Serial Experiments Lain E9: “Protocol”

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

Our inspirational quote of the day is "If you want to be free of suffering, you should believe in God. Whether or not you believe in Him, God is always by your side." Duly noted, SEL, I'll keep that option in mind.

Open on grainy footage of...is this the surface of Mars, from a rover? This show was made two years after the first successful-ish drone mission, so maybe it's that. Then a voiceover starts telling us about the Roswell incident.

Okay. Either this is grainy footage of the New Mexico desert, or it's just random Mars stuff to put us in a spacey mood for the UFO stories. A minute later it clears up some, and yeah, it's the New Mexico scrub.

The narrator tells us that no one is sure what actually crashed there at this point, and that rumors and inventions have become indistinguishable from fact in the decades since. Cut to Amlain in her unbombed cyberhive, curled up against a corner in her pajamas. Pipes bubble. Mysterious liquids in vats ripple. Then the door opens a crack, and there's no response when Lain asks who's there. The steam engine sprouts a leak. Then Lain finally comes to the door and sees aylmao looking in at her.

After a minute it disappears, and Amlain goes back to her favorite pastime of curling up in the corner and staring forlornly into space.

Another documentary-esque voiceover segment starts. In 1984, TV producer Jaime Shandera received an envelope from an anonymous source, containing unverifiable evidence of a secret American agency called Majestic-12 that supposedly studied the Roswell wreck and then brokered some sort of agreement when aylmao came to recover it themselves. President Truman's signature on the organization's foundational documents was later determined to be copied from another, much more mundane, piece of legislation. However, rumors and conspiracy theories have continued to exist about MJ-12 ever since.

The speaker starts to focus on one alleged member in particular, Dr. Bush of MIT university, when we return to Lain in her room. She has her back to us now, and is sitting in front of her computer's central mass with no characteristic body language, so I'm not sure which of her it is now. She connects to the Wired, and Aglain then asks the static flux spirits that inhabit the black void she's in how she could have possibly deleted a past event from the timeline.

Unfortunately, they dodge the question and just start talking about her in general. And saying things that defy her comprehension, while refusing to identify themselves.

They're asserting that she was in the Wired before she was in meatspace. Or...that time was fucked with to extend her meatspace body into the past before her actual origins. IDK. When she tried to get them to actually explain themselves, they just start arguing with each other and then disappear. Aglain is left frustrated.

Next documentary section is about another, much better documented, project of Dr. Vannevar Bush's. His groundbreaking MEMEX experiments were the beginning of random access memory technology. Computers hadn't yet been invented to take advantage of RAM, but almost as soon as they were their creators looked to MEMEX for inspiration.

Following the trajectory of these documentary bits, it seems like the show is trying to posit that aylmao taught MJ-12 about RAM, and that their technology made its way into our computers at the ground floor via Dr. Bush's prototypes. On one hand, MEMEX was in 1945, and the Roswell incident didn't happen until 1947. On the other hand, we've seen enough time-fuckery in this show so far that this may not be a problem.

The speaker also mentions that Dr. Bush was a leader in the Manhattan Project. Which may or may not be related to computers, aylmao, or both.

Cut to Club Cyberia. Remember that place? The DJ dude spots Lain across the club, and beckons her up to his station. She apparently forgot a manila envelope the last time she was here.

She claims not to know what it is, and her voice tone sounds more like Aglain than anyone else so this isn't just Amlain's default state of total ignorance. Nonetheless, she opens it, and finds a microchip.

Next documentary excerpt! A rather more questionable mid-20th century American scientist, Dr. John Lily was never accused of having been part of MJ-12, but he's the sort of person who probably would have believed the Roswell hoax wholeheartedly and wished he could be a part of Majestic-12. Dr. Lily did some solid, innovative research earlier in his career developing electromagnetic and chemical sensor technology, playing an important role in the later development of the CAT scan tech. He also invented sensory deprivation tanks as a concept. Unfortunately, as his career went on he spent more and more of his time researching how to talk to animals, which supernatural beings he should listen to in order to achieve enlightenment, and which hallucinogens would best help him with either. This documentary segment mostly focuses on those spirit guides of his, entities he referred to as the ECCO (Earth Coincidence Control Office. Yes, they're a bureaucracy of spirit guides that control coincidences and destinies on and around the planet earth. No, this isn't Terry Pratchett, this was actually believed by the guy who invented electroneural sensors). The show then posits that Dr. Lily's dolphin research (yes of course he worked with dolphins why would you have not already assumed that. Also, Ecco the Dolphin, from the videogame franchise of the same name, is a reference to this) was an attempt to mimic their intricate longranged sonar communication networks.

This is followed by a truly bizarre continuation to the Cyberia scene. Lain approaches the elf kid and his slightly less creepy friends at their usual table, and reminds him that he said he'd go out with her.

The kids are all surprised to hear this. Elfkid reminds her that he wanted a date with a specific version of her, and she isn't that self right now. (Ag?)Lain irritably tells him that there is only one her. All of the Lains are just Lain.

The kids all look shocked and stare at her in confusion and fear, as if she'd just said she's planning to cook and eat all three of them. But I guess elfkid is convinced now, because next we jump to him and Lain in her room, and him being awed at how her desktop PC has eaten the rest of her room. Notably, that little steam leak from before is still present (though the much bigger ones that preceded the bombing that apparently never actually happened are not). After he geeks out over her external technobrain for a few minutes, she has him sit down and asks him if he recognizes the microchip she allegedly dropped. He reacts to the sight of it in panic. Then, she accuses him of having tried to get it to her, and asks him if he's one of the Knights. He doesn't answer, except to fearfully whisper that yes, she really is the real Lain alright.

Aglain then accuses him of having hacked the memories of everyone else in Club Cyberia to make them think they'd seen another, more gregarious version of herself there at certain occasions. And of having used this trick to make the DJ think that she had dropped the envelope containing the microchip there, when really it was himself using his memory-hax to make the DJ remember it as having been Lain.

This would have landed a lot better for me if the show had provided any of the hints the audience would need to figure this out on their own. As it is, this isn't a revelation that looks obvious in retrospect, nor does it explain much of anything that needed explaining given that Lain already has multiple personalities. The only way Lain could have figured this out, meanwhile, is using sources and background knowledge (culled from her Wired brain network or whatever) that the audience is not privy to. We didn't know memory hacking was a thing, exactly, and we really didn't know that random elfkids could do it. So, goodbye Sanderson's laws, it was nice knowing you.

Elfkid tries to run for it, but Lain either trips him or knocks him down with telekinesis, it's not clear which, and looms menacingly over him.

She orders her Navi to play one of the techno songs from the club, and elfkid's eyes start twitching as if he's having a stroke.

Cut to the brightly lit living room downstairs. Lain's parents and sister are home, and apparently didn't ask about the random 12 year old Lain brought home. Her father and mother are comforting each other, and talking about how "it'll all be over soon." Okay, maybe these were actually illuminati lizardmen pretending to be Amlain's family after all.

This is their last opportunity to do marital type things, and she wants to take advantage of that.

Meanwhile, Lain's sister is sitting out in the hall making babbling noises and occasionally repeating the word "communicating" into her fingers.

Sister and parents are within sight of each other, but not looking at one another.

Back in Lain's room, the music has caused the visuals to go into blurry AR mode, and elfkid looks like he's about to die of fear as Lain steps toward his prone self through the chaos. Fortunately for him, she tells the Navi to cut the music, and immediately the room and his brain both start working normally again. Elfkid says that he knew the music at Cyberia had some kind of potential nerve-frying effects, but that he didn't know what or why. Lain then asks him what would have happened if she installed the chip as he presumably tried to trick her into doing.

He claims not to know; he's not actually a Knight of the Eastern Calculus, just a minor associate of theirs. Lain asks him again, this time while holding his mouth open and starting to shove the microchip down his throat, and that gets him talking. Though I don't know what assurance she has that he's not just telling her what she wants to hear, but...look, the point we need to understand here is that torture works. Torture always gets you good intel, and it's something that good guys do to bad guys. Get out there and start doing it today. Anyway, the 100% reliable story he now tells is that the chip contains "nonvolatile memory data." It's meant to wipe Lain's memories (or at least some of them) and replace them with something else. He doesn't know what its meant to overwrite, or what it would overwrite them with.

You know...if something like this was done to Lain just before the show began, that would actually explain a lot. Amlain is what was left over by a mindwipe, while her other personas are parts of her that got integrated into the Wired, evaded deletion due to not being soleley in her brain at the time, and are now trying to move back in. Though that might make too much sense for this show, honestly.

She lets him up. He tells her that the Knights aren't just some hacker clique, they're a religious sect bent on making their "truth" a reality. What that means exactly, he doesn't know. Also, Lain is special, which is why she's important to them.

Before he leaves, she thanks him, and then he turns around and kisses her before she can react.

I'm not sure why she doesn't paralyze him again and finish forcefeeding him the microchip at that, but...hmm. Her face looks blanker than it did a moment ago, and her voice is more nervous and confused sounding, so maybe she's turned back into Amlain in the last ten seconds. That would explain it. Anyway, the little creep leaves.

He apparently spat a piece of gum into her mouth, also. WTF. Maybe it's just revenge for the microchip-eating torture, or maybe the gum is actually another sort of mind control device or has a hidden Accela caster inside of it or something.

Next documentary bit! Ted Nelson was a telecommunications researcher who studied under both Dr. Bush and Dr. Lily (though he never got around to actually completing his own PhD until the early 2000's. This detail isn't in the show, obviously, I'm just adding some more modern context). Nelson is best known for having tried to invent the internet in the mid 1960's, using a network of satellites with onboard databanks to act as both providers and a wikipedia-analogue. This very grandiose and premature idea was given the equally bombastic name "Project Xanadu," and its greatness was preached by Nelson and his disciples until the 21st century when they were finally forced to admit that the internet we already had didn't need it (again, obviously not mentioned in this late nineties anime). Nonetheless, Nelson is known as the inventor of the hypertext concept that the actual internet would use heavily, so at least in that way his legacy is important.

Next, we see Lain sitting down in front of her Navi and having it perform a "memory check" while she boredly repeats the word "click" at it over and over. Then, we suddenly see the Tachibana spooks escorting Lain through a glaring white void to the front door of her house, which they guide her through. Inside, her parents and sister are waiting for her. They turn her over to her father, who brings her upstairs to a pristine, pre-borg version of her room.

Is this a suppressed memory Lain is just now recovering? Was she a lab experiment who some randos were hired to pretend to be the family of? Are the Knights just trying to steal a Tachibana gynoid? Although...if that were the case, why would Boss Tachibana have tried to tell her this? And...if it was time to tell her, why didn't he seem more sure of himself?

Current Lain looks up from her monitor and confronts the memory of her younger self. The two engage in some very confused dialogue. Then the apparition or flashback or whatever it is ends, and Lain is just left whispering to herself that it's all lies, and asks why "they" would do this.

Does she mean that the life and "family" she knows are a lie, or that she thinks that that flashback was a false memory someone is trying to gaslight her with? If memory hacking is a thing, then the latter is at least as likely as the former, and probably moreso.

Another documentary bit. This one about the Schumann Resonances. Because of the electromagnetic "trap" formed by the earth's ionosphere, strong magnetic activity anywhere in the lower atmosphere causes magnetic fluctuations that perpetuate clear across the globe. Things like lightning storms can be detected in realtime from the opposite side of the world just by monitoring the Schumann fluctuations. Various New Age weirdos, some of whom have fancy degrees, have made unsupported predictions about how the Schumann Resonances make up the mind of an electromagnetic entity that inhabits the entire planet. Said weirdos have also asserted that the magnetic activities of human brains can both act and be acted upon by the global resonance field, and that this entity has the potential to assimilate us into a hive mind if there gets to be enough humans with enough total brain activity.

Of course, these individuals have all just looked at the floor and started mumbling when asked what mechanism the human brain would have for receiving and processing these magnetic fluctuations as anything like comprehensible data. Or how the hell the extremely tiny magnetic output of human brain activity is supposed to not get absolutely shredded by static before it makes it so far as a few dozen meters from your skull. For more information about this extra-pseudosciencey version of Gaia hypothesis, just click around That Part Of Youtube.

Fade back to Lain looking up from her Navi and addressing Rudolph. He answers, proclaiming himself to be the one ultimate truth.

Cue final documentary bit, this time about a completely fictional scientist named Dr. Eiri Masami. Masami was a top dog at Tachibana General Labs, and led the charge on turning the Wired into what it is by the present day and present time hahahaha. Toward the end of his time with Tachibana, he proposed a mechanism for using the Schumann Resonances as a transmission medium for a completely wireless Wired. Also, he claimed that with the right signal tower designs at the right coordinates, he could plug in every human brain in the world at a subconscious level. Not many of his peers took that last part seriously, which is how he was able to slip it into his plans for the latest IP hardware and get it out the door.

When they found out that he was using their resources to slip extraneous pseudoscience bullshit into their commercial designs, Tachibana fired Dr. Masami. One week later, he was found dead in a Tokyo train station.

I suspect that, if Tachibana and their weirdo cyborg militiamen actually did put an amnesic Lain in this house with a fake family, that this was done on Dr. Masami's orders. And that Tachibana people have been sabotaging the implementation of the new signal relay tech ever since they realized what it might be able to do (and they didn't just go public about these towers maybe having dangerous neurological effects...why? Seems like getting it shut down through totally aboveboard means shouldn't be too difficult for them...). The Knights are either trying to recover his Masami's projects and complete them, or else Masami just let his body die after uploading himself into the network and becoming (or at least becoming a big chunk of) the nascent Rudolph.

And this is all possible because computers are based on alien technology with potential that Majestic-12 didn't quite understand before releasing to the public. And it's now been combined with the stolen BACKRONYM design to give Rudolph some greater psionic powers beyond electrocommunication.

So um. That's Roswell aliens, psychic kids, Spirit Science shit about geomagnetics, and a mad scientist supervillain all independently existing and then being drawn together. And it's still an insufficient explanation for what we've seen up until now!

Then, the final scene for this episode. Lain standing outside on that street she's always seeing spooky shadows and stuff along. There's a man standing opposite of her.

The camera then zooms in on Dr. Masami, and he looks like a one-off JoJo villain.

End episode.


I don't think I've ever seen something this atmospheric and interesting become this dull and stupid in a mere nine episodes.

Majestic-12 xenotech little psychic kid research electro-Gaia field mad scientist shonen villain plot. This could be a fucking *parody.* Just throw the words "ninja," "pirate," and "dinosaur" in there while you're at it, I doubt anyone would even notice at this point.

So, not only does this miss the tone and not live up to the haunting mystique of the early episodes, but...well, I'm going to point back to what I said at the end of episode 4:

“While I could be totally off in my interpretations of what’s going on, it definitely seems that Lain is no longer a character with agency. If I’m not totally off in my interpretations, then it’s possible that MOST of the people we’ve been following are no longer characters with agency. A show about cyberdemons positioning their appendages against each other isn’t really a story I can get invested in.

Since we’re only four episodes into a 13 part series, I have to assume that something will reinject humanity into the story. I doubt it really is going to just be 9 more episodes of hive mind monsters doing incomprehensible shit at each other. But who will our protagonist(s) be? Does Lain even still exist at this point, or is she as a raindrop fallen into a lake? I guess next episode will have to at least start answering that question, or else shift to a totally different main character.”

Obviously, I was wrong in a lot of my hypotheses at the time. There's only one hive mind monster (I think? Maybe there's a hierarchy of lesser networks within Rudolph/Masami, but if so that doesn't seem to be an important detail), for instance. Lain was never really "herself" to begin with, and the things overwriting Amlain might be more genuinely her than it was. But the main concern I had - that the story would lose its pathos and become bogged down in scifi minutiae instead of telling the frightening and heartbreaking story of a young woman slipping away - has been more than justified. I can't empathize with Lain anymore. I can't empathize with Lain's parents anymore. I maybe kinda feel for her sister, but I don't understand what's going on with her well enough to be sure. Arisu seems like she's meant to be an emotional support, but she's been almost entirely static throughout her meager screentime, aside from getting mad at Lain for telling everyone about her dirty daydream (because that makes sense for someone who doesn't know about the Schumann technopathy thing...). I have run out of people to care about.

So, there's four more episodes of the show left. Maybe it'll bounce back. I kind of doubt it though. I guess we'll see.