Gnosia

Episode 8

After last week's very welcome detour into goofy shenanigans, Gnosia is back on board the Gnosia Hunt Expressway, and with a vengeance. As the episode begins, Yuri has woken up on board a D.Q.O. in a world-line where fifteen passengers boarded the ship and a whopping four Gnosia stowed away amongst them. Jonas, Shigemichi, Comet, and Stella have all been put on ice, with no clear indication that any of the aliens have actually been dealt with. Tensions are high amongst the remaining eleven passengers. With no more cast members left to introduce (I think), and the rules of the hunt and the various roles all laid out, all our hero can do is try to crack the facades of the Gnosia and keep the real humans awake and alive.

The big question that I've been consistently asking is whether or not Gnosia will be able to hold up as an actual story, instead of merely being an okay representation of an experience that ultimately works better as a game. After this week, I don't know if I can provide a certain answer, but I feel much more confident that we're heading in the right direction. Mostly. The show still isn't as engaging as I'd like it to be on an emotional level, but plenty of mysteries have been able to get by purely on the charm of their casts and the verve of the procedural that they're all wrapped up in. If I look at Gnosia as the anime-cousin of, say, the Benoit Blanc movies, then I think I can at least have enough fun with each weekly descent into alien-hunting madness to accompany Yuri and Co. to the story's finish line.

And we are getting to know the cast better, little by little. As of right now, at least, I am very thankful for Gnosia getting a run of more than just thirteen episodes to give us a chance to care about its characters. Again, I am dubious about just how attached we will be able to get when we're technically getting completely new and/or alien-possessed versions of these people whenever Yuri jumps in time. Still, the thorny (ha ha) interactions we get in scenes like Remnan, Kurushka, and Otome's confrontation ensure that the proceedings remain engaging. Likewise, now that Yuriko has more to do than simply stand there and condescendingly wave her fan, she can ingratiate herself into the viewer's mind and take shape as, at least, an archetype of a personality that we can play “Friend or Foe?” whenever the Gnosia hunts reach their climactic votes.

Speaking of which, much of my remaining ambivalence comes from the fact that I don't think the voting trials are all that thrilling or exciting, and I don't even know how much of that problem can even be solved, given the nature of the premise. I like solving puzzles in video games when I'm at the helm and thinking things through, but when you combine the linearity of the medium of animation with the time-hopping structure of the world-line scenario, my brain can't help but enter cruise control whenever the cast starts elaborating on their motives, strategies, etc. In a game, you have to pay close attention to all of these exposition dumps because if you guess wrong, it's game over. In the television version of Gnosia, the only real consequences have to come from our emotional attachment to the characters, our desire to see them live on and escape the Gnosia, and so on. It's still unclear whether or not we'll ever reach the point where those vital emotional hooks will truly ground this experience.

To Gnosia's credit, this week's whopper of an ending is a hell of a place to start. All season, the Gnosia have been a very abstract threat; with their motivations and limitations being so limited, and the consequences of their victory getting reset whenever Yuri hops to another loop, it has been easy to take them for granted as an antagonistic force. Not this week, though. It would have been effective enough to display the hard shift to an atmosphere of legitimate horror once Kurushka reveals her status as a scheming imposter and begins slaughtering the D.Q.O. crew like this was the final act of Jason X. Gnosia takes things to a completely new level when the entire episode starts to completely break down, as if the alien threat was infecting and reprogramming the very show itself. I love it when series get playful with their structure and presentation like this, and interrupting the usual opening credits to brutally murder every single human character and throw a wild rap-rock ED at us as a final middle-finger is honestly brilliant. I don't want to jinx things this early in the show's run, but I'm beginning to suspect that Gnosia has only begun to show us what it is really capable of.

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.