Tokyo 24th Ward

Episode 5

"There's absolutely no need to sympathize with terrorists," Koki intones at the beginning of this week's Tokyo 24th Ward, coming off of the previous episode which sympathetically introduced us to the character who was revealed to be a terrorist, on behalf of an area with very sympathetic circumstances for fostering said terrorist, and going into this episode which further details why Kunai the Terrorist is, in fact, extremely sympathetic. Benefit of the doubt though, right? Koki's the law-abiding end of the ideological spectrum this show is so dead-set on illustrating, so perhaps his side of things turns out to be flawed or undercut by the end? No, I don't know why you're still expecting deeper things from this show at this point, as Koki orders Kunai shot dead by the end exactly as he pushed for, and this is treated like the hard but correct choice to make. But thank goodness all those rich people who were shooting at Shu earlier were saved!

I recognize that it's easy to be glib about the clash of economic cultures supposedly at the center of this story's conflict, but that's down to Tokyo 24th Ward doing such a piss-poor job of presenting it with even an attempt at balance. The majority of this episode revolves around detailing Kunai's past as it connects with Ran, and explaining his motives and methods for how he wound up seeking to blow up the S.S. Gentrification. There is a brief allusion early on to the possibility that Kunai's descent was out of a lacking commitment to the actual ideals of Ran and the DoRed crew, instead simply wanting to confirm himself as being 'Special' in some way. But then the gateway to this intermingled drug and terrorism plot is confirmed as originating from a healing biometric music app that Kunai created, particularly using it to soothe his ailing grandmother! So even that degree of personal nuance is immediately thrown out.

Instead, Kunai's personal isolation and turn to violent problem-solving is presented as mere miscommunication: The idea that the rest of his friends would blame him for the program he wrote being rewritten as a violence-inducing drug. But the storytelling of this idea jumps through so many hoops to make sure that we, the audience, knew that Kunai wasn't really at fault, that there's no way to take his hang-ups as anything serious beyond obvious mechanical fuel for the perfunctory violence of his dramatic death at the end. It'd be like if The New York Times turned Wordle into a delivery method for evil narcotic ASMR after they bought it from Josh Wardle. Everyone would know who the villain was in that scenario and may even be rooting for Josh to go vigilante afterwards.

But Tokyo 24th Ward can only articulate the world's stupidest moral dilemmas, so Ran's efforts at amassing all this information on Kunai must be opposed by Koki's policing in defense of socialites who don't even seem to want to be saved that much. Much as I actually enjoy the mechanics of Koki's power to always select the correct option in a dialogue tree, there's something inherently funny about the fact that even he has to circumvent department policy and rely on plants of 'false' information and reports to get SARG's forces to be utilized in a remotely effectual way. The casino donors are the type that shirk a terrorism warning from the police by saying laws don't apply to them, then shoot up their own boat trying to take out the guy who was attempting to get the bomb off of it. I didn't think it was possible to be doubly out of empathy for community-wrecking rich people, but here we are. That lack of interest in even articulating 'the other side' that Kunai is being sniped supposedly in defense of turns the entire portion on the ship into a boondoggle, exacerbated by the confirmation that Taki (or Tarki, Funimation's subs can't seem to make up their mind), the villain from the previous arc, was wrapped up in there too! So I'm not sure how well the show thinks it's being 'fair and balanced' in presenting its arguments beyond the fact that Koki's approach unilaterally wins in the end anyway.

Competing with the utter meaninglessness of the sociological messaging in this episode is the nonsensical order in which all those plot beats are actually delivered. The lynchpin point of Kunai's biometrics app isn't brought up until way late into all the other clues being uncovered, despite it being something all the characters in the show were aware of before now. "You should've let us know sooner" Kinako says in flashback. No kidding. The sequence of how Kunai got to selling the app to Tarki, and how that ties in with other aside clues we did pick up in the previous episode, fumbles together into a goofily overt number of deductive points to connect us to the already-known answer of "Kunai is the terrorist." The train of free word-association we hear Ran go through with his supposedly-superpowered intelligence to get to this is some BBC Sherlock shit. The show can't even fit some of its mechanical details together properly. The last episode had Koki make a big point about how Hazard Cast didn't work in Shantytown because cPhones with advanced sensors couldn't be distributed to the immigrants there. But then this week the big reveal is that the mystery drug ripping through Shantytown was a program that operated using, that's right, advanced sensors in cPhones.

"I can't protect criminals," Koki intones at the end of this week's episode. It's a laugh given that we know the drug-dealing, land-sharking rich people on the ship are hardly law-abiding either, but of course Tokyo 24th Ward doesn't have the knowing nuance to actually articulate that hypocrisy. The best it can offer is Ran trying to talk Kunai down with the base argument of "This isn't how we do things" because killing is badong. Sure, everyone feels real mopey about the whole affair afterwards, but it doesn't seem like any of the characters, nor the writer, nor the audience, walked away actually having learned anything about the ethics of these supposedly hard choices. There's a dark irony to Tokyo 24th Ward's invocation of ideals and belief systems, since watching it mostly drives me to nihilism: None of this matters, it's all just the most basic of constructed drama stalling until the actual machinations of the plot make themselves apparent to the characters. They're given the illusion of free choice over who lives and dies in these situations, when the only thing they're actually killing is time.

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Tokyo 24th Ward is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Chris is a freelance writer who appreciates anime, action figures, and additional ancillary artistry. He can be found staying up way too late posting screencaps on his Twitter.