Texhnolyze S1E9: “Wiggle”

This one picks up right where the previous episode left off, with Shinji chasing after the car with Onishi, Ichise, and whatsername in it. He still seems to be sure that Onishi is behind the bombing of his gang's hideout. He doesn't chase them for far before some surviving Unionists catch up with him, and he's forced to cut them down. Shinji hastily summons his surviving men and has them get in their vehicles to try to chase Onishi down, but the target slips through their (and also the Union's? I think?) grasp in a short, but intense and bloody, chase sequence.

The episode title then drops in a spooky wavy font without a dedicated background as we fade from a frustrated Shinji to a high rise apartment where Yoshii is lurking. It looks like he's kneeling at a window, and a second later we see why:

It's not just the other gangs gunning for Onishi.

It's not even just the other gangs AND other factions of his own gang who are gunning for him, for that matter. It's been heavily foreshadowed enough at this point that I'll be surprised if the Organo lieutenants don't make an attempt of their own in the next few eps.

Fortunately, either acting on razor-sharp intuition or just by fortunate coincidence, Onishi has the driver lady turn a sharp corner just as Yoshii's about to fire. Yoshii blows out their back window, but doesn't hit anyone, and they quickly leave his line of sight. Yoshii gives Onishi a reluctant smile for being worthy prey as the camera backs away and ominous music plays, signifying that Yoshii will keep attempting this until he (or someone else) succeeds.

Quick cut to the car again. Ichise is asleep in the back seat, which prompts Onishi to marvel at how placid and at peace he seems. Um...kind of reading a lot into a little there, Onishi. Pretty sure the guy is just exhausted. He tells the driver lady to bring Ichise to her apartment and let him rest and hide there until further notice.

...she's going to rape him, isn't she? Fucking hell, I'll bet she's going to rape him.

Just to emphasize my point about Ichise's track record with female characters who have any sort of power over him, we then jump over to Doc.

She's watching what looks like a GPS dot. I'm guessing it's something she planted on either Ichise or Onishi during their latest tampax overhauls. She smiles a little as she watches this, and takes a sip from her lab beaker of...you know what, fuckit, I'm not giving these characters the benefit of the doubt anymore, it's blood. She takes a sip from her beaker of human blood.

We briefly cut to some Organo bigwig conspiring with someone else on the phone about Onishi's recent actions and cackling about how all is according to keikaku. I suspect that the person on the other end is Yoshii, but I could be wrong.

Next we go to...someone? somewhere? Outside huddled against a building, hooded and partially masked.

I think it might be that Tatsuya guy again, but I'm not sure. Anyway, someone tosses him a coin as they walk passed. Seeming to take this as a signal of some kind, he stands up and drops an ominous-looking large bag he had on the pavement beside him into a sewer opening. An upward panning shot then reveals that this sewer opening is near the base of that giant obelisk that's been looming in the background all season.

For a second, it looks like we're about to cut to inside of that obelisk and learn something about it, but no. Instead, this is followed by more depressing urban aesthetic, and then Onishi and whatsername in the car with a sleeping Ichise and Onishi thinking he hears something. Then some Organo people talking about how they discovered something involving "the obelisk" and "the dig site" and that they can now attempt to perform "the restoration." This prompts a meeting of the non-Onishi bigwigs to be called, and they finally decide they've had enough of him.

One of said bigwigs - the youngest-looking among them - turns out to still be loyal though. He calls Onishi and informs him of this development. No visible cell phone, but the way the scenes are cut together makes it look like that's what happened. Probably a built-in communication device using Onishi's cybernetics. Which means he was probably just carrying on a conversation with that informant when he said "I think I heard something." I guess. It's pretty confusing.

They reach whatsername's apartment and...um...put?...Ichise onto the couch to sleep. Did they physically carry him there from the car without him waking up? Did he wake up briefly to walk with them? Who knows. Onishi then says he's going to the office to try and sort out this planned coup by his underlings, leaving her alone with the sleeping Ichise.

She starts taking off her coat. Under which she appears to have nothing on besides a bra and some bandages around a torso wound.

Of course.

-___-

Please stop raping Ichise.

A bunch of stuff that I don't understand happens. There's the Organo guys doing some cackling, while at a...pit? that one of them wants to turn into a koi pond? And then there's either an explosion or a bunch of fighting or something before we return to Onishi on his way to reassert his leadership.

On his way to the office, Onishi is intercepted by his informant guy, who warns him against going forward. No more telecommunication, I guess? Or did that never exist in the first place?

The dig site has been vandalized, he says. I'm guessing that's the pit that the one guy wanted to turn into a fishpond and may have also gotten blown up. Then, there's also something about "The People on the Hill" coming down to make their displeasure with Onishi known.

Wait. One of those Organo conspiring scenes looked like it was at a different location. And there was a brief look at the building up on the hill near the city that I thoooought was Doc's lab right before then. So maybe there were two evil conference chamber scenes, one of the Organo and one of the Hill People? They were all just a bunch of wrinkly middle-aged-or-older guys in suits, and none of them have made individual impressions on me so far, so I wouldn't have noticed they weren't the same group.

Well, if that's the Hill People base that the Doc was returning to that one time and not an Organo HQ, then...hmm. Maybe this has to do with that "Class" that Yoshii rambled about way back in the early episode? The ones who spend most of their time in a virtual world, possibly the same one as the surface-dwellers?

iuno

They say some more stuff that I completely cannot understand, and then the informant asks Onishi if he wants him to investigate the outside instigator that he thinks is behind the recent gang war. Then it jumps ahead a few seconds to him leaving, so that we don't get to hear Onishi's answer, because fuck me I guess.

Onishi runs into a nearby bar and borrows their phone, which he uses to call home. Oh, right, he has a wife. I think we've seen her sitting/laying around in the background in some of his office scenes. She answers, and he tells her to run away immediately. She doesn't answer, though. Just sits there smiling placidly. Then Yoshii, who is holding her at gunpoint, takes the phone.

He taunts Onishi about how *everyone* is going to be joining this party, he and his wife included. His voice is far less calm than in previous conversations, with Onishi or with anyone else for that matter. It's taken on a sing-song Joker sort of quality, and he breathily drags out some syllables. Either he's just progressively cutting loose and letting the mask off, or he just reeeeeaally has it in for Onishi.

While Onishi is demanding to know what's going on, Yoshii stupidly takes his attention away from her while taunting him, giving her a chance to grab a pair of scissors and stab him with them.

For the first time ever, Yoshii's face contorts into something like rage. Onishi's wife, Mana, looks catatonic again after she stabs him.

It almost reminds me of that zombie-like grin that came over Ichise before he set off the battle by attacking Shinji. Or, again, the first lady who raped him and then went eye-stabey. Some kind of force controlling multiple people? Hacking their tortilla and puppetting them through it? We don't know if Onishi's wife is tortilla, but she might be.

Whether or not she just did that of her own volition, a few seconds later Yoshii kicks her with his augmented cyberleg hard enough to send her flying across the room and smash into a wall before crumpling, leaving a trail of blood above herself. Either a back injury, or a head injury. Hopefully her brain is as indestructible as Ichise's.

Four guards come in and try to shoot Yoshii, but he dodges behind some furniture and...somehow...gets to some flour bags, throws them into the air, and shoots them without giving away his position at any point in that process. While the four guards are blinded by the flour cloud, Yoshii (who I guess can see fine because of his tachikoma eyes or whatever) shoots all of them.

And then tortures one of them who didn't immediately die by planting more bullets in nonvital spots, stepping on him, and asking him questions he can't answer.

By the time Onishi can run over there, Yoshii is long gone. And it appears that his wife was in fact killed by the cyborg mega-kick against the wall. Onishi is not having a good day.

...or maybe not? Next thing we know, Onishi has brought his wife to an apartment somewhere, and is tucking her into bed, cleaning the blood off her face, and trying to cool her concussion with icewater. So, maybe she's not actually dead? Or, she's dead, but he's in denial?

As he tends to her in a fairly heartbreaking scene, the phone rings. Picking it up, Onishi hears his informant guy. He tells him he thinks he's identified the instigator, and that he was in contact with the Racan shortly before the incidents.

Onishi puts this together with Shinji's determined attempt to kill him, and figures that Shinji is either in on it himself or has been fed false information by the instigator. Onishi thanks him for the information, and then has a little frustrated freakout where he breaks the phone. Understandable tbh.

Meanwhile, Ran leads her new adoptee Tatsuya through the nighttime streets. As is often the way with her, she leads her companion straight into Yoshii. I'm not sure if she's doing this on purpose or not, but given her precognition it's a definite possibility.

Tatsuya asks Yoshii if he's going to kill him now, and Yoshii just smiles and says that no, Tatsuya isn't going to get off of Mr. Bones' Wild Ride until it's over. He then kneels down in front of Ran and sort of strokes her head while giving a villain speech.

He explains that he's baiting the People On the Hill out, and ensuring that the people of Lukuss develop the will to power that their apathy and stasis up until now has dampened. Which um...is either completely delusional, or (more likely) a shallow justification for his sadistic rampage. There's plenty of struggle in Lukuss, as evidenced by people like Ichise and the other downtrodden who struggle for survival under the kleptocracy. And hell, it doesn't seem to have been more than a decade or two ago at most that the Organo rose to dominance via brute force and terror. That's not very long for any regime to last.

So yeah, Yoshii's just disingenuously sucking his own dick here.

When Tatsuya tells him that he can't believe Yoshii actually received orders like this, Yoshii says that he's not taking orders "anymore." Implying that he once did. Which I'm not sure if I believe, but I guess it's possible.

He then just rambles about some Nietzchean stuff of highly questionable relevance to Lukuss for a while as the other two nervously watch him.

And yeah, his voice is in permanent Joker mode now. It's not just something he broke out for Onishi. He was simply holding it in until the last episode or so.

As morning "dawns," we briefly see whatsername wake up Ichise and tell him that Onishi wants to see him, and that it's extremely important. Yup, looks like we're building up to a Ichise vs. Yoshii cyberduel. Then we jump to the train station, where a company of people (Organo men, by the looks of them) are awaiting the arrival of a train. It arrives, and a man in a white cloak and hooded cowl gets out.

One of the People From the Hill, I assume. Well, I guess we'll find out what they're all about next time, because that's the end of the episode.


I still don't have much to say. I guess I'm interested to see what the Hill People are all about (are they the Class? Is Doc one of them, these days?), but I'd be more interested still if I had a better idea of why the current cast are doing what they're doing.

Ichise kinda lost me with the whole "attacking Shinji for no reason and starting a gang war" thing, and since then he's mostly been asleep. It could be that he's being mind controlled or whatever, but in either case he's not really available for me to empathize with right now. Of the other two sympathetic audience anchors, Yoshii and Onishi, well...Yoshii is still fun to watch, a really charismatic bad guy, but he's still someone you root against rather than for. That just leaves Onishi, and he spent most of this episode just running and scrambling without time to do much else. The scene with him tending to his wife (or her body) was really touching and well done, and it seems like his sort-of-recruitment of Ichise has promise, but most of this ep was still pretty alienating and opaque.