If there's actually more to it, you'll have to have someone smarter than Leila Hann explain it.

Battleships, but they're schoolgirls. Airplanes, but they're schoolgirls. Endangered animal species, but they're schoolgirls. The human collective unconscious, but it's a schoolgirl.

Today. Right now. Lain.

This Lain vs. Masami arc is fun in a whacky retro-cyberpunk way. It's just also a very far cry from what Serial Experiments Lain seemed to want to be in the first half or so of the series.

Sardonic announcement of the current date and time, followed by mocking laughter.

Analysis for this episode...sorry, I've got nothing.

“I’ll tell you, but it’s just between you and me. I’ll tell you what’s happening in this society, what’s beginning. Just because you don’t know.”

Present day. Present time. Presently starting to make some kind of sense, I hope. Let's go!

It's been a while, but we're now getting back to Lain, or whatever is left of her.

We open on Lain, still crouching over her open Navi and leafing through a computer science textbook as she works. Jury-rigging in the Psyche chip looks like a more difficult process than the imp-kid-thing at Cyberia made it sound.

Last time on Serial Experiments Lane, our heroine or something acting through her diffused a situation with a mad shooter by making him turn the weapon on himself. This episode starts with the police arriving in force at Club Cyberia, where the event took place. Lain's friend helps her out of the club; Lain herself still has a zombie-like expression, and sees like she'd just be standing in place and staring at the wall if she wasn't being walked.

We return to the psychedelic and terrifying near future world of Lain, a teenaged girl who is either being haunted by some kind of cyberspace ghost creature that claims to be a dead acquaintance of hers, or simply going insane. When we last saw her, she had just come face to face with the apparition on her way home from school. Begin.