Touring After the Apocalypse

Episode 5

What the hell happened to the moon? Touring After the Apocalypse continues to add bizarre hints about mankind's mysterious fate, but so far, nothing's adding up to anything obviously coherent. Mount Fuji has a new, smoking crater. An enormous, unnaturally-shaped tree-thing dominates the Tokyo skyline. Yoko knows to check water sources for radiation, suggesting the possibility of a previous nuclear conflagration. Something is mutating the animals. There's no evidence that any humans have survived the civilisation-ending disaster(s), and the streets are full of abandoned vehicles. Now we see the moon is missing an enormous chunk. What caused this? A weapon of mass destruction? A collision of heavenly bodies? A clumsy Super Saiyan?

Although this episode starts as a sweet slice-of-life tale with our plucky duo wading through mudflats, struggling to catch fish, and demonstrating how to pitch a tent on paved surfaces (use rocks instead of pegs, apparently. I don't remember that from Laid Back Camp), it later becomes the most apocalyptic installment so far. The enormous, damaged moon is only the beginning. Yoko's inexplicable uneasy feeling becomes a portent of doom, as she and Airi face down multiple tornado/waterspout things, enormous waves, high winds, and terrifyingly close lightning strikes as they foolhardily weather a dreadful storm on their little motorbike.

Yoko either has a death wish or is terrible at judging danger. I'm pretty sure the last thing you should do during a raging thunderstorm is to set out on a motorbike into a wide open space. This particular wide open space is the 4.4km-long Aqua Bridge that leads to Umihotaru, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. In our so-far-not-yet-apocalyptic world, this is a multi-story car park and shopping mall with a 360-degree view of the sea, and it's also one of the two entry points for the 9.6km Aqua Tunnel, the other being the city of Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture. I wonder if they're heading to the tunnel next episode, but surely it's flooded?

Before then, they'll need to contend with what looks to be a horde of hungry rodents lurking in the shadows, as the show leaves us on its first dramatic cliffhanger. (I'm not counting the SAO jumpscare from episode 3.) I'm sure they'll probably escape this particular pickle relatively unscathed, but I can't help worrying when Airi tells Yoko she wants to keep travelling with her forever, rather than ever returning to the bunker, even for motorbike repair supplies. If that isn't a giant existential death flag, I don't know what is. I don't want this adorable twosome to perish in some kind of melancholically tragic way in the final episode, but I wonder if I should steel my heart against this prospect.

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Touring After the Apocalypse is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.