Review: Dimension W “The Mystery Hidden in Lake Yasogami”

If you need to catch up on the first three episodes, Click Here for Episode 1, Here for 2. and Here for 3.

And now Spoilers…

The episode begins with Kyoma & Mira driving while Mira gives an exposition dump explaining that the lake they’re going to has had a history of supernatural sightings for 21 years.

Before they can talk more about it, a jump-scare happens in the form of a ghostly looking little girl in white just standing in the middle of the road which almost makes them crash off the road Silent Hill style. (the game not that movie, even though they both opened with a car accident on the road.)

Thankfully unlike the Silent Hill games, they stopped before it caused any real harm. 😛 They get out of the car and Mira could swear she saw her too but Kyoma for some reason thinks something is wrong with Mira since her robotic sensors can’t pick it up when she records whatever she sees.

Kyoma is mildly annoyed and says to her that she shouldn’t be joking about ghost sightings and tries to shake off his experience by going back in the car.

Mira could swear she sees it again but Kyoma grows impatient setting off his car horn and she runs back in the car and as the car drives away an ominous girl in a dress appears.

The dubbed version once again skips the obligatory intro and for some reason cuts back to “24 hours earlier” where we see the events that lead up to this starting at Mary’s bar.

Mary & Albert hire Kyoma for a job which begins with Albert explaining the mysterious death of a novelist named Shinjuro Sakaki who stayed in a hotel at “Lake Yasogami” who died from “drowning” with the only witness being a simple housekeeping robot. (it’s obvious it’s the same guy from the end of the episode three cliffhanger).

The only hint of water was found in a dispenser yet the room was empty and Albert comes to the conclusion that it’s possible the housekeeping robot could be powered by an “illegal Coil” that “won’t get suspended or send reports”.

Albert of course assures him he isn’t just going to the Hotel for simply one coil, That would be too simple of a plot (and most anime’s rarely do simple.:P)

They decide to play surveillance footage that was recorded from the Housekeeping Robot’s vision hearing that the Novelist asked for water and reveals the robot’s to be “Keebo”.

However when it fetches water it cuts to random shots of distorted sound from it’s first-person view and suddenly the feed stops when it looks like Sakaki is having a heart attack and the video feed results 2 mins later to reveal him now as a corpse with the Maid (With her name revealed to be Kiyomi Kato in the footage) Discovering what’s left of him before Albert stops the video footage.

Albert then reveals that during their investigation of the crime scene there was no tampering or traces of an illegal coil or anything remotely wrong with the robot.

They go to the Hotel and Kyoma asks Mira to act like an emotionless robot and we the audience get a parlor scene introduction to a crew of potential suspects, victims, and allies. The hotel is owned by Marisa Sasaki, the author’s sickly younger sister.

There’s the hotel manager, Makita, the arrogant journalist, Hageyama, and Elizabeth Greenhough-Smith, (Which in the dub sounds like she’s saying “greenhouse smith”) a tiny Gothic Lolita girl, and Mira finds her strangely familiar.

Of course as Mira is trying to think of her connection to this individual she gets interrupted by her saying “It’s not polite to investigate someone without permission”.

She’s in the opening, so I suspect she’ll end up becoming a recurring character.(not much of a spoiler there if you’ve seen the intro enough times.)

Beyond them, there’s a group of people ominously chilling in the corner, but they don’t have names yet.

A later scene implies that they’re after the numbered Coil, coercing Masaki, who has some sort of power over the surrounding area, into working with them.

They get upstairs to their room and encounter Albert intrusively there reading books.

After briefly meeting Mira (And blindly thinking she’s an emotionless robot under Kyoma’s orders) Albert gets under Kyoma’s skin by knowing exactly what he knows so far (including his information about the Number Coils from the shopkeeper which is a minor call-back to episode three.) Which in a series of Gifs causes Kyoma to snap and they get into a small brawl before kicking Albert out the window.

And gets kicked out of a 3rd story balcony which of course drives Mira to Express concern before Kyoma tells her not to bother since he’s also a “Beast of Grendel”.

Of course as Albert is falling he gleefully tells Kyoma to meet up with him later to further discuss their case.

In the entire brawl scene we do get confirmation that the reason Albert survived the explosion in episode one is because he’s a former Grendel member. Kyoma casually kicks him out a third story window and Albert sticks the landing.

He’s also on a far more casual relationship with Kyoma than first appeared, and he’s still a hard one to pin down. He’s not the obvious bad guy that the first episode made him look to be.

The plot starts to drag-out a bit at first with Kyoma reading the books but realizes Mira could do a more efficient job in reading all of them given that she’s a robot and as She starts reading a bunch of Sakaki’s novels in order to gain information.

The Next Day Before Kyoma leaves, he goes to check on Mira which leads to a comedic scene of her experiencing a jump scare while reading the books.

After Kyoma leaves, there’s a random scene where Mira has flashbacks of her father teaching her about the abilities she has while she’s hooked to a machine.

Before cutting to night time again revealing Hageyama to be forcibly drowned by the mysterious ghost from earlier.

We then cut back to Kyoma on his way to meet up with Albert as he looks up records and visits the memorial of where the people of the lake who died 21 years ago.

He then goes to meet Albert at a small restaurant nearby and gives him the low-down on the history of the people there who were “supposedly” killed at that lake.

According to the Info he gathered, that 21 years ago, the towers that power coils were not invented yet indicating that the instability of the Numbered Coil’s power was the cause of the disasters further revealing that a physics professor named Kenjiro Kuroda had the “Numbered Coil” loaned to him for research and one of his students Haruna Enamori borrowed it.

Kyoma comes to the conclusion that it slowly lead to a series of disasters and ghost sightings that slowly died down until the novelists death, And despite New Tesla casually covering it up, they sent search parties with many of them dead from drowning and the numbered coil currently remains un-found.

And in a small series of flashbacks Albert points out that since he was the only survivor of a previous incident where a “Dimensional Collapse” happened during his time in the Grendel Unit, His experience would be essential to helping them.

After that small piece of exposition-dump towards Kyoma’s past, Koorogi sends him a message.

In the message he replays the video footage in a 3D Diagram revealing under a dimensional camera-lens filter of sorts that there were people in the same room with him killing him off which they believe have been the work of the very ghosts they’ve heard rumors of and Kyoma is shocked to discover who one of them is.

But before he can say out loud who he thinks it is, He’s interrupted by the butler who tells them about the discovery of a murder outside and they go out to investigate along with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth find a Hotel Bus full of water with what’s left of Hageyama drowned in the bus and the Butler is unable to contact the police. (A standard cliche in horror films I guess. *Shrugs*)

The lights go out and Mira’s shriek echoes waking up the Sister of the Hotel.

This gets the attention of Kyoma who runs up to the building using his Kunai and rope to pull himself upwards towards the window Batman style.

The Sister encounters 2 strangers with one of them knowing that for some reason her dreams are used to “connect to the other side” and want to keep her sedated for their goal of getting the Numbered Coil for themselves.

Kyoma intervenes but is abit too late as they take her and leave with their 3rd partner in crime using a hover-cycle and they distract him with smoke bombs.

Thankfully Elizabeth uses her Robo-Bats to follow where they’re going.

Going back to Mira’s plot might help this make sense. Of course, she’s afraid of ghosts. Unfortunately, she’s not the only one there – ghostly victims of the disaster invade her dream, and she rapidly loses control of it. (insert “Phillip K. Dick Reference” here.)

It leads to an obligatory shower scene that takes place after she’s read most of his books and is trying to shake off the horrors she’s read. (Keep in mind this Image is just one of the nightmarish visions she visualized and didn’t actually happen.)

(Note: I’d like to point out, that not only was this scene completely untouched in Adult Swim’s broadcast dub and the episode was rated TV-MA, but even in the Japanese version She doesn’t have nipples  either which made me think of those chicks from “Kill La Kill”.  😛 )

Aside from the blatant “Anime Fan service” it further reveals that she’s now able to now hide the coil in her body which for some reason opens like a vagina. (This Gif should be proof enough that I didn’t make a word of this up.)

While still in the shower she then proceeds to use her coil to help visualize what she’s reading.

Unlike the average person who gets lost in a book with their Imagination, It’s revealed in a flashback from her Scientist father that she when given enough information, She can digitally recreate (and explore) a version of Yasogami Village from 21 years ago from information & Images put together, as well as totally psyche herself out.

And without realizing what’s around her, she slips on some soap and hits the ground. (Ouch!)

But of course gets back up followed by a blatant excuse to show her ass & non-existant nipples.

Afterwards she decides to dry up but strangely her clothes are missing so all she can do is wrap herself in a towel for the time being. She quickly notices that the scenery has changed since it has purple couches & chairs but her vision is interrupted by some unknown static.

Mira stares into the balcony and encounters a strange woman who has a freakishly decayed arm trying to attack her from behind.

The Decayed-Armed woman tries to attack her with a golf club that has barbed wire wrapped around it (I guess it’s slightly more original than Lucille) and Mira runs feverishly away from her through a dark tunnel with a red tint surrounding her to escape.

While ostensibly a soft sci-fi anime, one can feel the strain of combining so many different genres. Mira’s ability to build the world of the author’s book she can perceive in three dimensions in order to find clues is a neat idea, but somewhat overshadowed by the fact she’s either naked or in a little towel at the time; the camera’s fetish of her body continues apace, and she ends up in a pretty standard horror movie chase.

As the environment around her warps, it seems as though she’s entered into one of Sasaki’s novels and she’s unable to move due to the reality around her keeping he from doing so which looks like something out an 80’s Horror or Exploitation flick. 😛

The ghosts eventually capture her and bring her face to face with their leader.

And the episode ends with a massive cliffhanger revealing the leader to be none other than Shijuro Sakaki himself, who is actually Shiro Kamiki, one of the students who was killed in the coil experiment and the Dead Novelist!

Overview:

I was pretty hyped for this episode as it seemed to be set in a mystery setting, and I definitely wasn’t disappointed. From the guys point of view the matter is close to being resolved but I’m sure that Mira’s situation will play very big role in the next episode.

It doesn’t really seem like ghosts so much as the students are trapped outside of reality (in the titular dimension) like in Silent Hill. I thought the guy that was seen at the end wasn’t the author but the author’s brother who vanished along with the students. That would also explain why the author was so attached to the place and why all of his stories took place in a similar location to the flooded town.

I doubt those “trapped” students will turn out to be human anymore. More likely the residents of Dimension W took their memories and then ran with them.

Other than that, loved Kyoma and Albert’s hand-to-hand scene as it shows Albert to be way stronger than I thought.

I really underestimated him. The way he was dodging and blocking Kyoma like that and how he nonchalantly landed from a 3 floor fall ninja-like which was awesome. However, he does know a lot about Kyoma’s past. As we saw from more flashback shots, it showed him in a lot of pain. I wonder if we’ll be able to see his past in full at some point?

We got introduced to the blonde Elizabeth whom seems like she’s going to be an interesting character especially since she’s also a collector but what I liked the most was finding out that Albert is from the same group that Kyoma was in and is actually a bad ass just like him.

Mira’s random flashback does it’s job to help establish things since we learn about her time with her dad and seeing her analyze things on her own in order to fully grasp the subject behind this mystery was pretty neat….Really liking how she’s full of surprises.

Overall the episode was great, the tone was fitting throughout it all and the mystery and thriller aspects were handled pretty great especially via the use of type of screenplay and direction that this episode had…..Seeing the numbers come into play even more like this has me very excited too since there are so many parties that are after them in addition to the stuff with how much chaos they caused both with Kyoma and his past plus the tragedy at the lake.

Also am I the only one who thinks the Author Sakaki looks like Johnny Depp with facial hair?

If you’ve ever seen the film “Event Horizon” There’s a similar kind of narrative to this episode. Don’t fuck with dimensional science I guess is the lesson to be learned.

For a standard 24 minute episode, there was a lot to take in, so you might need to re-watch certain parts so I can get a better understanding about our antagonists and their plans. Apart from that, this episode has left me wanting more and more! =D

This episode just makes me anxious to see what happens next. It’s obvious that this seems to be a 2-parter.