The Darwin Incident

Episode 13

Given its place in its current arc, and the fact that it's The Darwin Incident, I wasn't expecting a ton from its season finale. This is the nature of adapting any ongoing manga with halfway measured pacing, but the fact remains that the story had just kicked off a new leg under its upset status quo. Forget moving pieces around—they're still setting up the board. It coasted to a finish with a vague promise of continuation and a nudge to read the manga.

To be sure, The Darwin Incident doesn't hit anything resembling a narrative conclusion with this finale. Despite Rivera's tease at the end of last week's episode, the story wisely doesn't try to have him actually do anything at the last minute. The intense suspense is upheld by Grace taking Charlie and Lucy to a grocery store. The conflict is such a notable occurrence considering how it resolves. Some of it trades on the public attitude toward Charlie, which the show has been negligent in depicting—I suppose the speciesist shopkeeper here could've been around as much as the angry mob that stormed Charlie's old house, or maybe like them, he and some of the other patrons were tensed up by all the extra ALA terrorism happening around lately.

It is funny that a small child comes along with a digression on the philosophy of anarchy, because Shun Umezawa cannot help himself. Similarly, the call-out of the tryhard dudes open-carrying in the grocery store (this is Missouri, I just assumed they could do that) comes off like a non-sequiter. The way Grace correctly calls out the insecurity of these guys is appreciably funny (Grace is great, by the way—a simple, salt-of-the-earth character who gets by because her heart is in the right place.) Still, it has little enough to do with the reality of the confrontation taking place at the time. Awkward as the setup all is, the real reason Charlie stumbles into the orbit of this threatening situation is actually that The Darwin Incident has actually come around to tracking payoffs to character arcs. This is Charlie maintaining his composure in the face of a threatening situation, explicitly calling back to what happened to him as a child at the pool, and diffusing things by unilaterally not presenting himself as a threat.

Should Charlie restrain himself from having his jimmies rustled in the face of this sort of social bullying? But it's a calculation made in the moment, implying that Charlie recognizes he needs to abide by. He believes himself the sole representative of a demographic, after all, and if his right to keep existing hinges on him playing things off as the rest of society surrounds him with micro and macroaggressions, so be it. But beyond those implications, it does show Charlie's ability to control his reactions and emotions compared to when he was a child. It creates some interesting retroactive analysis: has Charlie's whole logical, pragmatic personality approach been him reigning in his emotional side in the name of being presentable to society? It would be ironic that he had to develop a cold, inhuman demeanor to be accepted by humans.

Charlie then returns to his intellectual indifference for the rest of the episode, dismissing attachment to his biological mother Eva, and even logic-ing out his reasons for seeking revenge for the murders of his adopted parents. The way he discusses the irrationality of revenge before considering there might actually be an evolutionary advantage to deterring would-be assailants is honestly a good point. It's another aspect that might be compelling to follow if it felt like a turning point in Charlie's emotional journey as much as it did Umezawa performing sociological thought experiments on the page. But even the whole exercise is tempered by Charlie claiming that stories of revenge usually present the act as a unilateral moral and personal good, which makes me wonder what kind of books he and/or Umezawa were reading.

That's all hypotheticals, background radiation as the pending death of Eva signifies how things are, as the FBI agents put it, in "a new phase now." So, of course, the burning setup of her old word cards gets paid off at the last minute, alongside Rivera talking in portents with a mysterious someone while the credits roll. Charlie having a secret fucked-up evil brother makes sense as a story escalation, even if it doesn't make a ton of sense within the story itself. The ALA having access to another Humanzee this whole time calls into question why they were so hot to get Charlie, after all. There are thematically salient places the writing could go now that Charlie's not the sole representative of his species anymore. But do I trust the writing to actually pull that off when I know I'd get much more entertainment mileage out of just watching Charlie and Omelas duke it out like Sonic and Shadow the Hedgehogs? Love the name, by the way. "Omelas" is as subtle about its position and role as anything else in The Darwin Incident.

It leaves me in largely the same place I was with The Darwin Incident when I started its season: not necessarily impressed with its quality but still conspicuously compelled to see where it's going. It's a testament to the show's ability to plot out these engaging thriller beats even as its sociological ambitions buckled in the face of actually articulating them. Not that they're technically clever, as this season wraps with the reveal of a secret evil brother. That is classic hackneyed writing. But maybe that's the kind of pulp that The Darwin Incident should be going for if it ever hoped to have legs. It's still not enough to get me to go read the manga, but I'd tune in for another season to see where they're going with this.

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The Darwin Incident is currently streaming on Prime Video.

Chris's favorite ape is probably Optimus Primal. He can be found posting about anime, transforming robots, and the occasional hopefully more salient political commentary over on his BlueSky.