English Dub Review: ID – Invaded “Fallen”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kazuta seems surprised that he’s kissed Hondomachi, running off and leaving her flustered. They question Fukuda, the one who drilled a hole in his like Hondomachi’s, but Fukuda just tells them to ask if “the wind blowing through your hole feels cold?” and that if it doesn’t, that means trouble. Though another possibility crosses her mind: Kazuta might have been there to visit the crime scene of the Gravedigger copycat because Kazuta might be the REAL Gravedigger. But instead of Killinger her to keep her from talking, he kissed her. Maybe because of the brain damage caused by Fukuda’s drill, his ways of expressing love or an urge to kill might have been switched, hence why he was surprised himself. They return to the site where he kissed her and detect Cognition Particles, which they then use to make an Id Well for Sakaido.

This well drops him into an empty sky, with the only visible land being a small house on an island. Once he lands, he finds Kaeru’s corpse having been stabbed with the pool spread out in an oval. Everything else looks to be weightless, floating in the air if it isn’t already on the ground. He also finds a girl underneath a table and a torn up photograph. The girl is actually an amalgamation of the Gravedigger’s victims, which pretty heavily damns Kazuto as the real Gravedigger. The photo is of him and his friends from middle school, possibly pointing to his targets. Sakaido also has a brief run-in with John Walker, who has just stabbed some man and then escapes.

Nishimura, another member of Kura, takes a police squad to Kazuta’s home, but the Wakumusubi (the device that detects Cognition Particles) doesn’t react because he isn’t there, which they find out too late once a trap that explodes the home is triggered, killing Nishimura. Hondomachi and Matsuoka make their way to the home of one of the people in the photo, Inami, who says she wasn’t very close to Kazuta, though admits she was interested in him romantically. Things start to get a weird vibe, at least according to the increasingly eerie music. Hondomachi then concludes that Inami, not Kazuta, is the real Gravedigger, who got Kazuta to kill for her. But unknown to them, Kazuta is hiding around the corner, knife in hand.

Inside Kazuta’s Id Well, Sakaido and the girl continue talking.

OUR TAKE

And just when it felt like things were starting to become a bit clearer, we get this episode to add even more pieces for us to unpack. It honestly did feel like last week’s case was a one and done with how things played out and that the identity of the Gravedigger might just end up lost to legend when it was only a copycat that the team had found, but here we are actually finding out his, or rather HER, true identity just one episode later. Also interesting is that this is the first time since the two part premiere that we are centering focus outside of Narihisago, but instead on Hondomachi, shining a spotlight on her own recovery since being attacked by Fukuda and how her thought process might have been altered, even improved somewhat, by the hole in her head.

Back when that happened, I did notice that the episodes did place an interestingly large amount of emphasis on the ambiguity of whether Fukuda was right or not regarding holes in heads actually clearing minds in some way, especially sense some like him, Hondomachi, and Kazuta had survived the procedure. Hondomachi, being a main character, gives us an opportunity to test this and compare her to other survivors. Fukuda has stuck around as a character since his capture but obviously is not the best example of mental health, though now we have Kazuta, someone with a clear wiring problem between his intense feelings of love and wanting to kill as a result of the drilling. Hondomachi, meanwhile, seems to almost have a subconscious desire to keep her hole open as her mind pursues leads and clues which now seem to have led her to the mastermind behind several gruesome murders. If I had to guess, this sort of increased ingenuity could be exactly what Fukuda was looking for in his own twisted mind, meaning that Hondomachi might just be the person to prove his theories were correct.

But it seems the story’s not done yet, as Narihisago/Sakaido is still within Kazuta’s Well, probably thinking that the case is solved. We might be seeing him go into Inami’s next, maybe even with further elaboration on John Walker, whose presence still confounds me, but he’s not the only thing. I still don’t know what this show is trying to say by using these holes, plus this particular case kind of left me in the dust regarding where it was headed. Heck, I only really put together Inami was the real killer before the reveal because the creepy violins kicked in over what seemed to be pretty simple questioning, and even a rewatch didn’t show much that might be a hint. It might just be something I have to piece together once the story’s over, maybe after two or three rewatches even. This show still puzzles the crap out of me, but lord knows it still has my attention.