Garden of Sinners E5: “Paradox Spiral” (part 5)

The elevator with the sword in it goes down to the bottom, and then starts coming up again, and the controls start glitching out. For some reason, it then explodes into a 2001: A Space Odyssey vortex accompanied by the Garden of Sinners main theme.

I guess that's a thing that happens sometimes.

Then there's a flashback montage of a bunch of scene clips from (mostly, but not entirely) Shiki's POV. Including filling in a little of the unheard dialogue from when she and Carrot were talking to each other in what looked like a flirty way back in the first stupid montage. What we hear now is...unnatural as fuck, but not as cringey as I'd have feared. Shiki is telling Carrot he's good looking, and he's petulantly telling her that she's just saying that. Again, it doesn't fit the visuals, but I was expecting much worse. The other montage scenes are also...um...okay, I have no fucking idea what pattern or theme this is trying to get at. There's not a collection of Shiki connecting with people. They're not all focused on the magic katana. The visual filter and music make this montage seem like its supposed to be some huge emotional climax that ties everything together and gives Shiki a boost of willpower or something, but...no, it's really not that. I have no idea what this sequence is trying to say or how it's trying to say it.

The good news is that it's kinda long and there's nothing else for me to say about it, which means less time until this review is over.

Then there's a flashback to one of the earlier movies, I don't care which one, with Shiki in her pajama kimono out in the snow talking with Mikiya. She suddenly looks up into the sky and her eyes go mother-of-pearl deathmode, and then back in the present Araya reacts in pain.

Touko explains that this building is Araya's body now, and that its being cut apart from the inside. Ah, okay, now it all makes sense. Thanks for the explanation homegirl.

The elevator opens, and a disheveled Shiki staggers weakly out. What, did the sword turn into her or something? As she emerges, Araya once again narrates my own thoughts on what I'm seeing with perfect fidelity.

Araya asks how she could possibly be back up in her original body, complete with battle scars, already. He whines about how he just needed her to stay in a coma for a few more minutes in order for...in order for what? He never explains. We were told earlier that he wants to take over her body or something, but we have absolutely no idea what that process entails, what sort of surroundings she was being kept in, etc.

It's like trying to let off tension that was never actually raised. We knew there'd be a bad outcome sooner or later, but we had no idea how close it was coming until after the situation was resolved.

Shiki also informs Araya that her awakening was not caused by Touko's attack. Mayyyybe it was caused by Carrot having put the sword in the elevator. It looked like it was, but just because KnK tells you or shows you something doesn't mean that it actually has any relevance to the story.

She blathers about how the thought of killing Araya doesn't give her any pleasure (still not sure what the rhyme or reason behind her bloodlust is, assuming it has any at all), but how his existence is not something she can live with. They fight. She blocks his magic missiles with her sword and cuts his current avatar's arm off. There's a break in the action where Araya says incomprehensible nonsense. Then they fight some more. There's a lulzy bit where he attacks her with his own severed arm that produces some amusing images, but it doesn't amount to much.

She forces his avatar to retreat with its wall-phasing trick. He clings to the outside of the building, and says that:

Touko said that the building was basically his lich phylactery, so it was always a sure bet that it wasn't, but confirmation is nice.

I'm not sure why he thinks Shiki can't get clear of a collapsing building, though, considering all the other shit he's just seen her acrobatically dodge and outrun.

I guess he and his high school girlfriend really were cut from the same cloth.

He casts a spell and the building starts collapsing. Really slowly. Like, slowly enough for Touko to pick up Mikiya's bandaged and unconscious body and carry it out of the lobby over her shoulder without visibly using any sort of magical superspeed or the like. Amazingly, this slow crumbling, collapse fails to catch Shiki. It does destroy the brain room down below though, so I guess that head mounted on the wall wasn't as important as it looked. Or maybe it has shields around it or something, idk. Shiki tackles Araya's avatar on the outside wall and they plunge a dozen stories downward, with her making sure she lands on top and leaps off of him just as they're about to hit bottom to break her momentum while he takes it full-on. His magical shields create a crater around him, but give out before they can tank all the damage for him.

So wait, is that his actual body? I thought he was using golem avatars? Maybe with the loss of his central brain in the basement he was forced to jump his consciousness completely into this body or something, similar to how Touko did? Though if Araya could do that, it's weird that Alba would be so surprised to learn that someone else could too. I don't know. This complicated metaphysical shit needs explanation.

Which maybe it got, to be fair. The translation could very well have gobbled it up without a trace.

Touko comes out and says some nonsense, before asking the dying(?) Araya why he wanted the damned Bullshit Gates so much. He has another flashback to his dead son or whatever on that battlefield, and says that he wants to know the names of all those who died ignominiously throughout history and give them their proper respects. That's a really dumb villain motive lol. They both say more nonsense at each other while the camera pans over a pile of shattered brain canisters whose tenants have finally been allowed to die. RIP Carrot. Then Touko starts lecturing him about Jung's collective unconscious, which always bodes well for anime. Apparently, in Buddism there's an analogous concept called Araya-Shiki, which means that his conflict with her is very deep and metaphorical. It's always a good move to have the characters in your story explicitly tell the audience what everything represents, especially when the thing they allegedly represent doesn't even make sense. She smokes a cigarette, and either uses sympathetic magic to make him burn up along with it, or it's just a pointless visual parallel and he disintegrated for unrelated reasons. It has a similar smoky effect to when he vaporized Carrot's avatar, so I'm guessing its the latter and he just suicided.

Mikiya wakes up. The building is, somehow, for some reason, still standing. And appears to be totally undamaged from the outside. Um, okay.

Then there's a dialogue-less scene of Shiki and Carrot parting ways forever in a heavenly coffee shop while Japanese Enya plays hauntingly in the background. It's like the wedding scene from the end of Titanic, only completely unmerited and without any of the visual poignancy that that scene's setting had.

Goodbye Carrot. Shiki will never forget you. Until she thinks about something else.

Our final scene is Shiki recovering in bed. Mikiya starts fidgeting with the lock she now has on the door, and she reveals that she's somehow absorbed her late opponent Araya's power to put my own thoughts into words.

The end.


On top of the usual issues with KnK, this one has the feel of an over-compressed adaptation. The ending makes it seem like Carrot and Shiki were supposed to have been something, but they never really were (except perhaps one-sidedly due to Carrot's implanted compulsion to fixate on her). Araya and Alba (ESPECIALLY Alba) were portrayed as the kind of villains who we've already grown to know and hate, but I don't recall ever seeing them before. It reminds me of one of those cash-grab movie adaptations that just adapts the most iconic scenes from the book they're adapting to appeal to existing fans rather than actually telling the story.

This may not actually be the case. Maybe the light novel was like this to begin with. But in either case, what makes it especially galling in the movie is that they had one hundred and ten minutes of screen time to work with, and they wasted so damned much of it on slow motion montages and characters staring gloomily into space. So much more story could have fit in that runtime. So much more could have been foreshadowed, depicted rather than merely mentioned, and explained. If these issues are adaptational, then the studio did an incredibly bad job of allocating its resources. If they aren't, then a movie of this length was a perfect opportunity to drastically improve on the source material, and they didn't take it.

Then like. On TOP of all that, we're retroactively shoehorning a Bigger Bad into two previous monsters of the week that had no indications of being related to anything bigger at the time, introducing a novel concept with the synths and magical building, introducing ANOTHER novel concept with the isolated brains that doesn't even look or feel like it belongs to the same genre, the whole thing about Touko's backstory that could and should have been established piecemeal in previous episodes, and then the event horizon conceptual overload of whatever the hell Araya was trying to use Shiki for.

All in addition to the usual KnK problems. However much they actually are innate to the work rather than a product of bad localization.

Thing is, as I said during the review, this series actually can be good in those rare, precious moments when it manages to pry its head out of its own ass. I guess when Nasu learned to do that more regularly, he stopped writing KnK and started writing Fate. As I've set before, I'm not even sure what standards I should hold KnK too, because if not literal high school writing it was still written early enough in the author's life that picking it apart feels kind of meanspirited. Though, I guess if the studio thought it was worth adapting and marketing as a full production, then the adaptation at least deserves that scrutiny.

It is kind of a pity though. A monster-of-the-week show about eccentric and morally questionable occult investigator Touko, her put-upon nonmagical researcher Mikiya, and her attack dog Shiki would have been good. It most often was good, when KnK was being it. Give it maybe one backstory episode about how the team came together (with the twist of Shiki being a monster of the week that they managed to leash being kept, to keep things faithfully edgy), and you could even keep a semi-comedic subplot about Mikiya's misguided crush on Shiki and her complicated feelings back. But, I suppose there are already plenty of other stories like that, so there's no pressing need for another.


Anyway. I'm not going to review any more KnK unless a better localization comes out. I hope that one does, though, because I'm really curious to see how much of a difference it makes.