Mob Psycho S1E9: "Claw ~seventh division~"

You know, it always bugs me when an episode title includes a number that is close - but not the same - as its episode number. "Episode nine: seventh division." Makes me grind my teeth.

Well, anyway, the Claw agents bring their captives - including Ritsu - to a remote techno-fortress hidden in the forest. The slimmer Claw who seems to be in charge is initially under the impression that Ritsu is the one who managed to actually give his underling a real fight, and thinks they might need special treatment for him. Hoodie corrects him though, and says that the one who actually managed to hurt him was an eleventh hour interloper who he had to use "your spray" on and escape.

So the higher-ranking Claw dude is either an inventor, or just the guy who's authorized to distribute their esoteric inventions to the field agents. And yeah, that spray is some crazy magic stuff. Which is good, because that's the only explanation for it that would make any sense.

We also learn that Hoodie's name is Koyama. The other guy, I'll just call Glasses for now. Anyway, when Glasses understands the full situation, and that the superpowered interloper who Koyama couldn't beat was in fact another child, he starts getting pissy again.

I'm not sure what he expected Koyama to do, exactly, but he's mad that he didn't bring in Mob as well. On one hand, that's not really reasonable. On the other...being entirely fair...Koyama probably COULD have gotten them both if he'd fought pragmatically rather than sadistically. Which Glasses has probably already suspected, knowing his partner. So yeah, Glasses is probably in the right now that I think about it.

As they piss and moan at each other, a third Claw by the name of Terada - seemingly more important than them, and flanked by a pair of much younger bodyguards - walks over and asks what all this is about. He'll decide whether or not it's something he needs to tattle to the "Division Leader" about after he has a full understanding of the situation himself. The Claw seems to have a pretty intricate hierarchy; a lot more distinct ranks than I'd have expected.

Also, I swear that every new character design that gets introduced makes me feel more and more like I really am watching Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

Just, you know, much better written.

Roll OP. After which, we cut to Tarada, his attendants, and his zebra-patterned facial hair driving through a back country road. He muses that while Koyama is a reckless moron, he is also an extremely powerful and well-trained esper, so a kid who can out-mindwrestle him is a pretty big deal. Recruiting this kid, voluntarily or otherwise, should be their cell's top priority according to Claw policy. However, on the other hand...

Heh. When he was describing the Claw in the previous episode, Teru talked up their organizational power and ability to make coordinated operations. But then, he's only been on the receiving end, and he admitted himself that much of what he "knows" about the Claw's inner workings was told to him by a Claw agent who was trying to hook him in. So yeah. An organization that's this hierarchical and this cynical is going to *necessarily* be crippled by corruption and power-jockeying. It would be literally impossible for them not to be.

So, because he doesn't want his own rising star to be eclipsed, even by someone who he could get the credit for having brought in, Tarada and his pair of child soldier flunkies are going to go on a mission to capture Mob and accidentally be forced to kill him when he puts up too much resistance, whoopsiedaisy. This seems like a very bad plan, Tarada. We don't know how psychically powerful Tarada himself is, or how powerful his flunkies are for that matter, but he himself just acknowledged that Koyama is one of their real heavy-hitters. Which makes it sound like Tarada isn't that much stronger than Koyama, even if he is stronger. Sure, he'll have the advantage of numbers, but if he can plot and scheme to get rivals killed in order to pave the way for his own rise, well...what's to keep his pair of underlings from letting (or even helping) Mob kill him to open up the ranks for their own advancement? Lol.

Cut back to the Awakening Lab's executive lounge. Mob is asking Teru the same questions I had earlier, about why he suddenly wants to fight the Claw when just a couple hours ago he was warning against it. He explains that he's been thinking since then, and he's decided that with Mob's superpowered ??? side within reach, it maaaay be possible to deal a serious blow to the Claw. If someone doesn't weaken them now, meanwhile, they might get big enough to actually do their world domination scheme, and then hiding from them is going to get a hell of a lot more difficult. So, thinking in the longterm, Teru has changed his mind. Logical enough.

They also have a conversation about their three-part teamup (plus Dimple I guess lol) that's pretty much repeated from the end of the previous episode, just more stretched out and needlessly detailed. Seems like an adaptational botch. Eventually though, they move the conversation on to the subject of tactics. What leads do they have to follow in order to start a rescue mission? Teru replies that it's okay that they don't have any leads at the moment, because they just beat up a Claw agent badly enough that he had to retreat without grabbing every psychic kid in his immediate field of vision, and then returned to a very obvious recent crime scene related to that event. Someone - probably multiple someone's - should already be inbound. They just need to beat this next combat encounter by a more significant margin, and they should be able to capture someone who knows enough to yield a productive interrogation session.

Banking on winning said combat encounter is risky, of course. But then, the Claw probably doesn't realize how much their enemy already knows about them; they don't yet know that Teru is involved, after all. Which...well, see my previous complaints about Teru not taking care to keep himself hidden in the previous episodes. Like I said, this whole Claw plot might be good, but at least some elements of it are a massive retcon.

Anyway, speak of the devil, Tarada and the Pussycats kick the door open right then and loudly challenge the remaining Kageyama brother to come forward.

None of them seem to recognize Teru, interestingly. This could mean that he never tangled with these specific individuals, or it could just be the wig doing him some favors.

Back at the forest base, the Koyama and Glasses are having a rare moment of camaraderie by commiserating about having to work under Tarada. They wonder out loud about his chances of bringing in that crazy powerful psychic boy who was able to stand up again seconds after being hit with Bat Anti-Psionics Spray. On one hand, Tarada isn't as powerful as Koyama. On the other, even Koyama himself is forced to admit that he can be reckless and sloppy, whereas Tarada is a very cautious fighter who always enters a scene prepared for the worst. With that in mind, they decide that Tarada has probably got this; he'll get the drop on the kid and take him out quickly and unglamorously using whatever dirty trick is most expedient. So, all things considered, that kid is going to go through some real torture.

Cut immediately to Tarada being waterboarded.

Hah. The fight wasn't even worth showing onscreen, apparently.

Also, when the camera zooms out, we see that the two flunkies are unconscious, covered in water, and naked (at least one of them *completely* so).

And, as Mob levitates the bucket of hot, soapy water back up around the restrained and dangling-upside-down Tarada's head, Teru asks him if he's sure this is right. Mob tells him, with a cold, blank expression, that he doesn't care.

Holy...fuck.

I was sure (and I'm pretty sure the show expected me to assume) that Teru was going to be the torturer with mob nervously going along with it. Or maybe that Richdude would be the one putting the kids up to it. But no. No, Mob is the one making Teru uncomfortable with his eager embracing of enhanced interrogation techniques.

It even turns out that Tarada has already answered all of their questions. They just aren't sure if he answered them honestly, and Mob's solution was "torture harder."

Okay. Well. That's certainly *a thing.*

On one hand, Mob showing that no, really, he actually does have a serious dark side (and that it has nothing to do with whether he's in glowy-eyed supersaiyan mode) is a pretty effectively chilling reveal that casts everything about him in a different light. On the other...I can't buy Teru getting cold feet at what Mob is doing. Even if Teru has turned a new leaf, he was a sadistic backbreaker and thug just a month ago. Remember how he lost his hair. Unless Mob started, I don't know, cutting people's fingers off or burning their feet with matches, I can't imagine Teru thinking this is anything objectionable, let alone voicing said objections.

I guess I just need to accept that Teru is a completely different character with a completely different background than the one introduced a few episodes ago. And also infer that he still fought Mob, and still lost his hair in that battle, but that it happened for different reasons and played out differently. The details are something I'll just have to best-guess. Annoying.

Anyway, the waterboarding continues. Mob, you're moving in a very bad direction.

We also get some exposition about what the facial scars signify. It's not just a membership tattoo; the claw mark is only given to Claw agents who survive...some kind of duel? I'm not sure, it feels like borked translation. But anyway, Claw members who have the mark have undergone some intense physical conditioning and developed impressive pain tolerance, so torture is probably not quite the best approach here.

Cut back to the Claw facility. The organization's Japanese cell is having a meeting of its upper-echelon members. There are eleven of them, but only seven managed to make it to this meeting, and another two of them (Koyuma and Glasses) arrive late. Tarada, of course, is among the missing; presumably, he thought he'd be able to kill Mob and make it back to HQ in time for no one to be the wiser. Koyuma, Glasses, and the other five Upper Echelon members in attendance start whining and throwing accusations back and forth at each other. Some of these baddies are fairly normal looking, while others continue to make me wonder if Hirohiko Araki actually contributed some character designs to MP100. Most of them have visible scars, but a couple of them don't. This could mean their scars are hidden, or it could mean they don't have them at all. Anyway, they snap at each other like surly children until the Division Leader - a small man in a bodysuit and gas mask that make him look and sound a lot like Team Fortress 2's Pyro - comes in and silences them.

Before beginning the meeting, Ishiguro informs those who deigned to show up that the Claw's supreme leader - I'll just call him Claw Prime for now - will be coming to Japan again soon. He's looking for some hardened, loyal veterans to add to his personal entourage based out of the Claw's global HQ. It's an honor to be given such a reassignment. Too bad that some people have just really badly fucked up and thus probably ruined their chances of being chosen. Ishiguro is addressing this last part to Koyuma, due to his humiliating defeat and failure to eliminate witnesses earlier today, but he's probably referring to the slackers who didn't even deign to come to the meeting as well.

Also, after he's been talking for a little while Ishiguro manages to actually be somewhat intimidating. You'd never expect this, looking at his goofy costume and hearing his squeaky, muffled Pyro voice, but he's got the cold delivery, statue-like posture, and ominous-without-being-cheesy word choices that somehow make it work regardless. Even the squeaky voice eventually starts coming across as uncanny and alien rather than just silly, when you've heard him speak in it for a while. Some really great work from the voice actor for sure; a less talented VA wouldn't have been able to pull this off.

Meanwhile, down in the prison area, some bottom-rung Claw neophytes are trying to sell the captives on joining the Claw.

You know, they should probably at least make a token effort at semi-voluntary recruitment to start with. Eh, maybe they also do that as well, sometimes. Anyway, the Claw noblets do a very bad job of convincing Richguy's noblets to join the cause. I'm guessing these punks are those artificially-induced espers that Teru described. Low status, low power, and mostly very young and brainwashed.

Ritsu backtalks one of them, and he promptly loses his shit. It's not like the adults around this place have much chill either, so it's not surprising that the teenaged cannon fodder would be at least as bad. Before things can get too violent though, one of the Upper Echeloners who's supposed to be at an important meeting right now enters the room and has the mooks stand at attention. This guy is arguably the weirdest looking Claw so far. It's like his neck is four times longer than it should be, and his chin is longer than his neck is, but everything else about his face is close to normal which makes it all look even more fucked up. Anyway, Ritsu and the semi-psychic kids try to convince Chinzilla that this is a misunderstanding, they aren't psychic, please let them go. Chinzilla tells them that he'll make sure they're telling the truth, and then promptly grabs one of the prisoners - the one with the square head who looks like a Minecraft creature - and drags him out of the room.

Tortured screaming comes from the door he dragged him through. Fairly unnerving tortured screaming, honestly. It's rawer than any sound or voice work from this show thus far. And...the visuals go like this:

Let me guess, it's going to be something like Monty Python's soft comfy chair routine, isn't it?

A minute later, after the other captives all panic and try to figure how to help the taken one without showing their powers and giving up the jig, Chinzilla comes back into the prison hall. Carrying Minecraft Kid's bloody corpse, which he throws down onto the floor in front of the jail cell along with the knife he just used.

I waited a little while for the trick, but there isn't one. Minecraft Kid is dead. Chinzilla just stabbed a kid to death and threw his body down in front of his friends, including a literal brother (who looks just like him, but with a round head).

I don't even know what to think about this show's relationship with death as a concept, at this point.

...

I guess this is supposed to be the moment that shows the audience that the shit is finally hitting the fan. That the Claw are extremely, extremely bad people, that the stakes have crossed over into life and death, and that everything we've seen until now was just (extremely) hyperbolic depictions of nonlethal brawls that aren't supposed to have *literally* been as dramatic as they were shown. Or...at least, that they take place in a sort of sublevel of reality where that doesn't count. Sort of like Scott Pilgrim fights, sort of.

I say "supposed to be the moment," because the time to do this was last episode, in the fight with Koyuma in the alley.

We saw Koyuma say in as many words that he'd kill them. The scene took place in an alley full of no-name minor characters who the plot isn't going to need later (or at least, it won't need ALL of them). He went all out in battle, doing things that SHOULD have killed people. It makes no sense for him to have NOT killed anyone in that situation, if the Claw really is murderous. The fact that no one died (or even got too badly hurt, as far as I could tell) took the wind out of those sails immediately and communicated that the Claw was just going to be more hot air and bombast when it comes to stakes.

Now, AFTER that, we have the Claw murdering a kid. At this point, the effect isn't a gut-punch or a rugpull. It just makes me kind of tilt my head at the screen and go "huh?"

...

Chinzilla tells the rest of them that they have until tomorrow to make sure that they really don't have psychic powers after all. They should try to get some though, because if not they'll just end up like Minecraft Steve on the floor there.

Also, we see a close-up of him here, and boy I wasn't kidding when I said Chinzilla looks like something out of a Cronenberg-inspired drug trip.

On that bizarre note, we go to the air about a hundred meters off to the side of the base, where a small car is levitating itself toward the facility.

Looks like Teru and Mob were able to drown the information they needed out of Tarada, despite the latter's supposed conditioning.

More and more, I'm getting the impression that Teru has really been overestimating the Claw's competence and organization. Which makes sense, considering that most of what he "knows" about them was told to him by one of its own agents who was trying to recruit him at the time. He heard a bunch of empty boasting and had no reason to disbelieve it. The Claw is dangerous because they have powerful espers who know how to fight, and that is plenty dangerous on its own, but as an organization they're much too chaotic to ever bring their full force to bear.

And, it looks like they decided the best way to make sure Tarada's intel is good was to drag him along with them.

He's steering, somehow. I guess they're watching his hands on the wheel and adjusting the car's trajectory accordingly, or something. Anyway, they're definitely making it easy for him to lead them into an ambush or alert the facility's defenses or the like. They're stronger than him, but he's much more experienced than them, and has the home ground advantage.

They land the car with a sharp thud, making the airbags pop out, and then leave on food to infiltrate the facility. Leaving Tarada completely conscious, probably within earshot of the place, with his powers available and only his hands tied up.

-_____-

What the fuck did they think would happen lol.

Mob blankly asks Teru if he thinks they should go after him. Teru scratches his chin a bit, and decides that there's no way he'd want to give them more trouble after how badly they beat him before. Mob just kind of shrugs and goes along with that pronouncement.

Okay. Characters being stupid, or child characters being childishly naive? Those can be funny. I can also see Mob with his overly placid attitude *usually* being the butt of this kind of joke. But...right after him going "fuck it, I'm going to torture these guys" though? I don't know. This feels out of order.

Also, what happened to the two flunkies that Tarada had with him and who got tortured before him? Eh, until further notice I'm just going to assume that Mob and Teru cooked and ate them with Richguy before setting out.

Naturally, Tarada starts planning his next attack the instant they turn their backs and start trudging on toward the tower. They're very lucky that he doesn't want to give any of his coworkers a chance to ask them questions, or he'd just alert them right away and bring the entire cell down on Mob and Teru before they even reached the building. As it is, he still thinks he can salvage this situation by killing them and making it look like he rushed out to a heroic one-man defense of the HQ. I'm honestly not sure if he or the boys are being dumber, in this sequence.

It looks like those coherent threads of telekinetic force are a signature Claw technique. Tarada uses them to grab objects and hurl them though, rather than reinforcing his body. How is this any different from just normal TK object-moving? Maybe just more energy efficient. Anyway, it's a flashy, dramatic fight, with some impressive animation for the falling and cracking trees, but also a very short one, ending when Teru distracts the prick and draws his fire while Mob unceremoniously crushes him between a pair of tree trunks. As they look at his (unconscious? dead? I don't know how to gauge what lethal violence looks like) body, Teru muses on the outcome of this experience vs. raw power battle.

To quote a not-especially-wise skeleton, "In any battle, there's always a level of force against which no tactics can succeed."

Back to the captives now. They're huddled around in their prison, wondering if they're better off trying to escape, or submitting to the Claw and allowing themselves to be indoctrinated. Ritsu, for his part, is very much on the side of trying to use their powers to escape, since that way there's maybe at least a slim possibility of freedom rather than complete impossibility.

The boy whose brother got murdered is too traumatized to say or do much of anything, meanwhile, and several others (especially the younger kids) have sort of frozen up or gone into denial. Ritsu isn't sure if he can even get everyone organized to participate in any escape attempt.

Then, suddenly, the round-headed boy turns around and reveals that he wasn't paralyzed with trauma at all. Rather, he was in a trance so that he and his brother, Minecraft Steve, could telepathically communicate. Apparently, Steve saw all of their bloodied corpses and was told that the others all resisted too much, and that the Claw was giving him one last chance himself. Chinzilla apparently has the power to create psionic holograms, or maybe it's more of a hallucination-projection type power. Either way, he didn't actually stab anyone, Minecraft Steve is just locked in another cell.

Okay, I take back what I said before then, I guess. We're just back to square one with death not existing at all. I prefer this, honestly. It's at least consistent and lets me have informed expectations.

He also mentions that it's lucky that Chinzilla happened to grab one of the telepathic brothers for this mind game of his. If he'd taken one of the others, they'd have had no way of seeing through it.

-_____-

Didn't the Claw recover the files on these kids from the Awakening Lab? Don't they know what powers each of them has?

Well, I guess this is what happens when your inner circle are so scatterbrained and petulant that they can't even be trusted to attend mandatory meetings. Chinzilla probably didn't even bother talking to the others before impulsively meandering down to the prisons during meeting-time to bully the new captives.

The Claw is sort of a living corollary to what Teru said a few minutes ago. If you're not smart or disciplined enough to use your power effectively, then in practice you really aren't very powerful at all.

Four thousand words, and only halfway through. Damn, I didn't expect these Mob Psycho reviews to rack up such a word count. I think it's down to the fact that these couple eps have a lot going for them, but also have a lot of missteps due to the awkward plot transition, so there's a lot for me to comment on for both good and ill.

To clarify, my rule used to be that I'd allow myself to split an anime-length episode review if I'd already gotten to 2.5K or so words by the halfway point. With my new drug-induced productivity, I've increased that to 3.5K or so words by the halfway point. So, that's a post.