Kaiba Episode 7 - A Man Who Doesn’t Stay In Memories
Vanilla, knowing his days are somewhat numbered now he is continually flouting the regulations of the police force, takes “Chroniko” to the planet Nene, and shows her to the ghostly submerged moon of Rivera where memories are kept alive only through the use of a computer. Kaiba sneaks away to look through the copied memories of Gel and discovers that it was indeed Neiro inside his body - except that all her memories of Kaiba in the Warp body, and most of her other memories, have had Popo’s face painted over them. All except the memory of Warp killing Neiro, that is. There is little time to reflect, however, as Vanilla’s clumsiness (and a little meddling from HyoHyo) destroys the system keeping Rivera submerged, and the police are hot on Vanilla’s trail in a tragic chase back to Nene…
Kaiba makes me sad. Sad that I don’t really have any creativity left in me. Sad that I don’t have the kind of brain that can dream up planets encased in water projected by a computer with strange musical instrumets, or giant yellow cats with permanent smiles and cohorts of evil creatures. I am consistently and constantly amazed at the stuff dreamt up for this show, and even when the writing’s not so hot or the animation gets a bit too idiosyncratic for me it still elevates the show above virtually everything else that’s on at the moment - Macross Frontier comes close to the same levels of creativity but in a slightly artificial manner. Without wishing to denigrate Satelight in any way at all, they achieve so many wonderful things with computer trickery and sophistication (with a healthy dose of fan-pandering), whereas Yuasa and his team just seem to let their pencils and brains go crazy.
Back to the episode, which leaves me emotionally conflicted. It’s hard to know what to feel for Vanilla - it really depends on how old Chroniko’s supposed to be I think, and whether or not you sympathise with his delusions (as the end of the episode shows he’s clearly not of sound mind!). This episode is deliberately manipulative to make you feel sorry for him, and gives him a beautiful send-off, but he’s still a bit creepy if you ask me.
I’m loathe to discuss anything plotwise because there’s still so much to ask - and more questions being raised, like what exactly Popo’s motives are. Those of you up to date on the show probably have all the answers, damn you - at least there’s another three week break for me to get caught up in…
June 22nd, 2008 at 4:35 am
Personally I didn’t know what to think at the end of the episode. This it what makes Kaiba so awesome. I thought Vanilla was disgusting, he seems to be a pedo and he killed some other characters earlier pretty much without hesitation. He seemed to like Chroniko only because she was a cute girl.
But then they showed a different side of him, and you can see that he is not entirely bad.
Concerning the story, Kaiba looks like he is Warp and maybe the terrorists took his memory? but else … no idea