This week’s ERASED wasn’t a highlight, but it was still a strong episode, and perhaps most importantly it was the series’ most thematically cohesive episode yet. ERASED has been a show that more often than not rides wholly on execution to carry its general thriller narrative, but this episode connected Airi’s past to Satoru’s current circumstances and the overall climate of fear pervading this show, making a compellingly uncertain case for trust in the face of danger. In spite of being another outsourced one, this episode also worked well enough aesthetically – the red eyes remain a bit much, as I talk about in my review, but otherwise there was a solid sense of understated menace running through most of these scenes. ERASED is holding strong.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!
Oh right, this absurd backstory for her father
“Why couldn’t I believe him back then?”
“I realized that believing in people was my strong point”
Airi in the burning building
The manager arrives to help. Still gotta believe in people a little, right?
The villain really has become a “villain.” Killing the mother is understandable – killing all even vaguely associated characters is over the top
And so we possibly meet red-eyes dude
Ah, it’s the TV guy from the past. Who also is given red eyes, because we want to be sure he’s evil? What other purpose could the red-eyes device serve? To demonstrate people who aren’t trusted?
Ah, this was the number on his mother’s note
“Thinking it’s your fault after the fact is pointless”
His mom apparently did find out who did it
The TV guy brings up Kayo
Now the version of reality he lives in involved the shed incident
“He’s a crafty son of a bitch”
Following Airi now
More nice angled shots to create a sense of either claustrophobia or being watched, along with the music returning to the nice percussion-heavy stuff from before
So he tried to kill Airi because he figured she’d seen his face
The killer possibly killed Hiromi to throw people off the scent, since they’d assume the killer wouldn’t knowingly kill a boy
The TV man meets with Airi’s mother, the icon of what losing trust represents. “I believe in you, Airi”
And Airi basically sets herself up to be kidnapped again
“Getting Airi involved will only make it worse for her.” It’s true. Airi is a liability
Satoru taking the Yuuki role to some kids
“What’s an adult doing here at this time of day?” A society that has lost public trust, that has lost a sense of camaraderie and overall concern for your neighbor
“I’m glad you trust me”
Airi mentions a “Nishizono” who the manager has seen before, a city councilman
A story about a grim reaper who makes a scheduling mistake and kills a child, whose attempts to fix the situation only make things worse
“The stuff about other people is just the grim reaper’s subjective impression.”
And Satoru gets captured
“What would a hero say at a time like this?”
“Isn’t it hard fighting all on your own?”
“Thank you, Airi. I’m glad I trusted you.” In spite of the ultimate results, being happy about trust
Oh no redeyes!
I honestly thought you’d point out more scenes where they oversell the thriller aspects. I think it’s a given now, but some of the execution could have been better – like the part where Airi’s mother places her hand on Airi while she’s in the hospital’s convenience store. There was a disjunct in the music and the actual sense of surprise. Other than that, there were other weird compositional hiccups, like the use of text-over bubbles for the documents Satoru was reading from the computer. It seemed lazy and out-of-place for the tone of the show.
Even the act of calling up the TV reporter guy seemed out-of-sync. Even if you can imply it, there was no graceful temporal flow of events from “I just pulled a girl out of a burning building” to “hey, let’s call this number in my pocket”.
Otherwise, I like what you mentioned about modern day ideas of “trust” and how Satoru sees himself in Yuuki’s shoes. In a society that is underscored by anonymity and its accompanying sense of distrust (as a form of protection), the type of trust that is asked for by Satoru is a heavy one. Airi’s trust in him, and his trust in her, felt genuine and sorrowful at the same time.
“I honestly thought you’d point out more scenes where they oversell the thriller aspects.” – I was actually expecting him to do the same! Though I still enjoyed it, I thought the most recent episode was actually even more over-the-top with its melodrama than the preceding “sad scream” episode that drew Bob’s criticism previously. I’m suspicious that we should just expect more of it at this point – the author wants pained cries and protagonists dragging female allies from burning buildings. These have begun to feel more like willful stylistic choices than mistakes.
The one thing about the story that I still trip on is the whole impetus for the modern era stuff. The killer is totally freaking out over the situation for no really clear reason. Killing Satoru’s mother has forced the killer to target Airi (and in a totally splashy way), and now things are spiraling well out of their control.
(With Satoru in custody the killer has lost cover for any further actions against Airi and others, and there are enough people outside Satoru who are working on the issue to cause the killer serious problems. The killer doesn’t necessarily know this for sure, but if they’ve survived so far they must know that haste breeds mistakes and mistakes are deadly.)
Yeah, I know, it’s more about the atmosphere, but it irritates me when the atmosphere has a tinge of artificiality instead of being solid.