English Dub Review: Dusk Beyond the End of the World “His and Her Long Afternoon”

Overview:

A single act of violence shattered Akira and Towasa’s lives in the distant past, yet time marches on. What happened after that fateful day of the shooting?

Our Take(Spoilers):

Now we know everything when it comes to Akira and Towasa. I can’t speak about this episode without talking about massive spoilers. So if you want to know if the show is worth watching and are cruising through episode reviews to find out, the answer is YES. Some minor plot holes aside, I’m invested now.

Still here? Let’s get into it. Akira and Towasa survived their assassination attempts, and we get a lot of explanation on where everything came from and how we got to where we are now. Towasa invented something called “Femtoblood,” which essentially merges our blood cells with nanomachines. Eventually, 90% of the world undergoes this procedure, and if you lived through the pandemic, you know that’s not realistic at all. Then again, this makes it so you can access everything through your brain, like Akira could see his music tab from his eyeball. I hope you can turn that off because if I had to see my phone’s home screen at all times, I would be pissed.

Turns out this Femtoblood can be hacked, and this leads to an outbreak of crime by hacked individuals and people pretending to be hacked. Ultimately, Towasa decides to put an Artificial Personality in charge, and it goes about as bad as you’d think. If you’ve seen Terminator or The Matrix, then you probably know how this goes. This was another plot hole in my opinion. If this AP had access to every human’s blood and could make them do whatever they wanted, why wouldn’t it make them kill themselves or something?

Thanks to this happening, Towasa creates the androids like Yuugure to fight back. They eventually defeat the AP, but a lot of damage has been done to the world. Only two hundred million humans remain. That’s a massive hit to the population.

The version of Akira we’ve been following was created by the real Akira to find Towasa because she left. For whatever reason, Akira never activated his android duplicate. Now it seems that our android Akira suddenly doesn’t care about Towasa on an emotional level. He still wants to find her, but he seems committed to Yuugure. Not only that, but we got a pretty jarring scene at the very end that seemed to show Akira waking up after a decent amount of time had passed because Amoru looks a fair bit older. I don’t know what caused Akira to go into a coma or whatever happened because that’s where the episode ends. Hopefully that’s explained in the next one. I’m definitely invested now and hope this can wrap up in a satisfying way.