Texhnolyze S1E3: “Texhnophile”

A "texhnophile" is presumably either someone who has a fascination with cybernetics, or someone who is sexually attracted to cyborgs. Granted, there's going to be a ton of overlap between those demographics. And, just going by the expression on her face that this episode opens with as she picks up her surgical tools, the doctor lady who found Tachat is probably in the dead center of that Venn diagram.

Then there's a flashback, at least I think it is. Prophecy is a concept that's been introduced into this story, but this seems...okay, yep, that's definitely Tachat as a kid, this is a memory. The visuals are confusing, but it looks like he and his mother saw his father being publicly executed or something. Then they visit his body in a morgue? I think? Like I said, the visuals are confusing. Also, Tachat is finally named! Ichise. Interesting name. The memory ends with a montage of more recent events, ending with the doctor standing over his unconscious body in her sterile white operating room.

There are some visual connections being drawn between the doctor and the mob lady who did this to him. Which might be fair, considering that they both appear to work for the same organization. The doc might be saving his life, but everything about her presentation in this sequence suggests that it's not for good reasons, and that Ichise probably isn't going to like what she plans to use him for.

Cut back to Ran and Yoshii riding the train into Lukuss City. The train appears to be mostly deserted. Kinda surprising; I'd have assumed that this was a "we don't run the trains unless we can break even" sort of society, given everything else. Then again, given the run-down advanced tech aesthetic, it could be that this train is fully automated and has been running on its own for decades while slowly, gradually breaking down. Anyway, Yoshii asks her a series of questions about whether it's safe for her to go alone into the city, what her "flower" business is really about, what she and her grandfather do with the money, how her prophecy ability works, etc. She answers all these questions in her characteristic manner, ie sitting completely still and staring at him without making a sound.

Finally, he asks her if she's seen his future, and she responds by saying that she only sees possible futures. Which confirms that she's seen something about him, at least. Anyway, he tells her that if she sees anything ahead of him, he would prefer it if she avoided telling anyone. Including himself. Interesting. Either due to secret mission stuff that he's afraid of getting revealed, or for more philosophical or metaphysical reasons. She agrees to that, though I doubt she'll stay true to her word if she sees a future of his that also effects her own family.

Also, how far in the future can she see? I suppose at least a day or so, considering that no one seemed to send or invite her to the train station to pick Yoshii up but she clearly had reasons for doing so. She witnessed the possible future of him saving her grandfather's life, perhaps? Maybe. Too many unknowns to make an educated guess about what she was going on, at this point.

Back to the lab. Ichise regains enough consciousness to be able to see Doc taking a lunch break...um, Doc? I'm not sure you should be doing this in the damned operating room.

No mask. No gloves. Just eating her steak right there in the same room as the cot he's hooked up to a respirator on. Either antibiotic tech has advanced to the point where this isn't an issue, or she's being damned reckless.

Also...she appears to be drinking out of a graduated lab flask. And the stuff she's drinking is dark red, to go with the uncomfortably rare-looking steak.

Is she drinking his blood? And...possibly eating his damned flesh too?

Or is he just hallucinating these details? That could work. Visual metaphor for her exploiting him, enabled by his delirium. Or else she's literally a cannibal. Either way, it's a big WTF.

Seeing her launches another jumbled flashback sequence. It looks like Ichise's mother also died when he was young. Or young-ish, at least, he does appear a bit older than in the previous memory. Not clear what killed her, there's no murder/execution scene like we got for what I think was his father. Also, that mezuzah case appears prominently at the end of this flashback montage, and in some close-up shots it appears that it is actually some kind of high tech containment cell with a tiny biological sample suspended inside. Like a little lump of flesh. There's a visual connection being drawn between it and his parents, but it's not clear what. Some secret experiment they stole? The zygote of his baby sibling that he removed from his mom when she died and has been looking for a surrogate for? No idea. Anyway, it apparently has sentimental value on top of whatever practical value.

Back to the present. Yoshii and Ran are still mostly-silently riding the train. Doc is prepping some textomexticus prosthetics to attach to Ichise. She gets that creepy smile again after making the final calibrations. Ichise's respirator has been removed, which I guess is a good sign for his recovery, probably. With his throat free, he's able to speak now, and musters enough strength to just barely, weakly, hoarsely ask for water.

I think those are the first words he's actually spoken aloud so far. Even by this show's taciturn standards, Ichise has been awfully silent. Though, I guess most of his scenes since the extra-silent pilot have been him struggling by himself to stay alive, so that might be less a matter of characterization and more one of circumstances.

Doc doesn't seem to hear him at first. When he manages to repeat it louder, she turns around, glares at him as if he's insulted her, and demands that he say please.

...okay, maybe she was just ignoring him at first until his voice got too annoying for her. The bedside manner on this lady, I tell you. What, is she going to go through all this trouble to save him and not make sure he doesn't dehydrate? Then again, she was eating rare stake (at best...) in the damned operating room, so who knows.

He says please. She glares at him for five seconds before very slowly making her way over to a cabinet to get a bottle of distilled water. At least, I hope it's distilled water. At this point I wouldn't be all that surprised if she just poured a bottle of bleach down his throat. It IS just water, it turns out, but he seems less than sure of it himself after she glowers down at him and literally overturns the bottle a couple of feet above his face.

Most of it gets in his mouth, but the rest just splashes all over his face and head. She keeps pouring until there's nothing left. And yeah, from how she did this he had every reason to think she was about to dump hydrogen peroxide on his face, and I get the impression she WANTED him to fear that. Trying to break him with a mixture of threats, trauma, and mercy. Or else just being pointlessly sadistic.

Also, she throws the empty bottle on the floor. Holy fuck, who's been keeping this room clean and organized for her? She obviously hasn't been doing it herself.

She turns away and gets back to work on the prosthetics without another word for him. She doesn't even turn around when she hears him fall off the cot onto the floor after trying to sit up.

It's only when he starts trying to drag himself toward the door that she speaks up, irritably asking him where the hell he thinks he's going. When he doesn't know what to tell her, she...

Holy.

The fuck.

But.

She just fishes his organic limbs out of the tank of preservatives she apparently had them in and throws them on the floor in front of him.

I...well, true, he did have them with him on a string when she found him. And I...guess?...she might have used them to model his axolotl prosthetics to size or something. And I guuuueeess she might have thrown the originals on the floor just now to illustrate some kind of point about how badly off he is without her, or something. The issue of cleanliness and sterility is just getting more and more WTF though.

...it occurs to me that women in this world are just insane. Ran is the most well-adjusted female character by far, and she's not exactly neurotypical even if she has psychic powers to blame this on. I guess Ichise's mom hasn't done anything obviously crazy, but we've only seen brief glimpses of her in retrospect so who knows.

At least Doc put on gloves before fishing the decayed, formaldehyde-filled body parts out. I seriously wasn't expecting her to at this point.

Cut briefly to the big boss, who gets a phone call in his office. He answers the phone with name "Onishi," which I guess is probably his own, but could also be the name of the person who he expects to be calling. Whoever is on the other end hangs up on him as soon as they hear his voice, though, leaving the bossman looking uneasy.

Something to do with the Salvation Union, perhaps? Probably. The only other moving part he's not in control of in this story so far is Yoshii, and Yoshii hasn't done much yet, so whatever just happened is likely Union-related.

Back to the lab. Doc asks Ichise why he even tied his limbs to himself and dragged them along with him like that. It's not like there was any hope of reattaching them after they'd been exposed to the elements for more than an hour or two. Not even "Raffia" can salvage tissues that have had that much time to decay. Raffia? Is that a person? A legendary doctor? Maybe they have a healing power, similar to Ran's precognition? Or is it another oddly-named piece of biomedical technology?

As the doc smugs down at him, Ichise surprises her by grabbing the wheeled gurney he'd been laying on with his remaining arm and flinging it right into her midsection. He might be weakened in his current state, but Ichise is still an accomplished MMA fighter, and he has enough muscle power to do some good damage. Doc screams in shock as the gurney knocks her over, bringing her low enough to the ground for Ichise to get his hand around her throat and slam her to the floor under him.

Bedside manner. Bedside manner. There's a reason they teach that shit in medical school, Doc. This is your own damned fault for partying your way through college.

As he throttles her, pinning her with his body weight for want of another limb to push down with, Ichise demands that she tells him about...Raffia? Wait, is that a person or...oh, I see. She tells him that "it's right over there" and gestures with her head toward one of the desks along the wall. He looks in that direction, and sees his mezuzah case sampler thing. It looks like she has it opened up, which probably means the sample has been removed.

Hmm. So, either "raffia" is that container, or it's the tissue sample that it was storing. I thiiiink the former? It doesn't *look* like scifi supertech, but it still could be. And, if raffia has something to do with tissue preservation or restoration, that would explain why he's been keeping that little chunk of flesh in it for all these years. Keeping the cells alive, or at least preventing decay.

Alternatively, it's the flesh itself that is the "raffia," and it's some kind of magic super stem cell or the like. That makes less sense as a momento of his parents though, so yeah, I'm leaning toward the container being the raffia. Preserving a living tissue sample of his mother for the last decade, so he can have something of her living on with him.=

The sad sax continues as we cut away from Ichise and Doc and return to Yoshii and Ran finally arriving at the station. It's hard to tell what time of day it is at this point, but in any case it seems to have been a long ride. The city looked pretty close to their starting point, but given how poorly maintained that train line appears to be I'm not surprised that it's slow moving. Yoshii watches steam erupt out of a breach in the side of a train car's underbelly. Ran just stands in place on the platform, putting her kitty mask back on. Then, it's on to the boss man (Onishi?) as he gets out of his car to confront a lone gunman who looks similar to the one who attacked Wrinkly.

I'm assuming Onishi's presence here, on this street where his car is being ambushed, somehow followed from the mysterious phone call earlier.

Anyway, as Onishi gets out of the car and approaches the gunman, the latter just trembles. Even though Onishi doesn't seem to have drawn a weapon of his own, and there aren't any other Organo soldiers in sight. I get the impression that the gunman either didn't realize that Onishi himself would be in this car and doesn't know what to do when faced with this high-profile a target, or he did know but only very recently learned through experience that Onishi is bulletproof or something.

Onishi asks the attacker if he really thinks the Salvation Union has a hope of replacing the Organo as the ruling power of the city. The man just keeps trembling and falling back. Then, as he slowly advances on him, Onishi tells the man that the Union's leader, the anti-transhumanist preacher Kimata, is a secret full-body cyborg himself.

He also claims that all that Kimata wants is the raffia, which...how rare and valuable is this stuff, exactly? I'm getting mixed signals.

The Union soldier is too scared shitless to reply, so I don't know if he believes what Onishi is saying or not. As the action-y Flemenco strings start to take over from the sax, the cultist just babbles the mantra "Soul, body, truth" and fires his gun. There's a discretion shot as the camera flashes to Onishi's chauffeur flinching from the sight, so it's not clear if the cultist shot at Onishi or himself. When the camera cuts back to him though, we see that while he tried to shoot Onishi, he was far from successful in doing so.

Onishi was still a good fifteen or twenty feet away when last we saw him. It appears that high-end ixixichitl limbs let you move damned fast, regardless of whether or not they also come with reinforced bulletproof skin in Onishi's case.

After grabbing the would-be assassin, Onishi remembers that the Union playbook for assassinating combat-capable targets involves sending two shooters; one to bait the target out, and the second to make the killing shot if the first fails. Sure enough, he spots the other shooter coming around the corner behind him at the last second, and raises the first one off the ground to use as a human shield. He blocks the shots (killing Union assassin #1 in the process) and then kills #2 with his companion's own handgun.

The action sequence is slowed down for the audience's benefit, but it's pretty well implied that Onishi grabbing the first shooter, using him to block the second's shots, and then grabbing the gun and using it back all happened in less than a second. It's a pretty effective demonstration of what high quality tezcatlipoca can do when paired with the mind of an experienced, ruthless combatant.

He looks down at his leg, and his HUD highlights a glancing bullet mark. Annoying. He just had those legs worked on.

It's not clear if he got hit by the first gunman's shot as he grabbed his wrist, or if one of the second's got passed the human shield. Either way, just a minor inconvenience to the Organo leader, at the cost of two loyal Union soldiers. The SU has not been getting many W's in the last few days.

Back to the Doc's lab, where she's giving Ichise an elevator speech. It would probably be a lot easier for her to pitch this if she hadn't been such a jerk, but better late than never I guess.

She's doing something new and different with him, I guess?

She goes on about how using teotihuacan and raffia only allow you to restore or preserve the human form, not to explore beyond it. What she's doing with him here is apparently something that crosses that line. She also believes it was destiny that she stumbled on someone with all the ingredients she needed for her experiment onhand, no pun intended. One of those ingrediants apparently was raffia. Or...the flesh contained in the raffia?

Wait, no. He at first denies having anything to do with raffia, but in response to her smug smile he almost immediately breaks down and demands to know what she did with it. She says that the raffia itself is something she took from that container for use. So, raffias are human stem cell cultures? Or something? I don't know. Normal muscle tissue samples or whatever isn't going to do anything special when it comes to medicine, so raffia cultures must be something more specific than that. Maybe it's some sort of magic symbiotic organism that lives in the bodies of underground humans. No clue.

Well, anyway. She says that tissue samples like this one are often carried to memorialize the dead from families too poor to afford even cheap cemetery burials. He asks her what the hell she did with it. She asks if it came from a wife, or a girlfriend, or a child. He asks her again what she did with it. Finally, she tells him that she grew it into a system of organic circuitry integrated into the new quetzalcoatlus arm and leg. It should be far more efficient than the usual synthetic nerves that she's had to use until now. Ichise's prosthetics are the prototypes for an entire new era of biomechanical technology.

She condescendingly tells him that preserving a few cells of the dead is a primitive, superstitious practice. It's not like those cells have anything of their donor's personhood left in them; they really might just as well have come from anyone at this point.

...wait, why didn't she just use some of his own cells for this, then?

Or...do only certain people have raffia in them? Or, maybe the cells were infused with raffia, allowing them to continue living inside of that container for years without sustainance? I guess a tiny dose of raffia is something that even a family as poor as Ichise's could afford, then? But...also expensive enough that she'd rather not use any of her own supply?

Yeah, I feel like something is being lost in translation here. Maybe I should watch the dub of this scene as well and see if it's down to clumsy subtitle work.

While Ichise is paralyzed in wide-eyed horror at what she just said, she grabs the water bottle she dropped earlier and smashes it into the side of his head. I thought it was plastic at first, but no, it's a metal flask. It hits him hard enough to knock him off of her, and it takes him a while to get back up.

Long, slow, moody montage of Lukuss City. Eventually we triangulate Yoshii, standing in a more elegant-looking neighborhood of the run down city. A car containing...either overboss Onisha, or underboss Aida, the window is sort of blurred so I can't tell which of them...drives passed. Probably Onisha I guess, since we did see him riding in a car just a scene ago. Yoshii watches the car pass by, and keeps his eyes locked on the passenger. He has a faint, knowing smile on his face.

Looks like he's found the person he came down here looking for. Or at least, one of the people. We don't know what his mission is exactly, but clearly it involves one or more of Lukuss' powerbrokers.

Back in the lab, Ichise tells Doc that he's leaving. He doesn't need those limbs, and he doesn't want anything from her. She tells him that she won't try to stop him, but if he leaves then the biomech limbs will eventually die without a body to attach to. In that case, he'll be responsible for killing his own mother. Does he really want to keep living with that on his conscience?

Holy fuck what a bitch.

Ichise agrees with me in this assessment, and launches himself at her in an extremely violent one-legged hop. It looks like he's coming at her with killing intent this time, and even with all her limbs she's clearly not a very fit or agile person, because she's not able to get out of the way in time. Just as she thinks she's regretting her interpretation of the Hippocratic oath for the last time, a shadowy figure leaps into the room and - for the second time in as many days - intercepts Ichise with a sword before he can punch a crazy psycho lady to death. Though fortunately for him, it's just with the flat of the blade this time.

Onishi had just been coming back here to have the Doc touch up his new leg that he got banged up already. If my experience with anime has taught me anything, it's that she will angrily beat him over the head with a wrench before complying. Anyway, Onishi scolds her for making a pet project out of this random schmuck who made the mistake of angering one of his lieutenants, and tells her that he might not happen to arrive just in time to bail her out next time. She bristles at this, but obviously can't argue.

When he gives her her new project to (re)do, she puts on a compliant smile and gets to it, while avoiding answering his questions about whether she's going to keep Ichise around. I'd suspect that she's thinking about repurposing Ichise's new biomech limbs for Onishi's use, but she explained earlier that meklekgolo limbs need to be custom-fitted to each recipient, so it's probably too late for that. Anyway, the episode ends with Ichise still unconscious on the floor as his "savior" defers to the man who left him for dead in an alley.


I'm fully invested at this point! I still feel like the overly slow pacing of the show makes it hard to get through, and that the minimalist dialogue obscures what's going on to a degree that isn't worth the stylistic benefits, but I think I'm over the main hump. The only really serious comprehension issue left is what "raffia" is exactly, and I suspect that that's down to a localization error rather than the work itself.

The whole thing with the world constantly shitting on Ichise is poignant for now, since the story's setting contextualizes it in a convincing way. He's on the wrong side of the mob, in a city run by the mob, and his unhappy life story up until then explains how he might have ended up in that situation to begin with (an orphan having to turn to semi-criminal arena fighting to get by is certainly plausible). Still, it's going to get tropey and comical if it isn't mitigated soon. It hasn't yet, but it could.

The gang/cult politics seem plausible and interesting enough. Not sure what's going on with Ran's family and Yoshii's mission yet, and they kind of took a backseat in this episode anyway, but I'm fairly interested to find out.

Honestly, the weakest part of this show for me is how hard it leans on its aesthetics and style. I don't *dislike* the vibe it goes for, but the show spends way too much time setting the vibe with long silent shots, scenery montages, etc without doing much else, and I find the story more engaging than the scenery.​