English Dub Review: FLCL Progressive “RE: Start”

Did you try turning it off and on again?

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

A girl in tattered clothes, cat ear headphones, and a protruding red horn stumbles through a demolished street white with ash. An army of giant hands pushing giant irons move towards her, forcing her to run as her body falls apart. Her run takes her to a giant beached life form, who opens its giant red eye at her, making her turn into a white-winged robot that begins taking down the irons.

Waking from her dream, lethargic Junior High student Hidomi (Xanthe Huynh) says goodbye to her extra peppy mother Hinae (Julie Ann Taylor) and leaves for school. At school, her classmate Ide (Robbie Daymond), brags about a developing relationship he’s having with his teacher while questioning his fashion-centric friend Mori (Jon Allen) and foreign friend Marco (Yuri Lowenthal). Class begins with their less than enthusiastic teacher who elects for a rather unorthodox teaching method of showing each student graphic pornography, though Hidomi is unphased.

After close the family café, Hinae looks up that the Medical Mechanica plant, she wonders where “he” is and whether it’s “time to stop waiting”. This causes something to stir in Hidomi and activate her headphones, but then she’s hit headfirst by a car. The driver, Jinyu (Allegra Clark), notes that she was about to “overflow”, but then remarks that she will be fine…unfortunately. She also tries on her headphones, which annoys Hidomi greatly, and then tells her to “be careful of the woman on the Vespa” before driving off.

That night, Hidomi has a vision of her dream just before the MM plant activates. Seconds later, a robot with tentacles shows up and pulls her out the window, and into the street. As it runs, a boy flings out of it. The boy is Ide, who can’t explain where the robot came from, except that it might’ve come out of his head. They get cornered at a dump, where a panicked Hidomi’s head begins to glow. Jinyu arrives, smashing the bot with her guitar and questioning an injured Ide before taking him home. Hidomi sees herself in a cracked mirror and notices a red horn.

The next morning, Hidomi, covering the horn with a bandage, follows the sound of breaking dishes to find Jinyu working as a maid. At school, their usual teacher begins an odd rant that hypnotizes most of the class except Hidomi and Ide, unmasking herself as Haruhara Haruko.

OUR TAKE

This episode had a lot to prove, and very fine line to walk. If it tried too much to replicate lines and moments from the original, it’d be a rehash. Too far in the other direction, and you could hardly call it FLCL at all. The first season left its mark so definitively that making a sequel would need to hit the ground running convincing viewers that it would continue the spirit and show it had a story worth telling after all this time.

I can’t say for sure if that’s what we have just yet, but I can say that I am intrigued, and MUCH less worried than I had been before it aired. Familiar imagery and lines are thrown around, certainly, but in ways that show intent to use them in different ways. New characters and ideas are presented but framed in a sense that they could have just as likely fit with the ideas of the old show.

In terms of the new cast, Hidomi is a tough nut to crack right now, but luckily not in the way that I am completely lost on how to follow her train of thought. She’s without direction in life and is overtaken by these new visions, so kind of like if Mamimi were a millennial and wore Ariana Grande headphones (though the design actually apparently started with an artist named Yuumei). Ide seems kind of like Gaku from the first season grown up a bit, but it seems he’s also taking a bit of Naota as the guy who has robots coming out of his head. Jinyu fills in Haruko’s role as the enigmatic guitar wielding stranger who moves in with the protagonist, but definitely a different temperament. Where this is all headed is impossible to say for now, but I’m in it for the long haul now.

Though that leaves Haruko, who is now an even more wild card than ever if that was even possible. One of the most interesting things about her in the first seasons was the ambiguity around her motives in handling Naota, Canti, and everything surrounding Medical Mechanica and Atomsk. After leaving Earth to find him (and it seems she did base on the end credits of this episode), she seems to have learned from what made Naota’s adolescent episodes activate the portals and exploiting all of those feelings in a room full of even more hormonally charged teenagers, instilling feelings of anxiety, disenfranchisement, sexual inadequacy (all of which she knew could get a rise out of Ta-kun) and running an experiment as to who would take the bait. Seems she at least found one successful subject in Ide, though what her hypnotizing the rest of the class and apparently the internet is anyone’s guess for now. We might be seeing her in a total villain role this time around, which is surprising since the only antagonists we had before were nameless robots and a giant iron. And why is her hair orange?

We’re left with more questions than answers, which may be the most FLCL-y thing about this new season, and I can’t wait for practically any of it to be solved in the remaining five episodes of Progressive.