English Dub Review: FLCL Alternative “Shake It Off”

I stay out too late, got nothing in my brain, that’s what people say.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

News grows about the ever-growing number of pins, along with the sudden appearance of more Medical Mechanica irons whose steam is causing massive shifts in temperature. Prime Minister Kitaki is flooded with questions that she either can’t or won’t answer, especially regarding the planned migration of the richest civilians to Mars in order to escape what may be a doomed planet.

Elsewhere, the girls have a fun time in swimming class until Pets mysteriously disappears. Everyone is pretty concerned until one classmate mentions the possibility of Pets’ family moving to Mars since they’re super rich…which is apparently the first Kana is hearing of that. Mossan and Hijiri are shocked this is news to her, since Kana’s known Pets since grade school. After school, Pets’ mother stops by to find her daughter. Kana is surprised to find out Pets’ life at home is nothing like she imagined, with an apparently abusive father and scared mother, but does see Pets kept an old photo of them as kids.

When Pets’ mom starts getting creepily desperate about where she is, Kana bolts into the street and twists her ankle. Haruko arrives, having apparently stolen the car, and picks her up. She reflects on how little she knew about one of her friends after knowing her that long. Around the same time, Pets (who FINALLY shows up over halfway through an episode about HER) wanders by the building wreckage from the first episode. The robot from then starts to reactivate, then begins consuming debris until it absorbs Pets into its hand-shaped form before trudging over to the closest iron. Haruko and Kana soon arrive, with Haruko facing the robot with her guitar while Kana tries to free Pets and Kanda rolling in with the military to assist, identifying the monster as the Terminal Core.

As she attempts to free her, Kana asks Pets why she didn’t say she was moving when they’re supposed to be friends. Pets replies with a tirade about how much she hates Kana’s butting in other people’s business, and other things Kana never knew. Kana falls off the robot, her emotional state triggering her NO and absorbing it entirely. She dreams about first meeting Pets as children, and that she ended up not leaving. In reality, Pets exchanges Kana’s hairpin for hers and heads home to leave for Mars.

OUR TAKE

With the other girls and even Sasaki getting their own focus episodes, it was only inevitable that Pets would get hers before the season was done. The placement of right before the end was odd, since both the previous seasons had used that point to build momentum towards an impending climax, and this time was did not break that tradition. I guess I just wasn’t expecting Pets, a character was probably the least easily defined personality of the main four girls, to have so much of a connection to Kana’s character arc, the background plot about space migration that had been mostly ignored for the first two thirds, and maybe even the overall message of the season.

And I’m all for being surprised, but unless I’ve been missing some very subtle hints, Pets has probably had the least amount of significant interaction with Kana before this point. Now we’re suddenly informed that she’s practically Kana’s closest and oldest friend AND YET has been holding onto an intense irritation and hatred for Kana’s allegedly invasive behavior. I’m aware one of the big things to take away from this is how sometimes you don’t always know as much as you think about people you’ve known for a long time, and I can roll with her family being rich and highly dysfunctional being a surprise since finances and domestic abuse have plenty of reasons to not come up in casual conversation. But even the crush on Sasaki, as thinly written as it was, had set up and paid off to it. Dropping all of this loathing Pets has been keeping inside at once feels like emotional diarrhea coming from someone who was practically a background character until now, especially when they’re absent for the majority of the episode like Pets was.

Even then, her “take down” of Kana’s behavior seems like it’s supposed to be revealing a major flaw in the last few episodes that are going to make the audience rethink everything about how Kana acted then, and how she really only made situations worse when she thought she was helping and will give her a big moment of emotional growth in time for the finale. However, all of what Pets is talking about is blown way out of proportion, considering Kana’s involvement in those situations either made things better or were, at worst, benign. The absolute worst thing she did regarding Hijiri’s break up was maybe make things a little more awkward, while she actually ended up being pretty helpful in assisting Mossan work on her dress designs. There’s also the apparent revelation that Pets also liked Sasaki and is mad about Kana simply letting him go when she realized she didn’t actually like him, which I feel like is meant to imply this whole rant is driven by emotion more than logic, but it’s still not dropping as many truth bombs as it thinks it is.

That’s not to say Kana was entirely in the right here since she was applying way more entitlement regarding knowing things about Pets just because they’re friends. It’s true she could’ve at least mentioned the move, but she wasn’t exactly obligated to tell Kana everything about her family, especially considering how complicated and hard to talk about familial dysfunction can be to talk about, even among friends. Basically, I can see where Pets is coming from on some level, but I’m not sure the show should have used this as the kick off to the finale.

One thing I’ve mentioned before about liking FLCL Classic is the ability to take relatable moments of adolescents and give them the physical weight and importance to match the emotional. There was always a way to correlate the nature of the giant robot fight with the personal journeys of the human characters it was happening around. This was something Progressive never bothered with, so I appreciate Alternative trying its hand at that. Though while finding out a friend is moving away suddenly without saying anything and THEN finding out that friend has actually hated you this whole time can be a traumatic and painful time for a teenager, I’m not certain it synchs up well with a giant hand robot about to end the world.

I have thoughts on other things like the rich people space migration and how the hell Haruko even factors into any of this, but I feel like that may have to wait until the Season Review. But yeah, one more episode to go in this season, and probably FLCL as a whole. Hope you’ve got your tissues ready.