©Ino Asano/Shogakukan/DeDeDeDe Committee
While the relationship between Kadode and Ouran is the heart and soul of this show, I still enjoy these episodes without them. It’s important, from time to time, to focus on the bigger events happening in the world—events that Kadode and Ouran would have no way of knowing about. Better still, we are shown these events through a mix of story types.
On one hand, we get personal, one-off stories like the one about the reporter. Through it, we not only learn about the people who still live in the abandoned zone (and their interactions with the aliens) but also get a powerful moral about SNS and personal relationships.
The reporter cares more for people online than in real life—using the latter for sex and little else. Yet, because of that, when she is in a life-or-death situation, her real-life contacts don’t even bother to take her calls—and her post to SNS either goes unanswered (or fails to upload). Making things doubly ironic, she is only in said life-or-death situation because she gets involved with a real-world person—running into danger because she sees herself in the other woman she’s with. It’s heartbreaking but the message is clear: foster real-world relationships over online ones or you’ll have no one to help when you need it most.
Then, in another vignette, we see how things are unfolding from the top. President Totally-Not-Trump has secretly placed back doors into not only the Japanese internet infrastructure but also the laser gun/AI-controlled walking tank network. Unfortunately for the US, the Japanese government (aside from the clueless Prime Minister) knew this was coming and was preparing to abandon Tokyo. Meanwhile, the S.E.S. director gave sole control of the AI to his secretary/lover Hikari—so the back doors mean nothing. And so when US agents come to abduct her, they are eliminated by Kenichi—who then promptly uses her to kill 5000 aliens via mecha, drones, and a space laser. So now the most devastating power the world has ever seen is in the hands of an immature teen with a god-complex and a murder-boner.
And speaking of the aliens, it seems that they’re victims of their government as well. The overloading of the mothership’s reactor was something planned—and thus the alien civilians aboard the ship were never anything more than a distraction. What the alien leaders hope to gain from destroying their ship, their people, and… well, Tokyo (if not all of human civilization) remains a mystery.
So in the end, this episode is meant to show us how everything is spiraling wildly out of control. While Kadode and Ouran spend time messing around at the beach with their friends, the world’s fate is balanced on a knife’s edge—and those in control seem bound and determined to bring things crashing down around them.
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