking and tells him to give it to her if he finds her and she's in any condition to fight. Then, we cut to what I assume is synth-Touko getting out of her car and approaching the tower herself.

Here's hoping they didn't give her working vocal cords.

Back to the Nice Guys. They arrive themselves, and split up to approach their respective targets. Before going, Carrot tosses Mikiya the key he made for Shiki's apartment and tells him to look after her from now on.

You um. You gave away a key. To someone else's place. To someone who you know that they chose NOT to give a key to.

Did the author actually think this was romantic and not, you know, the stuff of nightmares? STOP MAKING ME SIDE WITH THE FUCKING SERIAL KILLER, SHOW, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Carrot's last words to Mikiya are that if one of them dies, he hopes its himself, because Shiki could use someone like Mikiya much more. Wait, are you saying that there's any difference between the two of you as far as relationships with Shiki are concerned? Could have fooled me. Carrot then runs off to do his part of the mission while going on an inner monologue about how he's going to turn his life around after this and become his own person. Something something one week from retirement, something something engaged.

Mikiya goes in the front door, where for some reason Alba is just now emerging into the lobby. He has Touko's severed head under his arm. So wait, that WAS literal? Or is he already working on another instance of Tougolem, and this is just a head he's about to install?

Or...did Touko just send a synth body double of her own as a decoy, and what we saw getting out of the car a minute ago was the real her? Eh, come to think of it that's not very likely. You'd think Alba would be able to tell the difference, especially once Araya had ripped her open. Yeah, probably not.

Alba plays with Touko's head in front of Mikiya, pretending it can talk and so forth, and then starts tearing it apart. There appears to be actual blood and eyeballs in it.

I'm getting that "middle schooler's idea of what a psychopath acts like" feeling. The grandiose operatic music accompanying the scene doesn't help.

Also, he ends up crushing her head to a literal pulp in his hands, which I guess means that either it actually is a convincing fake or he cast a super strength spell on himself.

Meanwhile, Carrot crawls through a sewer passageway to get into the basement, and finds his way into a storeroom full of brains in canisters wired to some big contraption in the ceiling.

O...kay then. I guess he was being literal about the isolated brains. He somehow got living brains out of all these (dead?) people, and they're controlling their golem replicas remotely.

Presumably, the golems that attacked Shiki and Carrot zombie-like were temporarily disconnected from their brains and reverted to some sort of basic defensive programming. This also means that Carrot probably isn't a synth then, since if he was they'd have just pulled the plug on his brain as soon as the golem under his control went missing.

...unless they've been controlling him part of the time throughout the movie, acting as bait for Shiki. That would explain why "he" randomly gouged the one guy's eye out while cackling about it, if his synth was being remote controlled by Alba the Kefka-wannabe at the time. He does seem to enjoy gouging out eyes, so.

Cut back to an unintentionally hilarious scene of Alba chasing Mikiya through the halls while ballet dancing and singing nonsense to himself. God, this guy is so middle school I can almost hear the Linkin Park under his theme music. Mikiya eventually realizes that the dumbass is too busy dancing and babbling to actually be paying much attention to him, so he uses the opportunity to turn around and just shank a motherfucker.

I guess you can't spend years being obsessed with Shiki without picking up a few things from her. Unfortunately, Alba seems to have the same toughness spells on him that Araya does, so the stab wounds don't do much to slow him down.

Back in the basement, Carrot is digging through the brain canisters for something. Does he think Shiki is buried under there, for some reason? Or that they already mi-go'd her, and her brain should be in one of these bottles? Or is he looking for his parents' brains? His own brain, perhaps? Are we doing Inside?

Back upstairs. Mikiya is unconscious. I guess Alba beat him over the head or used a sleeping spell or something. He beats Mikiya's head against the wall until his apparent death while cursing out Touko over and over again for how she ruined his career at Type Mogwarts. I'll bet she dumped him for the quidditch team captain or something. Anyway, he beats and quite probably kills Mikiya, and then accurately summarizes the life he just extinguished.

He proceeds to ramble about how Touko has some kind of grudge against her little sister who was chosen as her clan's heiress over her, when Tougolem walks in behind him. He looks shocked, and alarmed. Maybe she's not a golem after all, then.

Cut back to Carrot, who has discovered himself in one of the canisters. Apparently he found his own long-decayed corpse in that other apartment when he and Shiki entered it, it just didn't show us that at the time for some reason

Why weren't the skulls of those bodies open?

And, why did Araya and Alba just leave the bodies rotting there?

And...what the hell was that police investigation about if the crime scene was never found and the bodies never recovered?

Am I supposed to be asking these questions, or is it really all just that nonsensical?

Also, Carrot's arm that's been hurting him chooses that very moment to fall off. Um. Okay. Guess it just waited for a dramatically appropriate moment to visually demonstrate that Carrot's body is a remote controlled synth. Smart arm. Araya and Alba really put in the extra effort.

Speaking of the dev team, Araya's severed head then lowers itself down from some wires on the ceiling and asks Carrot why he bothered to bring his avatar back here.

I'd ask Araya why he didn't just shut off his connection with the damned avatar and wipe his memories again as soon as he and Alba had Shiki in their clutches, but I guess I can't really blame Carrot for lacking the presence of mind (as opposed to the presence of brain, which he finally does have again now ) given the circumstances.

Anyway, I'm guessing Araya removed his head as part of the preparation process for putting himself in Shiki's body or something. Or, perhaps, he's been a severed head or isolated brain inhabiting a series of vessels for some time. That's also possible.

...oh, wait! A few times now Araya has gone into what he refers to as a "dream" where he's in what I now know to be the brain room conversing with Alba while his body is elsewhere. Maybe his real head and brain was here the whole time, while he's been using a superpowered synth avatar to interact with the world? That would make sense.

...wait, no, because he went straight from killing Touko to having one of those sequences, and Alba already had her severed head down there. How could that have happened in the literal blink of an eye? Or was that head just a replica that Alba had coincidentally just made? IDFK.

Back upstairs, Alba realizes that the Touko he and Araya killed and decapitated earlier was the actual puppet, and now he's confronting the real thing. I guess that was a really, really convincing synth, if its internals were able to fool even another golem specialist. A moment later, she explains that she managed to make a biological clone of herself some years ago, and she's been intermittently inhabiting it and her original body ever since. Presumably, she usually left the empty vessel at home, so she could jump back into it at a moment's notice in the event of a break-in or something. Anyway, Araya could have killed her original body or her backup, it doesn't really matter. Okay then.

Back in the brain basement, Araya tells Carrot that he never escaped, but was rather turned loose to act as bait.

Apparently, they implanted a ready-made attraction and obsession with Shiki into him before letting his avatar run amok.

And um. Apparently they knew that Shiki would be receptive to him.

And like. That she would run into him in the first place.

Also, if Araya implanted an obsession with Shiki into Carrot, why the hell is he asking HIM why he's come back to the place where he thinks she's being held?

I'll also repeat my question from before: why didn't they disconnect Carrot from his avatar as soon as they had Shiki? Why did they let him run off and tell her friends what happened? Why hasn't he been memory wiped in the day (at least? Has it been more than one day? It's been at least one) since then?

And, finally, it's kind of rich that the movie is now explicitly telling us that Carrot's attitude toward Shiki made no sense and only existed because of mental imprinting, when Mikiya is pretty much EXACTLY THE SAME. What, is he an earlier escaped experiment of theirs?

Carrot tells Araya that he hates him or whatever. And also cauterizes his arm stump on a hot...thing...that happens to be down there, even though it's not bleeding.

Back upstairs, Touko kills Alba with an upgraded version of her briefcase-cat. It's like a briefcase-centipede type thing now.

I'm almost sad to see him go, he was such a compelling villain.

Carrot heads upstairs, carrying the katana in his remaining hand, and is confronted by another version of Araya. I'm guessing Araya's actually consciousness is in the severed head downstairs, and this is just another avatar of his. Time for a synth-on-synth battle!

Or, well. A synth-muggle versus synth-two hundred year old combat mage fight.

Okay, it's not actually a fight.

Carrot lunges at him and tells him he's going to kill him for what he did to his family, and then made them repeat over and over. Araya paralyzes him in his web-things, and then vaporizes him.

Or, vaporizes the golem he's hooked up to. Presumably, Carrot is still alive in his canister in the basement.

Then he seems to feel or sense that Alba just got killed as well. Okay.

In the lobby, Touko is putting a bandage around Mikiya's bloodied head. He's still alive, apparently. Okay.

Then Araya's face sticks itself out of the wall in the lobby and starts having a completely incomprehensible conversation with Touko.

Touko starts laughing when he asserts that he has Shiki completely under control thanks to the magical stuff in the building. Then we see the sword bouncing around in the elevator, where um...I guess Carrot just dropped it when he saw Araya or something. And the elevator is moving, shaking it around. Which I guess is going to cause it to come out of its sheath and breaking the field? Just from elevator vibrations?

Fuck, this is gonna go over SV's image limit. And also my brain capacity for the time being. I guess this is going to be a five parter.


Well, I guess it is a two hour movie, so the screentime-to-posts ratio is actually pretty close to my usual. Still, was hoping I could do a little better than that.