The Perfect Insider

Episode 10

Well, we've “solved” our “mystery.” This week featured the final confrontation between Magata and our two detectives, as the pair traded off interviewing her within her own dream chamber. Hypotheses were proven, murders were answered for, and goodbyes were made. And the overall production came off as, well...

Completely, entirely ridiculous.

I don't even mean that wholly in a bad way. From the multiple personalities onward, the overt mystery of Perfect Insider has always been a pretty silly, camp-scifi affair. The show doubled down on the absurdity of its premise with devices like The Dream Machine and Magata's secret daughter, so you can't really say that any of this week's revelations came out of nowhere. The show has found solidity in the details around its mystery; in the compelling evocation of the laboratory as a grounded space, and in the ways the show contrasted the personalities and histories of Moe and Magata. That's always been the show's strength, and that stuff remained reasonably consistent here.

But jeez, was this episode's overt mystery-solving ever silly.

The episode opened strong, with Moe and Souhei each meeting Magata in a digital environment that matched their perception of her world. Souhei's interview room was a vast open sea, where he and Magata could chat casually while enjoying technicolor fruit drinks. Souhei sees freedom in her groundless digital world, and so it made sense that his perception of her reality expressed ultimate freedom. In contrast, Moe met Magata in a tiny cell lit by a single bulb. Moe's always distrusted the “perfect freedom” of Souhei's solipsistic attitudes, and so it made equal sense that her vision of Magata would convey her disdain for that worldview.

Starting from that excellent visual metaphor, the episode proceeded to “answer the mystery” in the course of one of the silliest monologues I've ever seen. The explanations here were ridiculous on both a writing and narrative level - with Souhei reciting lines like “people only live for fifteen years, at which point they kill their parents and become fourteen,” I wasn't sure whether to lay more blame at him specifically for his storytelling or Magata for actually having carried out this absurd plot. Magata's daughter was taught that killing her parents was natural, and that's why she was perfectly able to fake being Magata for interviews. The true meaning of “everything becomes F” related to the hexadecimal data storage system of Red Magic, and how it was used as a countdown timer. Moe's simple “who are you” question to Magata's daughter threw her off fifteen years of conditioning, and resulted in her wanting to kill herself and let her mother free instead.

It was all total nonsense, basically. The mystery here has always been nonsense, but this episode leaned into it like it was expecting that end of the story to actually support some dramatic weight, and as a result plunged into the ocean with far less grace than Magata. Perfect Insider has never successfully sold the philosophies of Souhei and Magata - it's described them as “geniuses,” and Magata's feelings might somewhat be explained by her warped upbringing, but it seemed like this episode actually expected us to find something beautiful in their choices. But their philosophy, like this show's central mystery, is rubbish - it's empty nonsense, a sequence of words strung together to resemble the outline of meaning.

For all that, I enjoyed this episode. It was very pretty, with shots of both Souhei and Moe's realities finding a beauty in illusion. It was also entertaining in a perhaps unintentional way to hear Magata and Souhei wax rhapsodic about nothing at all. In the end, Magata's profundity was an illusion… and perhaps that is the intended takeaway after all.

No. It isn't. You're supposed to think these characters are smart, it just doesn't work. Sorry for getting your hopes up.

Rating: C

The Perfect Insider is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.