Review: Dimension W “The Possibilities of the Dead”

 

Overview.

One of the things that surprised me most for the Dub in the end credits is that they kept the original music from the Japanese version of the show intact just for this episode so far (As opposed to the Hispanic guitar solo in the first four episodes.)

The direction is really weird and hit-or-miss, yes, but I’m more positive about it because it’s not half-assed: most of the layouts are ambitious and the action scenes have a lot of good dynamism and weight. Even when the main character and Loser are running and doing sudden changes of direction in hallways felt exciting (and also not confusing because it’s an easy space to identify in your mind).
However, it’s true that its biggest problem is that it’s confusing, it tries to be so dynamic that sometimes it forgets we need to see the shots clearly in order to follow it well, and with a lot of closeups (and sudden switches from closeups to long shots), oblique shots are quick camera movements it’s hard to figure out.

But, I’m so used to see no weight or timing in many action scenes that makes them feel so bland even though they’re clear, that seeing this opposite angle is kind of refreshing and you can tell it’s ambitious, and it’s still fun, so I’ll hope it will learn how to keep the action scenes more clear and focused.

The pacing was a little quick, but this episode wrapped up this arc nicely. =D

Kyoma’s badass stats got another increase, with him dealing with the water monster, then dueling it out with the enemy, landing a beautiful kick to the face too!

It was tragic to see what Enamori had to go through. First, it was the ‘Cameraman’ who tried to assault her, in which she accidentally killed him in self-defense. Not long after that, she slipped, fell down a small slope and landed head-first into a boulder. Really unfortunate for her.

Mira’s role in this episode was solid, figuring out the way to escape her ordeal was to use logic that overruled the logic in the world that she was trapped in. When she recovered, Kyoma came in, royally pissed off with her, and tried to punch her as well. Amusingly, it backfired and she didn’t feel any pain at all. Contrast to the end of the episode, where Kyoma lands a heavy pat on the back of her head, which she DID feel the hit. Kyoma learnt his lesson here. =)

With Mira’s curiosity about Kyoma’s past and his hatred of the coils, I wonder if the next arc will shed more light into his past? I’m hoping that it will.

Bare with me the next part´s gonna be confusing and long:

Judging by the events in this episode, the numbers kind of store one reality in the 4th dimension.
There are multiple reasons why this doesn´t make any sense.
To store a part of reality it would require W to have 3 (if you count time as a dimension,4) dimensions aswell.

Either that, or W is less of an additional 4th (5th with time) dimension, rather an alternate universe, which can be used to store a part of reality.
By that logic, W would be sort of a “backup dimension” for our current world, so when nothing is stored, the dimension is empty.

And do you know what doesn´t exist in an empty universe? That´s right, energy, the very thing the coils are used to obtain from said dimension.
Long story short, you can´t have both, a reality storage and an endless supply of energy.

Either I´m over-analyzing this a bit to much and the authors of the story didn´t think about it as much as I did or they think a 4th (5th) dimension wouldn´t be affected by our laws of physics.

Barely understood what was going on, it was pretty rushed.

The alternate universe shit just got me so lost along with the blonde haired bat girl who was connected to Loser and is his possible daughter because she called him papa? But then that guy who was standing at the edge of the woods was the one actually talking even though Loser’s mask showed up on her screen? I just didn’t understand.

The story of the author was cool but it felt like something that happens later in the show like some small extra arc, we should be learning who Kyoma is not going on a Scooby-Doo adventure after only 4 fucking episodes.

It was an okay episode just, wasn’t something I cared for because it felt really random and out of place this early in the show. The mystery aspect isn’t what I watched this show for, I watched it for scenes like when we first met Loser and so on, those were GREAT episodes. Not saying Mystery has to be gone but not just to this level.

The themes I hoped for ever since the show was announced, finally tackled. We first had Mira wondering whether she’ll still be herself if she’s “restarted”. Since she’ll go off of the same set of memories, and same set of preset personality modules, so she’d still be “herself”, right? But there’d be a gap, and she won’t be able to tell she’s really herself. And this is a metaphor for every single one of us. We keep thinking of ourselves as “ourselves” because we have an uninterrupted chain of remembering we’re ourselves, but do we not “reset” ourselves every single night? And can we truly hold in our memories an uninterrupted chain going back a year or more? We can’t. But we choose to think of ourselves as still ourselves, as the same selves we used to be. But this is a decision we make, and not necessarily a truth. And sci-fi, and this talk of “resets” should make us perhaps question how we operate. But here the answer was a bit silly, rather than discussing the idea, but it wasn’t the episode’s focus.

What was the focus in this episode was the concept of past versus present, of how your past self comes back to kill your present self, which does tie to the above question, showing that we’re not the same people before and after being “reset”, and as time takes its toll on us. About how we change. It’s also the story of all stories, of our past mistakes coming to haunt us, or growing past our past.

This was also tied to the whole notion of the “fake world”, which Mira overcame, but this was a segment much hampered by this episode’s storytelling and rushed nature. People make up worlds in their minds, and they let the worlds they constructed control them, worlds where they can’t save the people they care for, so will turn about and save others, or murder passersby. Worlds where they can’t save themselves and thus will let others walk all over them, toy with them, and they’d take it, whether because they think they “deserve” it, or because they think they are helpless to avert the disaster. And those were the shackles Mira was held by, the shackles we are all held by, the ones inside our mind, that whisper to us that we are weak and powerless.

Until she decided to free herself, that she will not go quietly, by another’s decree, by her own fears, by imagining a new future with Kyouma, as a collector. And the writer managed to imagine a new world for himself, so he managed to keep on living, leaving behind his ghost.

But the show’s final notes aren’t all hopeful, because even as it tells us we can leave the fake world behind us, we end the episode with knowing that clinging to the fakeness might be a sweeter lie than truth, and that the past can never be simply abandoned, and we all need to pay our outstanding debts. And thus the cycle of revenge continues. Even if it took the form of messy storytelling.

Well, there’s two more major issues with trying to discern what happened; we had an unreliable narrator due to the fact that his memories of the situation were fucked by the coil/alternate timeline. The “fake” time is where he ended up saving everyone but saw her dead body floating next to the coil. That’s why it seemed really convenient for her to be there? When in reality, he had went back and pulled her out of the water where she first fell down and let everyone die.

It’s kind of confusing because of the alternate timeline and muddled memories (which they reveal at the end of the episode)

The man’s thoughts were converted into a world which persisted thanks to the coil. His rendition of the world kept interfering with reality in the form of ghosts. His rendition forks from reality when he thought that his colleagues* died. As for how his real self-got killed, the ghost manifestations are associated with the lake’s water, and other peoples’ thoughts are actually stored in that dimension, not just the writer’s. So, the dam worker he whacked in the head was there too, whispered to his daughter to switch out the drinking water with lake water, and then proceeded to kill the real author. The ghost version of the author was confronted with reality that his colleagues* was saved, and decided to call it off. Coil got shut down and the “dimension” version of the world goes away. Oh and the whole thing with the robot is that, since she’s operated by a coil, that world can interfere with her and rewrite her memories in real time, so it basically has direct access to her RAM, more or less.

I can’t expect the series to make everything clear by Episode 5, but it has to be at least compelling enough to make me want to learn more. This is like getting to Season 5 of The X-Files: up until then, I could understand the basics, that the government is hiding the existence of aliens for some apocalyptic result. But then the series has to keep delaying and back-tracking, reversing details for plot-twists, awkwardly writing out Mulder, then awkwardly writing back Mulder before writing him out again.

I think Dimension W could learn something from Gravity Falls: that series kept the explanations not simple but clear. The mystery persisted, but the evidence at least led viewers to logical conclusions, even if those conclusions were undermined by new or misleading evidence–and there was payoff. Dimension W instead keeps playing a game of hot potato: one minute, the episode, the show is about the mystery of the numbers, then the numbers somehow create ghosts, now we’re dropping the ghosts to focus on something else.

The next episode is called:”The Wind of Africa” I wonder if we’ll finally get our questions answered now that this “haunted hotel” 2-parter is out of the way.