English Dub Review: ID – Invaded “Inside-outed II”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Two years pass and Narihisago starts taking up his old hobby of analog cyberbullying to get more serial killers to kill themselves so they won’t bother Kiki anymore. In addition to the Face-Lifter, he also goes after several others and gets them to turn their MO’s on themselves, like the Arm-Twister, the Thigh-severer, the Tounge-tearer, the Fing-longer, the Toe-stubber, the Ball-fondler, the Movie-talker, the Tax-evader, and the Plot-spoiler. And only some of those are ones I made up!

After a chance encounter with Nishio Shirako, who would go on to invent the Mizohaname, Narihisago goes to ask about John Walker, the last killer left, but it seems they still can’t find him. Even worse, Kiki is on death’s door. Or rather, she won’t die, but dissolve into the world and break it somehow. Not wanting to lose his seemingly happy life in this world, Narihisago refuses to kill her and leaves her alone, finding out later that she has dissolved and caused thirteen nurses to go comatose, just like what happened in the real world.

She’s presumed to have escaped, though couldn’t have gotten far in her condition, but while on the search, Narihisago goes to kill Fukuda, only to be stopped by Hondomachi. She recognizes him, having been stuck in this zone too, and reminding him that this is a well, not the real world, though he’s naturally reluctant to accept that. Now that the two of them recognize each other, the reality begins to break down. Narihisago calls his wife and daughter telling them to run, but as things dawn on him, he uses it to say the goodbye he never got to say. His head back in the game, he plans to use his time left in the well to look for clues about John Walker with Hondomachi.

However, Anaido then pulls Sakaido out of the machine, ten minutes having been reached on his end. Sakaido no longer remembers his life, but soon realizes that the tan lines on their arms were meant to keep them attached to Kaeru and that Anaido loosened them for some reason. Anaido then reveals that he’s able to remember being Fukuda due to his brain AND that this well ISN’T Momoki’s…but Narihisago’s, having formed this desert somehow to hide the number tiles. As a storm rises and Narihisago/Sakaido enters a dogma, with a silhouette of John Walker appearing in the storm.

OUR TAKE

Looks like we’re headed into the end game with only three episodes left before the show ends. Like many guessed, including myself, the desert well was not Momoki’s well. I don’t think many expected it to actually be a reworked version of Narihisago’s well, though. Heck, I didn’t know that you could pick different stages to go into with wells, but the one who sent them into it probably did AND expected Narihisago to end up exactly where he is now. That narrows our suspect list towards being John Walker down quite a bit, with the head of Kura looking to be a prime suspect. And with just a handful of episodes left to resolve this, they are really going to need to speed things up to have this ending feel well paced AND satisfactory.

As for the stuff with Kiki, I still can’t fully wrap my mind around all of it. It seems like, as Narihisago blended in with that well more and more, that things began to resemble what we’ve been told that past looked like aside from the obvious differences of his wife and daughter not dying. Narihisago still ends up a killer of serial killers, probably killing exactly who he killed before he was caught and used as a subject for the Kura, while Kiki Asukai still disappeared and left several nurses with comas. Only now we might know why that happened, assuming this version of events is actually filling in events that were previously unknown. Did Kiki “dissolve” and damage the real world like she assumed she would in the well? Is this what a well within a well always looks like or is this just what Narihisago’s version of that is? Where has Hondomachi been and how did she end up meeting Narihisago in this world?

Things look to be becoming increasingly more complicated the closer we get to the end and the deeper we get into Narihisago’s core issues. While I still put money on my theory about John Walker, there’s still so much about this world and its concept that just escape me and inhibit me from fully immersing myself in it, despite how I am still holding a good level of fascination. So I’m pretty struck by the twists here regarding Anaido and where things could lead in the final three episodes, I just can’t stop myself from stopping myself from liking it and being confused. Perhaps by the end it’ll all make perfect sense, though I doubt it.