English Dub Review: Angels of Death “Yeah… I’m a monster.”

Accepting the monster within.

Overview:

Rachel descends to the lower floors and starts to show who she truly is.

Our Take:

This episode built upon what we saw last week, and cut a slice into Rachel’s true personality. Last time, we saw her gunning down what seemed to be zombies because it was the fastest way out of the floor. She confirms our suspicions this time around- she did what she did because it was the easiest thing to do. However, instead of just violence from convenience, we see a different sort of violence that arises this time around, one that comes more from a darker place.

Rachel and Gray head down to Eddie’s floor, where once again, the corpse is missing but everything else is still the same disaster that they left it. In order to make it to Eddie’s locker, Rachel has to cross the sea of broken gravestones, but this time she’s not alone. Out of the graves comes hands of the deceased, crying out in misery and begging to be saved. Of course, they are dead, and there’s nothing Rachel can do about it. However, instead of just walking past them, she makes a point of stepping on and smashing them. This is not a sort of passive malice that she displayed last time- this is active. The hands and screams annoy her, so she violently gets rid of them. Actions like these are troubling because they indicate a different level of violence– Rachel is someone actively violent, not passively so.

As Zack bleeds out, we start to see more of his past. After fleeing the orphanage after murdering his adoptive parents, his answer for everything is still violence. He murders a woman who finds him on the side of the road and nearly murders a blind old man. However, Zack is shown kindness, likely for the first time in his life, when the old man offers him a place to stay. The old man cares for Zack but not in an overbearing way; even when Zack admits that he’s killed before, the old man merely accepts it as fact. Unfortunately, that is cut short when the old man is a victim of a mugging gone wrong. From that, Zack loses that potential point of human connection: by losing the one person who offered him kindness, he accepts the fact that he can’t change, and how he’ll surely be a monster forever. One connection that he fails to make until Rachel comes along– but with how Rachel is turning out to be, it’s doubtful that will change anytime soon.

Score
8.0/10