Gnosia

Episode 7

Whoever said that one needs to be careful of what they wish for can go ahead and shove it, because this week's Gnosia gave exactly what I wished for, and the results are pretty darned delightful. Sure, when I begged the show to take a step back from the Tutorial Zone and deliver some meaningful character interactions for once, was I expecting Gnosia to deliver something this exceedingly wacky and bizarre? No, I must confess, I was not. While I'm still waiting for the dramatic stakes of the D.Q.O.'s perilous journey to hit, though, I will happily settle for cartoon sitcom shenanigans. Anything to avoid getting yet another agonizing, detailed explanation of how lying works.

Sure enough, the actual Gnosia hunts in “Understand?” are sidelined to the point of being literal punchlines, but we'll get to that later. Functionally, the plot of this episode serves two main purposes, the first of which is to introduce the next batch of characters. On this count, Gnosia acquits itself quite well. We don't get to learn much about Sha-Ming and Remnan outside of their basic personality traits, but they're certainly intriguing. Remnan's comment about growing up on an “A.I. Planet” probably sounded a lot less ominous when it was written in 2019, and Sha-Ming has a fun “dirtbag with a possible heart of gold” thing going on. The best new addition to the cast, though, is obviously Otome, who is essentially perfect, and must be protected at all costs. The only flaw that any sane person could perceive in her is the way that the dialogue keeps insisting that she is a dolphin when her snub nose and wide-set eyes are clearly the features of a beluga whale. It's fine, though. Who knows? Maybe people have stopped distinguishing between the species a thousand years into the future.

The other focus of the episode is its attempt to tell the insane but genuinely earnest love story between Shigemichi the Gray Alien and Stella the Mysterious Woman Who Turns Out to Be an Android Interface Unit for the D.Q.O.'s Computer. If you think that centering the show's first character-focused love story around the most unserious weirdo on the ship is a bold choice, then you're right on the money, but it works surprisingly well. I honestly never took Gnosia to be the kind of show that would be so interested in (or adept at) broad cartoon comedy, but there are some legitimately hilarious bits scattered throughout this episode. The biggest laugh of the week comes from Jonas loudly announcing that he won Shigemichi's contest for Stella's heart thanks to his newly awoken Gnosia powers, only for the show to hard cut to him being frozen. I cannot tell you how glad I am that we're finally at the point where Gnosia respects our intelligence enough to skip through some of the gameplay minutiae so we can enjoy the story.

Of course, there are deeper themes at work here, namely the way that Gnosia is establishing exactly what it means for characters like Stella and Otome to be considered “human.” It's an increasingly common way for science fiction to handle these age-old questions, for one; by now, we've all done the song and dance of questioning whether robots or anthropomorphic animals and aliens count amongst humanity, so it makes sense that more stories are getting that business out of the way early. It also serves the convenient narrative purpose of letting the audience know that the Gnosia are not discriminatory in their infections. Androids and Adorable Beluga Whale Girls are just as vulnerable to the Gnosia threat as anyone else.

What a refreshing change of pace this was for Gnosia to take. While I still want the dramatic (and comedic!) escalation to continue, I at least feel recharged enough to be prepared for a little more tutorializing when needs must. Now I just need the show to figure out the one remaining issue that plagues time-loop stories like this one. Even when you get such fun and entertaining stories like this, how do you keep things feeling consistent and meaningful if every single character's development resets whenever Yuri jumps to another world line? There are a few ways it could go, but I suspect that there's still yet more for our hero to discover about how their time travel powers work that will only make for a more complicated - and hopefully more rewarding - story in the long run.

Episode Rating:

Gnosia is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.