Tokyo 24th Ward

Episode 9

I had previously mentioned how it felt like Tokyo 24th Ward was trying its damnedest to keep its ostensible main characters, the RGB boys, as cut off from understanding and agency in its plot as possible. Two out of three of them still have no idea what the KANAE system is or how it relates to the trolley-problem challenges they've been getting, being strung along as Koki was until answers are provided. So then this week's episode comes along and does provide some answers, but in the form of a full-flashback episode presented purely for the audience's benefit, and no actual revelatory effect on the characters or their motivations within the narrative. It's the same order-of-operations issue Tokyo 24th Ward has always had with its narrative, now multiplied by twenty years.

But sure, let's spend half an hour taking a detour with the show's adult characters to find out how they were incidentally connected and shaped by experiences that have led to them orchestrating this story. Where the present-day story of Tokyo 24th Ward has been about extreme expressions of socio-politics informed by technology, this flashback sees the characters more directly grappling with tech's impact on that society, and how much they allow it to have. It's a formative trolley-problem calculation of a self-driving car (an actual problem being grappled with in real-life, by the way) that brings together Kanae, Tsuzuragawa, and 0th, and post-consideration development of her statistical crime-prevention system that ends up with Kanae shelving the whole matter. She manages to bluntly state early on the point that the decisions of these kinds of systems are still based on human input, and thus can't be infallible to any tenable degree. That point had already been detailed with regards to the system and its effects on policing in Shantytown several episodes ago, so reiterating it so plainly this early into this exercise seems clear enough. But of course Kanae being the one person who Gets It means she's too good for this world, and won't be sticking around to steer that particular ship.

So much of this episode feels like the story working backwards to quantify components of the characters' personalities and politics through their densely-interconnecting origins. We could previously have gleaned that through their interactions with our supposed present-day main characters, but instead Tokyo 24th Ward feels the need to demonstrate how, say, Tsuzuragawa came to be Koki's chauffeur/secretary through a succession of Wookie life debts, or insinuate how her comatose sacrifice last episode could be construed as her finally atoning for her guilt over the accident that injured 0th. Do you get it? That these people's disparate misunderstood mistakes leading to the sociological complications in the present can only be overcome by the synergy of RGB the writing is pushing those boys towards just comes off less like a symbol of cooperation and more like another indictment of kids being conscripted to clean up the messes of the previous generation.

The apex of this is the arc we get for Gori in this episode. The dude basically exists to react to the various tragedies in his life in whatever way will carry him through to becoming the 24th Ward's sociological supervillain. The automation he champions is proven flawed very early in this episode (as it has been through this whole show), but the writing acts like piling familial traumas on him is all it needs as an explanation for why we see him push forward with it anyway. Yet again: Order of operations. Had Tokyo 24th Ward demonstrated the tragedies that befell Gori first, only to later reveal the imperfections in the system he deployed in response, there might be a sense of sympathy there. But instead this show has already spent eight episodes hammering home that the KANAE system is a bugged program beyond practical use, so reinforcing that its entire genesis was conceived in the heated, misguided moment of a similarly flawed individual does it no favors. The best it can do is let Gori spit out some supposedly-sympathetic dialogue indicating that he would have donated his own brain to the computer if he could, or that no really, he felt super bad about shoving his daughter's comatose body in there to make it work. No comment on if his drug-trafficking gentrification scheme was also a tough choice he made for the social good, or if he's just taking out his frustrations on the dirty poors who killed his wife.

That's the problem with a whole episode like this, a flashback that explains things purely as justification to the audience with no immediate effect on our actual main plot or characters. The only remotely revelatory piece of information is the absolutely hilarious implication that Asumi's consciousness in the system is foisting these choices on RGB as some sort of decision-making calibration, like a kind of absurd trolley-problem captcha. But even then the boys are no more privy to the past that led to this present than before, making this come off like a desperate appeal to us instead: Entirely an exercise in trying to convince the audience of how complex a moral paradox this whole situation actually is. The thing is, if its story had really been so compelling up to this point, it wouldn't have needed to make a play like this. And worse, that play isn't even successful, because it spends all this time articulating in-universe character motivations that could have been inferred, rather than trying to make any compelling conceptual arguments. With basically no new information or ideas, it feels like a huge waste of a time in a show that's already regularly felt like it was wasting our 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.