Mechanical Marie

Episode 12

Who doesn't love a happy ending? Only the most miserable of misanthropes could have wished for anything other than what the final episode of Mechanical Marie gives us – a blissfully happy, formerly expressionless girl who has finally found her smile along with the man she loves. Before that, though, Marie must attempt to locate the antidote for Arthur's amnesia poison by infiltrating would-be mastermind Maynard's mansion. Unfortunately, Marie is a rubbish spy. She doesn't even know the mansion's layout, plus morally ambiguous assassin Noah spots her instantly.

Noah has always held an attraction towards the stoic maid of his enemy, so he doesn't immediately sound the alarm; he mercilessly messes with her, sending her on one wild goose chase after another. It's only once Maynard appears, when Marie triggers the alarm in his creepy Arthur hate room (filled with enough effigies and images that Marie openly wonders if Maynard has crossed from holding a vendetta against Arthur to nurturing an incestuous crush instead), that Noah picks sides.

Seeing Marie crushed by Maynard's claim that there is no antidote to restore Arthur's memory of the time they shared strengthens Noah's resolve. He realises he will never be the object of Marie's affections, yet it's the Marie who is happily in love with Arthur that he loves. In an act of professional self-sacrifice, he gives Marie the antidote he'd handily brewed up himself anyway (suggesting he would have ensured things ended up going this way anyway), and helps Marie escape. Even though Maynard throws everything against Marie, including his ridiculously huge mecha, Marie 2 arrives just in time to beat it to a pulp. Again.

Mechanical Marie has always looked cheap and cheerful, with bargain-basement animation carried merely by its sheer innocent charm. The action sequences in this concluding episode are sadly about the worst the show has ever looked, with multiple still frames, blurring, and minimalistic visual effects failing to compensate for the almost complete lack of animation. It looks frankly amateur, plus there's the return of multiple of those oddly jarring painted images that everyone who sees them speculates could be AI-generated. I'm unaware if this has ever been confirmed either way, but regardless, many of these scenes look bad.

Once Marie returns to her beloved, she's resolute in her decision that as soon as she restores his memory, she'll admit her lies to him and leave forever. So it's no wonder that amnesiac Arthur, who still values Marie's presence, refuses to take the antidote, intuiting that “something bad will happen” if he does. Yet Marie boldly takes matters into her own hands, pouring the antidote into her mouth and transferring it to Arthur via a goodbye kiss. Arthur's brain is instantly rewound to last week's bathroom scene, and he suddenly remembers everything…

Of course, Arthur was never going to let his beloved non-robotic maid run from his love, chasing after her, declaring that he never fell in love with her because she was a robotic maid, but because of the person she is. He rejects the crazy logic that she must leave because of her lies, when he counters that those lies were kindnesses that made him happy. Their long-awaited reconciliation is everything I hoped it would be – tearfully emotional.

I'm not totally convinced that the last-minute amnesia plot line was the best way to manoeuvre these two lovestruck doofuses into a place where they could finally, honestly admit their feelings to one another, but at least it leads to a climactic wedding scene where all of the ancillary cast are invited, yes, even the horrible ones. I'm not sure how to feel about Arthur handing over control of the family firm to Maynard. I don't think he deserves it, plus his incompetence is likely to drive the family to bankruptcy within a single generation. Perhaps Isabel will keep him on the straight and narrow with the regular application of (in this situation only) justifiable domestic violence. This doesn't even stop him from sending assassins to kill Arthur, merely stating that he and Marie enjoy it, as if fending off murderous hired killers were a harmless hobby.

Arthur's happy to see his dad and his inexplicable robotic dogs (is that where the idea for a robotic maid came from?), and it turns out he was the narrator all along. Finishing things off with Marie princess-carrying Arthur while jumping off the balcony down to the wedding party below is about as tone-perfect an ending as possible. Even as his wife, she'll keep protecting and supporting him in the manner to which he has become accustomed. It's an endearingly daft ending to an endearingly daft show. While its visual aspects have never been more than barely passable, the cute characters, silly situations, and loopy humor have managed a great deal of the heavy lifting. Mechanical Marie is hardly anime of the year, let alone anime of the season, but it's been an enjoyable ride I've been glad to take.

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Mechanical Marie is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.