Once again I must apologize for getting this post out as late as it is, but English sub releases were delayed and as I’m not one of the badass raw-watchers, I was left with little choice but to sit tight. Episode 8 of Chaos;HEAd is probably the weakest link thus far both animation- and content-wise, but it is rather straightforward and contains some important hints about Rimi and Shogun.
Since a lot of shit went down in the previous episode, I recommend watching through the short narrated recap at the start, unless you remember everything that happened as clear as day. The episode itself starts with security camera footage being inspected by one of the police investigators working on the New Gene-cases. We see a person carrying a green backpack, a Porter for the Noah II device as we learned in the previous episode, being attacked by Sena and her Di-Sword (Real-Booted, so it’s visible). She chases him down and destroys his backpack, after which ripples appear on the image and Sena disappears – only to reappear a moment later and then disappearing again.
At school Takumi is depressed and worried as Rimi still appears to be missing. Soon Kozue appears and tells him that Sena is asking for him – apparently the time to raid N.O.Z.O.M.I is at hand. Like any sane person with an instinct of self-preservation, Takumi tries to refuse but eventually Kozue’s loli tears make things too awkward for him to stay in the classroom. As he makes an escape with her to the school gate, the two run into Sena. Once again Takumi insists on sitting out the raid, but eventually Sena’s warning about N.O.Z.O.M.I’s intention to track down Gigalomaniacs-users and a hint that he might find some answers to the questions bothering him convince Takumi to tag along.
Meanwhile the police investigators are visiting Momo-chan, the expert on G-Errate (or GE-rate, hell I’m confused with all this) phenomenon. She explains that the GE-rate has a tendency to spike up every weekend, as it reads on a graph her computer displays. One of the latest spikes took place during a small-scale earthquake (Shindo 3 on JMA scale), which mysteriously took the lives of 8 people despite being rather weak (deaths shouldn’t happen until Shindo 5, refer to the table here). The quake we witnessed at the end of episode 6 is also shown and interestingly a strong electro-magnetic wave was detected at the same time, which wiped out several computers. Official explanation states that the EMW was caused by the quake, but Momo-chan believes the truth might be the other way around – the earthquake was caused by the wave and as such might have been caused by man instead of being a natural phenomenon. This quake was Shindo 5 in strength and although at this level of intensity some deaths are expected, as many as 118 people were killed. So we end up with two important points here: Quakes related to the GE-rate seem to be of an artificial origin and they are causing considerably more deaths than their intensity would suggest. Also, it seems that some things that took place during the latest quake such as sky turning white have not been reported in the mass media, giving us a reason to believe that some cover-up is taking place behind the scenes. However, Momo-chan hints that she was unable to find any proof of such between companies and the government. The younger investigator sure makes a suspicious face when the unexpected death tolls are explained. Might be just me, but I think he’s up to something.
We leave the investigators brainstorming and switch back to our heroic trio Takumi, Sena and Kozue as they are ready to infiltrate N.O.Z.O.M.I. Sena has obtained information about Noah II’s location within the building from someone, probably the Porter we saw at the beginning of the episode. As a rather peculiar infiltration strategy the three waltz in through the front door, but the security guards act as if they were employees. Sena explains that she has already taken control of their vision to have them see the three as a group of executives instead of suspicious-looking, sword-carrying teens. So far so good.
Now the scene switches to what seems to be a hospital room somewhere. Someone’s sitting in a wheelchair holding a book – yup, you got it right, it’s none but Shogun himself. The door opens and lookie lookie – Rimi steps in! She tells Shogun that Takumi should be erased because she thinks he’s dangerous but Shogun seems to be against the idea as there is something he needs Takumi to do. Rimi asks him about some dream he’s been having – is Shogun a prophet or something? Seriously gais, what’s going on? In any case, it’s clear that Rimi fears that Takumi will eventually erase Shogun and that she wants to “awaken” before that happens. Shogun, however, seems to be totally okay with this.
Takumi, Sena and Kozue are exploring the depths of the N.O.Z.O.M.I building looking for Noah II. As Sena points out, the lack of employees around gives a good reason for suspicion – as anyone even a bit familiar to anime or entertainment in general knows, this hardly is a good sign. And Chaos;HEAd makes no exception – as soon as the trio stumbles upon the Noah II device, the machine lights up and the grey-haired guy familiar from the previous episode appears – the president of Nozomi Technology, Norose Genichi. Meanwhile it looks like Ayase has disappeared from the hospital.
Norose greets Sena and it’s clear that the two aren’t meeting for the first time. Also, he uses Hatano instead of Aoi as her last name. Takumi notices the difference but has little time to be confused about it, as Sena real-boots her Di-Sword with an obviously murderous intentions. Not very surprisingly Norose reaches out and grabs a Di-Sword of his own and the two engage in a fierce duel. However, it appears that Sena has an upper hand, as Kozue is telepathically relaying her information on Norose’s movements. Soon enough Sena’s fierce attack sends Norose falling flat on his ass, but it’s not like a bad guy would go down this easy.
As well as it worked, Norose has already figured out how trick of Kozue reading his mind and real-boots a bunch of mirrors around her. As she looks into one of the mirrors, she has a delusion of being surrounded by people holding up mirrors at her and repeatedly asking “Who are you?“, which makes her cower in fear. As Takumi WTF’s, Norose explains that she had a similar experience in her past which caused her to be unsure of her own identity and made her unable to speak. Sena runs to her rescue but is stopped by a puppy dog that suddenly appears out of thin air. Apparently she’s scared to death by dogs and is rendered completely helpless as the puppy licks her face (seriously, what the fuck is this scene?). However, it appears that this Sena was just a delusion as another one suddenly appears, destroys the mirrors around Kozue and comforts her.
Sena stands up to face Norose once again and several steel chains shoot from her Di-Sword at him, pinning him down. Unfortunately this soon backfires as Norose turns the chains into snake-like ropes that quickly bond Sena, making her unable to move. Norose shoots a fireball along the rope to finish her off, but Kozue leaps into action just in time and cuts the rope to get Sena out of the way. She then proceeds to attack Norose, buying Sena some time to recover from the attack. As she is gasping in pain, Takumi gets a delusion all of a sudden.
This appears to be a vision of Sena’s past, where we see a research experiment taking place. A woman sits in a comfy room being observed by a group of scientists from an adjacent room, among whom seem to be Sena’s father and Norose. The woman in the room, who is wearing a funky-looking helmet and embracing a baby, is revealed to be Sena’s mother and once again the name Tenseishinkoukai pops up as Norose is speaking – seems that whatever it is, Sena’s father is involved in it. Sena, who is among the observation group as well, asks what exactly is going on and who the baby is, to which Norose answers that the woman is currently watching a pleasant dream – or a delusion perhaps. Looks like this experiment is part of the research for Noah II system. However it seems that awakening to the brutal reality is also part of the experiment and despite Sena’s father’s protests, the helmet his wife is wearing is powered down. With her eyes fixed on the baby her expression becomes terrified and she babbles “Mana-chama!“…except that instead of a baby she’s holding something that probably used to be a baby, but now looks more like a dried body with completely blank eyes (baby Shogun?). As her mother is crying out in terror Sena gets a fit and tries to scream out to her but her voice is blocked the glass in between. Scientists drag Sena away while Norose tells them to treat her well because of her value as a sample. As she screams “Unforgivable!” at Norose and her father, the vision ends and Takumi wakes up to the present.
Surrounded by fire, wherever the hell it came from and how it can burn on plain steel floor, Kozue and Sena are facing Norose who concludes that since he has Sena’s sample data she has no further value for him. However, before he has a chance to strike a finishing blow the fire disappears and the floor is covered with still water. Ayase comes for the rescue! Holy crap this tune, who the hell thought it would fit the situation…reminds me of the German medieval movie with 80′s disco music as BGM. As she utters “Cocytus” the water starts freezing around Norose, quickly covering him completely. Deciding not to make a clean escape and instead just stand around and babble, Ayase explains that she was guided by the Great Will to help out the friends of the Dark Knight – which I guess means Takumi. After mumbling something about preventing the resurrection of some evil god king Gladior, she faints.
Suddenly both Sena and Kozue seem to have noticed Norose and engage…each other! Accompanied by evil laughter Norose breaks free of the ice and explains to confused Takumi that the girls see each other as him. To spice things up a bit, he also made them unable to see anyone else and feel great rage at him. Takumi comes to the realization he should have had long since – this shit wouldn’t have happened if he had just taken Seira-tan’s advice and stayed in the container playing EnSu all day long. Norose seems to be aware of Takumi’s inability to use his powers and obviously wanting to find out what he’s got, he approaches the terrified nerd. As he attempts to strike the killing blow, however, Sena appears and blocks his attack – did Takumi use his powers subconsciously to break the delusion Norose used on the girls?
While Sena engages the surprised Norose, Kozue slices the Noah II device into next week. As the device goes boom Norose’s body becomes a transparent, fuzzy image suggesting that he was a delusion all along. Before disappearing he tells Takumi that his awakening should happen some time soon. The bad guy is far from being dealt with though and soon he speaks out via an intercom system. The device destroyed was not Noah II itself but a prototype and the person our trio fought was just a copy of Norose created using it but weaker than the original because of the prototype’s limited power. With unconscious Ayase around the trio decides to call it a day and get her back to the hospital.
On the next day at school Takumi is surprised by Rimi, who seems to have concluded her meeting with Shogun, and our poor number one nerd is moved to tears by her appearance. It looks like Misumi has decided to forget about the deal with Takumi and Ayase and joins the two as well. Putting up a stupid smile, Takumi thinks that things are back to the way they were – but as we got a glimpse of Rimi doing business with Shogun I hardly think Takumi’s life is going anywhere but back to the same old. To conclude the episode we see Norose having a monologue about wanting another Gigalomaniacs-sample, probably meaning Takumi, for Noah II’s CPU.
As I stated in the first paragraph, this episode was a rather weak show. The fighting scene that takes majority of the episode’s run is rather poorly executed with stiff and inconsistent animation. The strength of Chaos;HEAd is definitely the creeping atmosphere and developing mystery rather than action and I sure hope Madhouse realizes this soon. All in all I’m rather disappointed at Kozue/Sena-arc and I’m glad that it seems to have concluded for now. I have expressed my wish to have more action and less talk in To Aru Majutsu no Index – well, for Chaos;HEAd I have exactly the opposite recommendation. Less action, more talk. That’s all I have for this week folks.
