The Darwin Incident

Episode 9

There are plenty of mysteries driving the story of The Darwin Incident. What were the exact circumstances of Charlie's creation? What is the ALA actually trying to accomplish? Why is Rivera dressed like Kazuma Kiryu for this story arc? Compelling black boxes to hope to peer inside, I'll admit, in ways the show's attempts at sociopolitical commentary haven't consistently engaged me. As this arc gets underway, it's specifically dialing up those thriller components with a tighter focus on the characters, how they're tied together, and how that propels them in the shifting social landscape of the alternate universe they occupy.

Granted, this is still The Darwin Incident I'm talking about here, so it's going to make these efforts in the bluntest ways possible. It's not even obfuscating the mystery-box nature of its writing, as Rivera's explanation of his ultimate goal is to open a meta mystery box for the whole of humanity, visualized as Judith opening the doors of Bluebeard's Castle in the opera of the same name. The FBI agents introduced last week discuss the mysteries powering the plot thus far at the beginning of this episode, and by the end, Rivera is teasing some shocking info, surprisingly lurking in Lucy's backstory.

The episode naturally cuts off before detailing what Lucy might actually have going on that could light a fire under her role in the story. I'm not going to completely count out the possibility that The Darwin Incident will manage a complete 180 from me on the character after all this time. But I'll give it a 50% chance of doing some poorly considered, hacky bullshit instead. To her credit, Lucy is currently working an unseen angle with Phil, which foreshadows her pulling some kind of win out of this situation she's found herself kidnapped into. And I appreciate that she's still getting to utilize some agency in all this, that loaded twist indicating she'll be focal through all of it. But as with so much else in The Darwin Incident, it's Schroedinger's storytelling—neither good nor bad until the ultimate reveal of where it's actually going with it.

With that tone in mind, the reveal in this episode is ironically about as vacuous as I would've hoped a show that thrives on grounded, ripped-from-the-headlines ideas would be better than. Anybody could have guessed that Rivera's agenda with the ALA wasn't a commitment to animal rights. But rather than using the group to advance some sort of personal empowerment or enrichment scheme, Rivera's simply a grandiose lunatic. I often refer to anime antagonists "doing an Instrumentality" when their plans amount to basically copying Gendou Ikari's homework on having humanity ascend to a higher, unified evolutionary plane from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Rivera's goal, described as it is at this point, is basically a vague, sociological form of doing an Instrumentality—using Charlie to break barriers of human/animal interactions in the world and ACCELERATE MANKIND'S EVOLUTION, etc, etc.

It doesn't really work as any sort of allegorical commentary on freedom fighter/terrorist organizations having their movements co-opted—as Lesley points out, Rivera's planned path means the ALA will end up achieving their goal of animal emancipation one way or the other. And positioning Rivera as a pointedly insane sociological accelerationist does not, at this point, let him serve as salient commentary on any currently relevant real-world belief systems. It's simply a way for him to exist outside the scope of the other movements The Darwin Incident is invoking while positioning him with overarchingly vague antagonism that the writing can also gesture at and go "Oooooh, he might have a point though!" Maybe there are more compelling details lurking in those questions discussed by the FBI agents: why Rivera waited 15 years to reactivate the ALA and went about it the way he did at this stage in Charlie's life. But those are mystery boxes as much for the technical plotting as they are for the thematics of the show. They're as much there to raise eyebrows as this episode tacitly broaching the subject of potential pseudo-interspecies romance between Charlie and Lucy—something it was reasonably going to need to address at some point, but which similarly doesn't really go anywhere in this entry's discussion. Instead, the audience is left with the show simply gesturing at the vague shape of grander ambitions.

It's annoying, but also about what I've come to expect from The Darwin Incident at this point. And it keeps the thriller side of the show moving strongly. I joke about it, stringing along mysteries like Lucy's, but that kind of element keeps me immediately interested in what could be coming next for the show. Focusing on more direct plotting and action also lets the anime thrive way more presentation-wise this week than it has previously. The dry, procedural look of the show has nightfall over it to deliver moody scenes of Lucy conversing with her captors in the cabin. Charlie going all Predator on the ALA goons in the forest is smartly paced out, playing on him starting with minimal equipment and co-opting that of his enemies as he defeats them. There are even dynamic color-scheme shifts to the setting, still predicated on in-universe effects, namely Charlie's flare gun. This continues to be the sort of thing The Darwin Incident is good at, oddly enough.

The mystery doors will likely be opened in next week's episode, doing more to crystallize how I'll actually let myself feel about this stretch of The Darwin Incident. The show's nature makes it odd to review weekly, I'll tell you that. But for that part, this week's episode was one on an upswing. The goofier indulgences let me sideline my criticisms of the anime's attempts to criticize/satirize/whatever American sociopolitics, but then that also means I'm critical of it nebulously not engaging on that level.

Rating:

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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.