Flipflap has been destroyed! Mimi has revealed herself! The end is nigh! With three episodes left to go, it appears that Flip Flappers is already barreling towards the finish line. So what bombshells are dropped in this, Flip Flappers’ second-from-penultimate episode!?!
Well, mostly a bunch of sad stories from long ago. Though we open with the direct aftermath of last episode’s Mimi reveal, the better part of this episode is spent elaborating on the shared history of Mimi, Papika, and Salt, giving us context for both the modern Flipflap organization and their nefarious nemeses. As with the last episode, this context often feels dramatically rushed, and the show’s structural messiness continues to add a sense of “and then this happened” shapelessness to the dramatic proceedings. We’ve reached the point where characters don’t necessarily exist in a shared physical reality so much as they inhabit a shared dramatic space, and thus characters like Salt will jump from vaguely defined location to vaguely defined location in whichever way the narrative demands.
I’d consider Flip Flappers’ lack of solidity a meaningful flaw at this point, but given the show’s own choices, I’m not sure its creators would agree. By this episode, its disregard for grounded storytelling priorities like a consistent world or a meaningful role for all characters introduced feels almost like its own sort of point – like a direct refutation of the worldbuilding-focused priorities of many other shows. Given how the reunion of Mimi and the organization Yayaka once represented goes, it seems hard to deny there’s at least a little gleeful mockery going on here.
That meeting is one of this episode’s most unusual scenes, and as a dramatic object in its own right, it’s a total and almost bizarrely clumsy failure. After building up Yayaka’s leaders as the mysterious antagonists responsible for all of Cocona and Papika’s troubles, these shrouded figures with all their rituals and monoliths are cast aside in mere moments. Ten long episodes of foreshadowing and worldbuilding are thus instantly discarded, treated as carelessly by Flip Flappers as they are by Mimi herself. This story does not care about these characters.
It’s a bold and strange choice, and as I said, it seems hard to read as anything short of a refutation of the science fiction worldbuilding details that often dominate narratives like this. This is not a story about the convoluted but ultimately solvable world of these scientists – this is a story about messy human emotions, about parents and children. In making this choice, Flip Flappers could be once again tipping its hat to Evangelion, which pulled a similar trick with its evocative but ultimately meaningless Christian symbology. Of course, Flip Flappers’ choice is much cheekier and more loaded – instead of carelessly tossing around Christian symbols that a general Japanese audience would likely just see as evocatively exotic, Flip Flappers is carelessly tossing around things like “the evil plan of the ostensible antagonists” and “the true nature of the amorphous,” which are just as irrelevant to its own goals, but are often considered sacred in the context of genre fiction.
This cavalier treatment of seemingly crucial narrative elements is summed up by the cult leader’s desperate question, “Where is the third child?” In Evangelion, the Third Child was Shinji Ikari, the actual protagonist of the series. Here in Flip Flappers, the third child is Nyunyu, an overdesigned and underdressed girl who was essentially created just to put pressure on Yayaka, and who now has nothing to do in the story at all. Having failed to accomplish literally any physical thing, Nyunyu will now spend the rest of Flip Flappers doing basically nothing – wandering around, making friends with Flipflap, and generally just enjoying an extended work vacation through the apocalypse.
Personally, as someone who’s often grumpily declared that “plot is details,” Flip Flappers’ own active disdain for worldbuilding and villainous explanations is understandable to me. But the fact that that’s not the default, or even standard, response to these choices isn’t meaningless. It is not “wrong” to care about worldbuilding in a narrative, even if worldbuilding and “we gotta reach the amulet” plot conceits and whatnot often don’t tend to interact that much with a story’s emotional or thematic thrust. Propulsive storytelling and coherent worldbuilding help us believe in all aspects of a story’s world, and many people will very reasonably be put off by Flip Flappers’ disregard for these things. I think Flip Flappers’ choice to disregard these things is valid, but I think it comes with meaningful consequences, and I believe a Flip Flappers that wasn’t quite so careless about these elements would ultimately be a better show. Building up this organization as a threat only to undercut both wastes time and betray’s the audience’s trust – if these things aren’t important, it’s generally better to make that clear from the start. There is only so much to gain by flipping off people you disagree with.
All that said, all this flagrant disregard for the significance of Yayaka’s secretive organization does give Mimi’s formal introduction that much more punch. Upon hearing the cult leader’s dream of merging Pure Illusion with the real world, Mimi states that Pure Illusion only exists for Cocona’s sake. Mimi’s words act as a natural echo of what this scene is doing in a narrative sense, denying the universality and classic scifi apocalypticism of this narrative, stating that no, this is a story about Cocona and her feelings. Lifted by dynamic layouts contrasting white pillars against Mimi’s green clovers, the scene is a striking statement of purpose for the act to come.
After destroying a nefarious scientific cabal intent on compressing the multiplicity of our internal perspectives into one horrific post-singularity future, Mimi at last commences with the real work: catching up with her ex. The two meet at the lakeshore outside the old laboratory, where Mimi states that she “had to protect Cocona because you didn’t.” In one more echo of Evangelion, Salt raises a gun at Mimi, taking the role of the vengeful, determined lover who once threatened Salt’s own doppelganger. And at last, we learn of the end of their mutual story, and the birth of Mimi as we know her.
The end of the first experimentation era was heralded by the creation of ELPIS, a device that would let the scientists direct which Pure Illusion Mimi and Papika would enter. Salt’s father goes first, but the experiment goes terribly wrong – after entering the gateway that we now know seems to contain repressed, subconscious memories and feelings, Mimi leaves Salt’s father a gibbering wreck. Given we see that same father directing the cult later on, it seems safe enough to guess that what Mimi did to Salt was categorically no different from what Papika and Cocona did to Iroha – she “fixed” him, and people are not meant to be fixed. Our scars are a part of us, and for Salt’s father, it seems the pain of the past was the only thing offering him the perspective necessary to see Pure Illusion as dangerous.
The failure of Salt’s father’s experiment leads to the total breakdown of both the lab structure and the relationship between our prior-era leads. This focus makes for a natural parallel with Evangelion’s own late-stage reveal of the melodrama informing its adult characters’ relationships, but comparing the two mostly just reveals how much sympathy Flip Flappers possesses for all of its characters. It would have been easy for Papika and Cocona to make Mimi’s mistake with Iroha, and though he undoubtedly regrets it, it’s hard to fault Salt for lashing out at Mimi in the wake of his father’s accident. When Cocona is recaptured with his own daughter in tow, he attempts to make things right – but sometimes, everyone can have the best intentions and things will still go wrong.
In the end, Mimi’s turn to violence is accompanied by the most sympathetic words this story can muster: “switch with me.” Echoing Iroha’s constant refrain from this show’s most devastating episode, Flip Flappers tethers Mimi’s suffering into its greater reflections on how we all compartmentalize our grief, and let other selves bear our heaviest burdens. We carry those selves with us, as real and immediate as our surface selves, and they inform all our actions, regardless of how tightly they’re secured behind those big red doors. As Mimi herself says “people have several faces, and so does Pure Illusion. And they’re all real.”
With Mimi still acting from within Cocona’s body, the final clash of this episode thus frames the violence parents inflict on their children in painfully literal terms. Salt, who was never there for Cocona, and Mimi, who wants to command Cocona utterly, wage war over their daughter’s future while her actual body bears the consequences. As Mimi attempts to wrap her daughter in a soft and fanciful cocoon, her father acts like true family for the first time, fighting to give his daughter the choices he never thought he had.
After a tumultuous episode of narrative scouring and tragic history, Flip Flappers’ eleventh episode ends on a few isolated sparks of hope. Both Salt and Mimi express an honest love for their daughter in their own ways: Mimi through the wish of her old self, and Salt through the abandonment of his self-reliance and empty pride. Yayaka and Papika make up, each of them finally trusting in the other’s concern for their mutual friend. And after being tempted by beautiful world after beautiful world, Cocona finds herself most comfortable in a very specific illusion: the world where she and Papika first met, the world where their shared feelings were born.
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