Serial Experiments Lain E13: “Ego”

Alright. It's been a long time, but it's time for me to finish this thrilling installment in the Spirit Science Cinematic Universe. Last episode ended with the Jungian collective hivemind internet god known as Lain killing the guy who was trying to control her in a weird and hard to understand way, and hugging her school friend Arisu. Now let's see what happens.


In lieu of the usual opening, we start with staticy footage of Lain looking directly at the camera and claiming that "I'm confused again." I guess she really is the collective unconscious, because she knew exactly what I'm feeling. She starts asking herself questions about her own existence, and how distinct "she" is from any of her billions of hosts.

In particular, she's wondering who is doing the talking right now as she speaks to herself, if she's really just a virtual entity made of humanity. Well...Dr. Masami DID create a physical body for her, right? Presumably using enslaved psychic kids in hamster wheels to generate one out of the ether, as she later did back to him?

I should stop trying to understand what's going on in this show...but then what would I even have to talk about? I spent the first couple episodes praising the art, direction, and atmosphere through the roof, and those are all still top notch, but I can't just do that for 13 whole episodes when a story is ostensibly trying to tell itself. Especially given the long dialogue and monologue sequences that have become more common in the later half of the series.

Roll OP. It's kind of sad that the intro song and sequence are the most enjoyable part of the show for me at this point, but here we are. Afterward, we repeat the last couple minutes of the previous episode, with Lain crushing Dr. Masami to death while he makes constipated Dragon Ball Z villain noises. Once he's dead, at least locally/temporarily, Arisu screams and cries louder. Lain tries to calm her down, but Arisu just slaps her across the face and recoils back. Her fingernails must be pretty long, because that slap somehow drew blood from Lain's cheek. Arisu then either faints or dies, and Lain embraces her limp body and calls out her name while bemoaning how every time she tries to help Arisu she just makes things worse for her.

Bullshit. Lain didn't have to pick a fight with Masami right at that moment, and she didn't do it to help Arisu. True, he was trying to get her to do some brain fuckery to Arisu, and saying he would "debug" her for her hesitation to comply, but considering how little power he actually seems to have had over her I'm not sure what the risk really was.

Lain resigns herself to an unspoken decision, and then a bunch of text fills the screen talking about a "reset."

Oh god, please tell me we're not going to do a "the timeline resets with everything changed for the better" ending? I don't know why anime is in love with that lazy cop-out deus ex machina of an ending, but I've seen it too many times now, and OH FUCKING HELL HERE COMES THE REWINDING MONTAGE IT'S DOING IT.

The rewinding sequence completes itself. Then we pan over an even more distorted than usual version of the familiar street.

The Iwakura front door opens into the glaring white void, but the camera cuts away before anyone can step outside through it. Cut to the family having breakfast, with a close-up shot of a half full glass of MILK included. We don't see the drinker of the milk, but the voice doesn't quite sound like Lain, and it's talking about being on a diet, so I think its her sister restored to non-modem-ness. Sister gets up early from the table without the camera ever showing her, though, so maybe that actually was Lain? IDK. Mystery Daughter leaves her half-eaten breakfast on the table, and the parents keep doing their thing.

The dad gets up, and starts to say something, but doesn't seem to be sure about what. He looks across the table at a conspicuously empty fourth seat with nothing in front of it, as if trying to remember why it's there.

It's the Madoka ending, isn't it? She deleted herself from everyone's memories and adjusted reality around herself never having existed besides one or two people close to her having inexplicable little vestiges, and maybe Arisu as the lone witness a la Homura?

Well, more like Madoka has the Lain ending, of course, given how much earlier SEL was. In any case, I didn't find this satisfying at the end of PMMM, and I doubt it's going to impress me any more here.

The father (and mother, who had been asking him what was up) forget about the momentary weirdness. Back on the outside of the house, their door is still hanging open with no one coming in or out. There's a short montage of no one walking down the street, no one standing in Lane's customary spot on the bus she used to take, and a bunch of students who aren't Lain entering the school. The camera pans up to the telephone wires overhead, and a laid-back, but sort of haunting, guitar song starts playing.

Next, we see Arisu walking toward the building, looking dazed and lost, until she's approached by those two NPC girls. They ask her if she wants to go to Cyberia again tonight. Arisu agrees, and says that she'll text "her" and ask her if she wants to come. The other two have no idea who Arisu is talking about, and Arisu is surprised at this.

Okay, yeah, this is what Madoka Magica stole its disappointing ending from. Only it's even limper in this older case, because Homura and Madoka's relationship got a hell of a lot more emphasis placed on it than Arisu and Lain's. And like, Homura understood what was going on well enough to actually be able to feel something about what happened, as opposed to Arisu being every bit as baffled as the audience.

The other two decide that she must be talking about Chisa, who they dragged to Cyberia with them once. They don't want to bring her again though, she's kind of a wet blanket.

Arisu opens her phone, and confirms that her contacts and call/messaging history are all completely devoid of Lain.

...wait hold on a second WHAT THE...

"Alice."

Her name this whole time was supposed to be "Alice."

They gave this Japanese teenager (who explicitly lives in fucking Tokyo, and even looks more ethnically Japanese than most of the other characters. No anime hair colors or anything) the name Alice, just so that they could mispronounce it?

Why.

The other girls start asking Alicerisu if she's okay. After a moment, Alicerisu mutters "oh, I get it..." and starts smiling. She then tells the others that if you don't remember something, it never happened, and that if no one remembers you you no longer exist.

Insightful, Alicerisu! That explains why the rest of the universe never existed until we invented the telescope. And proposes a mechanism for how paleontologists and archaeologists are always conjuring ancient remains out of bare stone! Man, some of those guys must have really strong imaginations, with how much detail they dreamed up so quickly!

The other two ask her who she's talking about. Alicerisu answers "Like I said, no one!" Okay, but like...even if reality worked that way, doesn't Alicerisu still remember her? Doesn't that mean...oh whatever, nothing actually means anything, let's just move on.

The elf kids are out on the street during school hours, probably looking for lost pets to eat, when the creeper one sees a brief apparition of Lain on his tablet screen. The others ask him what the hell that was, and he looks kind of dazed for a moment, until an older boy who...I know we've seen this character before, but I can't recall where. Maybe he was the Cyberia DJ, or the deliveryman?...stops beside them and complements Creeper on his tricked out tablet. Okay, sure. Creeper separates from the others and walks off alone, and is passed by by a bitter, egomaniacal salaryman on his way to work.

Hilariously, Masami's gigantic fucked up mouth and angry Fischer Price eyes seem to actually be his natural features. I'd been assuming those were just to make his Wired avatar look more unsettling and inhuman, but no, aside from those red marks on his cheeks that's what he actually looked like. I don't know if this is as funny to anyone else as it is to me, but...god, just this random supervillain-looking mutant fucker living a mundane life and going to work alongside more normally drawn characters tickles my funnybone something fierce.

Masami moves along, rambling about how nobody appreciates his brilliant intellect and they all call him mad etc, when he sees a couple of civil technicians wearing hardhats and goggles working on a telephone pole.

I guess they're alive again, and now working in urban maintenance instead of muddled cyberpunk black ops. Sure, why not. Also, there's some graffiti art on the wall behind them that includes a Lain-like figure silhouetted against the sun, because she appeared to a drugged out street artist in a dream or whatever.

Then we get the "present day, present time" intro, and Lain is in the ghostly virtual version of...you know what, here, I'll just tell the rest of the story in images.

Text summary: Lain has an inane conversation with herself about the Wired connecting to some magical dimension beyond merely the human collective unconscious, argues with herself about which world she wants to live in, is taken into a heavenly realm by her father and/or a capital G God who's portrayed as her father, and then has a brief, ghostly meeting with a college-aged Arisu who she promises she'll see again. Also some random talk about how Lain isn't needed anymore because the "dead people leaking out into the Wired" problem has been solved, somehow, somewhy, and about how humanity's collective memory goes both ways in time. The end.


I compared the final episode to Madoka Magika, but there's a much better analogy for the series as a whole. I've seen Serial Experiments Lain described as "Lynchian," and I'll take that further and compare it directly to Twin Peaks.

Episodes 1-7 or so are like Twin Peaks' first one and a half seasons. Some of the best television I've ever seen, perfectly balancing realism with surrealism, richly atmospheric and with a very powerful emotional core and thrilling mystery.

Episodes 8-13 are like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. An overcomplicated, obtuse-for-the-sake-of-obtuseness clown car of arcane ideas that expands things that didn't need expanding in the weirdest and dumbest directions, to the point where the human core of the story is buried and gone.

The rumor arc with Arisu is like the latter half of Twin Peaks' second season (besides the finale). Just trash.

I haven't seen the new Twin Peaks sequel series yet, so I can't make any comparisons with that. But yeah, Serial Experiments Lain attracts comparison with both the best and the worst of David Lynch's work.

Maybe I have a lower appreciation for "art film" type productions than most. I can appreciate things that prioritize atmosphere, themes, or symbolism over telling a coherent story, but only if that subtextual message is pretty clear (or if its short enough for the style alone to wow me for the duration). What is Serial Experiments Lain's message? What themes is it exploring? The first half seemed like it was about the intersection of social negligence, mental illness, and the internet, with particular warnings about web-based identities and "reality bubbles." For a show made in the late nineties, that stuff was prescient as hell, and the archaic (and therefore distant) approximation of what are not modern problems made the point clearer if anything. But what was being said in the later episodes? What were they "about?" I don't know. Maybe people who "get" abstract art more than I do could tell you, but I can't.

I've watched a couple of the youtube videos claiming to explain the meaning behind Lain, but they all ended up being people just comparing random details of certain episodes to the ideas of various philosophers, with nothing like a thesis or even a continuous theme. Maybe I just watched the wrong videos.

So, what do I have to say about SEL in the end? Nothing. Just as I feel like it, taken as a whole, has little to nothing of its own to say under the intellectual wheel-spinning. If there's actually more to it, you'll have to have someone smarter than Leila Hann explain it.