English Dub Review: ID – Invaded “Channeled”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As Hayasura puts the last bits of his plan into action, Kiki Asukai repeats what happened with the nurses and walks through the halls of the wellside putting all the civilians (including the main team) she passes into an existing Id Well, with some of them dying instantly. Hayasure then enters the room with the Mizohanames, sitting down in front of one and…killing himself before entering his own Id Well, as well as turning the Kura building in order to “investigate on a larger scale”, planning to retire and make Momoki his successor. He talks about doing all this for the greater good, typical villain speech and all, then shoots himself in the head as he enters the well. Narihisago and Hondomachi follow after, but Fukuda is knocked unconscious by Kiki and can’t follow.

Inside Hayasura’s well, he emerges as Uraido, otherwise known as John Walker. Upon finding Kaeru, he solves her mysterious death…which is easy since he’s holding the knife that did it. He then remembers who he is, but this doesn’t cause a storm because he’s dead in the real world and his well won’t change now. Instead, it uncovers a countless number of faces on grey hills, each of them being a mask that can take him to any other well made by any other serial killer. Sakaido and Hijiriido follow after, jumping across numerous wells to catch up. One of them is Hondomachi’s well, which Hayasura uses to trigger a storm and throw them off. Hondomachi then tells Sakaido to go to his own well and remember who he is, probably so this won’t be used against them again. Fukuda also appears in Hondomachi’s well, then they both end up in Hayasura’s well again along with Inami, who kills Fukuda to get revenge on Hondomachi for killing Kazuta, then going to Kazuta’s well and being killed herself by the projection of John Walker there. Narihisago and Hondomachi meet up and decide to face Hayasura to save the day.

Momoki and Matsuoka also do their own investigations, determining that they’ll have to put Kiki back in the Mizohaname, meaning they’ll have to get the equipment that got her there in the first place and head back in.

OUR TAKE
We’re entering headlong into End of Evangelion levels of what-the-fuckery as the world goes totally topsy turvy, which I’d say is fitting for the penultimate episode of the series. Yeah, looks like this show will be a pretty closed ending since we’ve uncovered the identity of the killer and the reason why the wells exist, not to mention cutting to the core of how these worlds work in the first place. And like End of Evangelion, we’re also getting a shit ton of new details and rules thrown on us at the last second, such as what happens to someone who dies in the real world or someone who gets put in an id well without going through a machine first…it’s a whole lot to be shoving at us in the episode right before the end is all I’m saying.

Not the mention that, even with all the technical information we’re getting now, we still don’t really have a handle on a lot of the characters involved, including the culprit behind it all, John Walker/Uraido/Hayasura. Why did he make these serial killers in the first place? Why did he make this organization at all? What was the point of this whole endeavor if it was leading to this? Not much is really explained here and I’m not sure we have the time to really get into it in the final episode. We CERTAINLY don’t have time to be going into the more detailed motivations of the guy who, up until this point, was just a guy behind the desk and completely unassuming because we never got to know him very well at all until he was suddenly revealed to be the killer by Hondomachi’s weird ass deductions (which still bug me but I never quite know how to describe them because they are just so random).

One episode left in the series and it looks like we’re headed for a big final battle between the good brilliant detectives and the bad one. This seems to imply that there will be a bit of an ideological conflict that each side will be debating, which I guess will come down to whether or not it is a good idea to create serial killers if it gives you access to a weird representation of the human mind. But to do that we’d need a better idea of how beneficial this kind of technology actually is in criminal investigations, which to me doesn’t seem to be a whole lot at the moment. But we can get more into that, hopefully, next time on the final episode of ID: Invaded.