Tokyo 24th Ward

Episode 6

I may have found Tokyo 24th Ward's efforts at 'balance' or 'nuance' to its tale of terrorism last week laughable, but credit here: Writer Vio Shimokura has the presence to follow through on the point that even a failed terrorist attack would only be the beginning of things. Given this episode's revelations about more of the government's Hazard Cast system's technical workings, we're really driving forward with the question of how much of these events they actually set in motion purposefully. Drug trafficking into Shantytown provokes pushes for law-enforcement crackdown and forced redevelopment, which prompts retaliatory terrorist attacks from affected individuals like Kunai, which only ups the excuses for tightened surveillance the leaders and their Hazard Cast system mobilized as the genesis of this whole setup. The question now, with some firmly damning revelations to the audience about who's running this show and how, and Koki's seeming siding with the oppressive side of the law, is how much Tokyo 24th Ward still wants to push for a 'middle' path between Law and Chaos, or if its narrative will take an actual side before this is all over.

For all my snarkiness towards the show's seeming centrism previously, I'll admit it might be a good time for me to step back in that evaluation here. In the interest of that aforementioned nuance, I'll admit that as of now I can't be so sure I can tell where the communicated thematics of this plot are actually going. A lot of that has to do with the revelations, and style within, of Koki's side of the plot and Hazard Cast. Like we all already knew Mayor Gori Suido was shady as hell, but here he lets Koki in on the fact that his citizen-spying supercomputer, named after his dead wife, is powered by the corpse of his dead daughter suspended in a tube. Dude's clearly angling for the Gendou Ikari Memorial Father Of The Year Award. It's hard to imagine that Ran's DoRed counter-faction of law-opposing art renegades could be presented as "Just as bad' as SARG at this point save for it being revealed that their spray-paint was made of, like, ground-up orphans or something. I've remarked before on Tokyo 24th Ward having the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and its deployment of this computer-corpse reveal has me conceding that perhaps it did always know this side was the Bad Guys.

Granted, that just means the show continues to trade on "Things we basically already knew" as fodder for dramatic revelations in its oddly-ordered structure. Alongside finding out that the organized surveillance state might, in fact, not be in everyone's best interest, this episode also devotes a chunk of time to a broadcast released by the late Kunai detailing his backstory which we got filled in on last week. Part of the point of this is of course to make apparent to the characters in-series how the broader conspirators manipulated Kunai into giving everyone that sweet "D", but even that was something people like Ran had already figured out previously. Amusingly, finding out that Kunai programmed the Di-VA app that formed the basis for "D" sees no blowback from his former DoRed comrades, firmly rendering that supposed dramatic misunderstanding utterly needless.

What it does do is provide an outlet for the show's acknowledgement of how these sorts of events will always be co-opted by powerful governing bodies to advance their own agendas. Just on a local level, anyone who lived through the phone-tapping controversy in the wake of the 'War On Terror' in the U.S. will recognize the debate over allowing further smartphone surveillance, in the national interest, of course. But given how blatantly it swings Mayor Suido and SARG into heel territory with this episode, it just results in yet-another question of how well the story can leverage that kind of hashtag-topical invocation in getting its clunky political analysis across (the Mayor even straight-up refers to Kunai's broadcast of the insidious uses of cPhone technology as 'Fake News'). Basically, we're at a point now where it's pretty much impossible to see the government and its law enforcement as anything but pure antagonists, meaning I'm at least more curious now as to where the show is actually going with its eventual endgame statements on how these sorts of societies actually should be governed.

The wild card in that stacked-deck setup, and the one who gets the most focus in this episode, is Koki. The irony of him ending up aligning with the ostensible 'villains' at this moment is that I'm able to follow and understand his decision-making process more now than when he was simply acting as a mouthpiece for the conservative end of the show's sociopolitical spectrum. There's a through-line to the idea that the well-meaning advice he received regarding 'rules' from his mother at a formative young age would result in him agreeing to work with her morally-dubious computer legacy for a crime crackdown in the present. And to his credit, he's realistically spot-on in his rebuke of Shu's desperate wish for them all to just get along; Koki was directly responsible for the death of Ran's best friend. That's not the sort of thing that people with different beliefs can 'agree to disagree' on. It speaks to the broader understanding the show does seem to have of the insurmountability between its classes and coalitions, taking to task Shu's naive wish that the poor people who have to steal to survive be able to happily coexist with the cops who want to brutalize them. The progression of the story in this episode asserts that things have to change, and the events it arranged to get here, as contrived as they felt in the moment, at least feel realistically reacted to that way.

That assurance of a shifting status quo, at least, drives me to keep up my interest in following Tokyo 24th Ward. After the mess of its presentation last week, this one makes clear that it won't just be occupying a thematic middle ground in pursuit of illustrating its ideas, and is willing to place its characters on different, more objectively-regarded 'sides' as parts of the plot go on. Granted, it's still possible it'll wash out trying to balance everything again in the end, and so many parts still resonate with the most blunt storytelling force possible (at this point, the propensity for anyone Kozue gets close with to wind up dead is downright comical), but it's more interesting again.

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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.