Summary:
Saki returns home, avoids helping her sister Asako at Sangetsu Breads, and wishes she could poach her brother-in-law, Ryousuke. Oosugi Satoshi has calling like crazy, and he finally reaches Saki and volunteers to accompany her to her interview tomorrow. After hanging up on the poor guy, Saki then sends a pathetic text to Akira, but not before erasing a bit of the desperation from the text. Meanwhile, Juiz won’t give Akira much useful information, so he tracks down Selecao #5, Hiura Hajime, through Hajime’s purchase of an MRI machine.
Hajime suspects that Akira is the Supporter, and so drugs Akira to knock him out until after an important afternoon prefecture assembly. With Hajime’s plans for his private geriatric self-sustaining hospital in place (through bribes), Hajime wakes Akira up in a recreation of how Hajime was chosen as a Selecao by Mr. Outside. Akira learns that you are killed by the Supporter whenever you try to cheat the game or use the phone for yourself and not the nation, and that only one Selecao will survive at the end. Hajime refuses to reveal much to Akira, saying only that Akira was very clever and traded his past to bet on his new self. As Akira leaves, a man in a suit shows up to kill Hiura for using up his funds without saving the nation.
Reaction:
There were a lot of reinforcing clues given this episode, although much of it was hinted at before. The 500 shipping containers that Akira bought suggests he did not kill the NEETs, and that grainy B&W flashback makes it seem as if Akira was a paperboy before becoming a Selecao. Both Yuusei and Hajime suspected Akira of being the Supporter, and yet it is interesting that Mr. Outside is the only one who knows who the Supporter is. Could it be that one Selecao is going around killing the other Selecao thinking that it will save the nation? The fact that the winner will meet Mr. Outside, has convinced me that Akira will survive and win the game.
Hajime’s main purpose in this episode was to show how 10 billion yen is not enough to save a nation using only conventional thinking. Hajime basically gave up immediately and set his sights on a smaller, achievable goal, but Akira must have something really grand and creative in mind. I’m not sure what this plan might have to do with the skeletal “Johnny” creatures Akira imagined while pondering Quadrophenia, but I noticed that he quickly went from happy to angry when he decided they were useless.
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This post was written by...
Kabitzin – who has written 1940 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I think it’d be much more interesting if pre-amnesia Akira had mass-murdered the NEETs in his previous life and intended for post-amnesia Akira to figure out how to build on that. Anyway, this was my favorite episode so far, mostly because of minimal Saki-action.
I’m getting the feeling that everything Akira needs to know to do whatever he planned pre-amnesia is somehow cunningly encoded in his recollection of movies.
I think this is mostly true, since Akira could probably anticipate how he would react to certain stimuli, but he is hoping Tabula Rasa Akira will surprise him(self) even more. Otherwise, what would be the point of a mind wipe.
I get the feeling those Johnny skeletons were representative of the NEETs in how they crawled out of garbage and glomped Akira at first, only to be yelled at and beaten when they tried to get to second base.
You know how badass that would be?
I bet it gives him super strength =3
I’m just not feeling the movie references. Of course, I’m not a big movie-person, but everything seems forced to me, like this is in-game advertisement or something:
=3
I still think that whatever Takizawa was doing with them NEETS must’ve went wrong and they all ended up sexually traumatizing him, thus leading to his erasing his memory and targeting the nearest female specimen the moment he regained consciousness just to keep his sanity intact.
(Or maybe I should just continue watching 07-Ghost now before this pseudo-yaoi relapse affects ALL the shows I’m watching now -_-”)