English Dub Review: Midnight Occult Civil Servants “White Cocoons and Blue Flames”

A moral conundrum.

Overview:

Miyako finds out there are cocoons in the Olympic Stadium.

Our Take:

This time, he sees the Tokyo Division again, who have discovered cocoons in what is soon to be the Olympic stadium. It looks like the Tokyo Division officer who is voiced by Takahiro Sakurai (I had to actually look up his name because his name is unfortunately just that forgettable), Kanoichi, asked Miyako to come along on purpose. What Miyako finds is that the cocoons house baby Anothers, which makes killing them feel morally reprehensible.

The strange thing is that the dialogue frames it like Kanoichi brought Miyako there purely because he wants to have an all-clearance before he orders extermination, having made sure that the Anothers can’t be removed by any other means, but the visual framing tells a different story. How it’s visually framed make it seem like Kanoichi brought Miyako there knowing that Miyako would balk upon seeing that the Anothers look like infants, all to purposefully hurt him. If this was set up, then this wouldn’t be so bad, but based on the last episode, that wasn’t the kind of relationship the two had. It was antagonistic, sure, and Kanoichi clearly doesn’t respect Miyako, but he also didn’t come off as cruel to him–which this clearly is.

Here’s the thing: it’s fine if you want to give someone a sympathetic backstory to explain their mentality and why they decide to do certain things, but the audience has to be invested in that character at least mildly to care. This is doubly so if said backstory ties into other characters and points in the series, which it apparently does. How Kanoichi got his scar is because he was being held hostage by a rogue group who wanted the household god from an earlier episode, and his father instead chose for him to die. Seeing his own life devalued due to an Another made him violently hate him– and that would be okay if we actually knew more about the household god more than a surface level. I expected that storyline to be a one-off one, like every other one in the series, so seeing it come back with no depth or preparation is just… strange. It doesn’t deepen Kanoichi’s plight and it doesn’t make him more interesting either.

This episode wasn’t bad, but it just felt messy. It seemed like they were rushing the story, when this would’ve been better with a much slower pace, and have gotten to know people organically.