DIGIMON BEATBREAK

Episode 10

Last week's episode gave us one of the heaviest stories we've gotten out of DIGIMON BEATBREAK so far, and I'm happy to report that this one does a great job of following up on it. While there's a decent amount of emphasis on Makoto trying to get Chiropmon back, the real star here is Haruko as we see the toll that her downward life spiral and father's abuse has taken on her. It's a lot to digest, and while the execution isn't totally perfect, it sticks the landing well enough to make for Beatbreak's strongest episode yet.

Despite being able to take control of Chiropmon and attempting to flaunt this in front of Makoto as proof that Digimon are just tools, none of this helps to fill the void in Haruko's heart. She still can't bring herself to accept the idea that Digimon are reflections of their human partners, and even though she tries to hold onto Chiropmon as a toy that reminds her of Makoto, she can't see what the two of them could have in common when part of her still idolizes Makoto as a privileged rich kid who was willing to be friends with someone of lower status like her. Much as she wants to deny it, part of her knows he has a point. While it was already pretty clear that Shademon was a reflection of Haruko's desire to take things from others while desperately hoping not to be abandoned herself, this gets driven home when we see that Shademon first manifested after Haruko's mother walked out on her and Sunny, after getting fed up with the latter's obsession with money.

Through all of this, Sunny continues to be the absolute worst as a parent, promising that he'll let Haruko keep Chiropmon as her toy, while plotting to sell him at his earliest convenience so he can get what he wants out of some mysterious masked lady and her squad of armed goons (which caught me off guard, since even with Digimon's rep for frequently having dinosaurs or wolves with giant guns, this might be the first time it's ever featured humans with real guns). What he wants turns out to be a fake Sappotama that can give him a new identity, and when everyone else points out that he's only managed to secure one, he lets it slip that he plans to abandon his daughter and start a new life completely on his own. It's at this point that Haruko realizes she's being treated like she treats Digimon. When she asks him about this, he says the words that she's been too terrified to admit: that she and Shademon are mirror images of each other, and that he finds the way both of them long for acceptance to be creepy. Devastating as this betrayal is, I do think the moment is let down slightly by needing to have Sunny and Haruko blurt all of this out loud rather than letting the implications here speak for themselves, and it's a bit disappointing to see from a show that's otherwise been good about letting the audience interpret its ideas for themselves. Still, if there was ever going to be a moment where this show decided to be a bit more on the nose than usual, I'd rather it be in the service of making a point than something more self-indulgent, and it otherwise still works, so I'm willing to give it a pass.

I more or less feel the same way about the ensuing fight afterwards, where Haruko finally snaps, and fuses with Shademon in an attempt to erase the memory of everything painful that's happened to her. Through it all, Haruko still rejects the idea of Digimon reflecting humans, but Makoto acknowledges that Chiropmon reflects the way he tends to simply observe others from a distance rather than fighting on his own. He knows that's a weakness, but he's chosen to accept that part of himself as he encourages Haruko to do the same. This pushes Chiropmon to want to be stronger for Makoto's sake, and gives us our first real Digivolution sequence since the first episode, as Chiropmon becomes Night Chiropmon. Since triggering this evolution is meant to signal a step in Makoto's growth as a person, I do wish the episode had maybe given put a little more focus on him, or maybe showed how he and Chiropmon first met, but with this being a longer show, I imagine it wants to save that bit of backstory for later. The scene still works regardless, so even if Makoto could have stood to be in the limelight more, I'd still say I was satisfied with how this was handled. That said, I'm a bit less satisfied with the fact that we didn't get an insert song to go alongside the new evolution, as going this long without one just feels painful. At this stage, I can only assume it's being held off for when Gekkomon finally Digivolves, but solid as the anime's regular background music is, Digimon fights just don't quite hit the same without some vocals, and it remains the one franchise convention that I wish Beatbreak had stuck to.

I'm glad that the end of the battle at least makes up for it, as Shademon pleads for Haruko to avoid erasing memories of Makoto or her mother alongside the painful ones, and seeing how far Shademon is willing to go for her causes her to accept him as her other half, finally. After all that drama, I almost thought she was being set up to join the rest of our scrappy Cleaner kids, but she instead decides to go and reunite with her mom, which seems like a happy enough outcome for her. Meanwhile, Sunny loses everything, alongside getting some well-deserved punches to the face from Kyo, and considering how much of this he brought on himself, it's hard to muster any sympathy for him. Even with its cyberpunk aesthetic, I really wasn't expecting the show to commit quite this hard to showcasing how much the desire to feel on top within a fundamentally broken system can break people both physically and mentally. Still, as Makoto himself puts it, for all the luxuries those on the top have, they don't have Digimon. He's happy with the life he has now, and it shows that the only way to truly push back against a system that demands perfection is to leave it and embrace imperfection.

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DIGIMON BEATBREAK is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.