The Darwin Incident

Episode 5

Despite the overdramatic title of "The Struggle For Rights", this is, perhaps necessarily, a more low-key episode of The Darwin Incident. Well, most of it is. The opening continues with the tense standoff at the police station, as Charlie, his family, Lucy, and the cops negotiate his personhood and the legality of actions by and against him in real time. And coming off the surprising salience of last week's episode, this entry swings with more of a miss for the anime's sociopolitical ambitions. It's all preceded by Lucy managing to give cagey cop Phil pause by whipping out her smartphone and recording him abusing his powers. "You'll get bashed for this online," she warns, as if this incident were still taking place in anything resembling the real United States.

Phil, actually being threatened by the specter of accountability, intersects with his Sheriff, Roy Navarro, who appears and reasonably diffuses the situation by letting Charlie and pals go. That and a later scene between the cops seems set up to portray Phil specifically as "one bad apple" of a cop who's prejudiced and obsessed with the humanzee's existence, to the detriment of "reasonable" police work that could otherwise be done. It feels like an attempt to balance the depiction of law enforcement. Between that and the smartphone-recording bit, it comes off like it was written by someone who had heard about these sorts of things happening in America but wasn't up on how they actually played out. The cops wear body cameras now, Shun Umezawa, and spoiler alert, that hasn't made them or their adoring public treat suspects any better.

I got a dark chortle out of the appearance of Representative Linares, and her stated willingness to disregard Charlie's well-being in the name of "political strategy" and "the midterms". There's the considered question as to whether it would be fair for political leaders to throw a vulnerable minority under the bus if said minority encompassed exactly one person—and no, of course, it wouldn't be fair, but the so-called leaders in our reality have done the same with much larger groups who expected better of them.

That said, Charlie's singular minority status means things don't map out as functionally when The Darwin Incident actually tries to say something about animal rights. Charlie, the hypothetical concept of a "humanzee" itself, is but a thought experiment—one that would complicate questions of animal rights in a world where such a thing existed. But the fictional disconnect means our universe and the show's operate under completely different rules, so there's no point in proselytizing to potential viewers to sway them on the issue.

But The Darwin Incident is also not terribly interested in debating those points even from its own fictional position. The end of this episode brings back Gare, a militant vegan with a massive misanthropic streak, stemming from how he's treated for his beliefs (and, presumably, because his parents named him "Gare"). But his attempt to protest meat-eating on campus here prompts more of the same recycled paradoxical arguments from the pro-meat bullies, with few actual rebuttals offered—rebuttals that could potentially hold weight in a world where the humanzee exists. But the humanzee's not having it, as Charlie himself shrugs the whole thing off with a bored yawn by the episode's end.

It leaves most of the episode to mildly amusing sitcom antics in which Lucy tries to help Charlie make friends to shore up his social capital and potentially earn his rights in that titular struggle. And between Charlie's general disinterest in the whole thing and Lucy temporarily forgetting that she's not the greatest social butterfly herself, it makes for some entertainingly dry humor to cringe through. Lucy tries to chat up some dudes by agreeing when she hears them talking about how cool they think the Joker from The Dark Knight is, if you want to get an idea of what Umezawa's teen sociopolitical culture reference points are. Lucy also wryly quips to her mom that she's a "strong, independent woman" at one point. So The Darwin Incident's writing is remaining laughably blunt a lot of the time, even if that bluntness isn't being used for more intensive commentary like it was last week. At least Lucy winds up with the wherewithal to understand how she's projecting by the end, even as she also is aware of the dense social conservatism that comes from living in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. And she's animated, with a decent grasp of body language, in some of her grappling with these efforts; that's nice to see from the show's otherwise workmanlike efforts.

It's all that Lucy has actually done in The Darwin Incident after I remarked on her lack of contributions last week. The cop-phone-recording thing was a flop, but at least there was an effort, and these friend-making attempts bring out parts of her personality that contribute to the show's agenda and commentary. Ultimately, the value is that Charlie has her as a friend, after all, and that sincere connection shows it might attract some more well-meaning new friends as well. I'll give the episode props for making that work, even as the rest of it felt more like a pit-stop before the next, commentary-prompting upheaval.

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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.