“Don’t you dare touch my friend!”
Impression
As an audience, we’ve known about Rei’s situation for quite a while now, yet it was still interesting to see Kenjirou so easily notice that she was from another world, purely based on scientific anomalies through scanning her – helped by the fact that he’s more open-minded about the existence of parallel worlds and the supernatural after his own personal experiences, unlike some of his military colleagues. He phrased things well too; Rei appears human yet has a different molecular structure and doesn’t quite adhere to your usual laws of physics, giving her increased physical strength like we saw in that very…memorable beach episode. And that was only cemented by how there was no existing data in the world (that wasn’t forged) to provide any sort of background for her. What I probably should have pieced together was the fact that Rei is essentially a beacon for the Alones, guiding them towards the location of the Engine – it’s how they so easily appear right next to the Engine instead of materialising halfway across the world and travelling to Japan. Therefore by killing Rei, mankind solves the threat posed to the Engine as there is no longer an anchor for the Alones to take advantage of.
Trust the Vividteam to not give up in regaining Rei’s trust – they realized pretty quickly that Rei’s only controlling the Alones for a reason, and is a good person despite that. You’ve just gotta love Akane’s determination as well, just casually busting through all the defence systems keeping them from seeing Rei again xD I’m glad they didn’t decide to extend the misunderstanding for longer than was necessary – with only one episode left, it makes sense for everything to focus on wrapping the series up rather than lots of angst over Rei still thinking that the Vividteam were lying to her.
So the crow finally made an appearance to someone other than Rei – that is, it appeared to the rest of the cast. The way it spoke about the “higher intelligence” Kenjirou had contact with 7 years ago really lauded them. Apparently they exist throughout time, and are absolute; essentially they’re like gods, yet they are somehow afraid of a lowly entity like mankind. Coming to think of it, their worry of misusing Manifestation Energy is proof enough that Rei’s deal would never go through – if that energy killed off Rei’s world, and that world ends up being brought back, then wouldn’t it just provide a new cause for worry for these godlike entities? Screw all these excuses, it’s more likely that they’re destroying for the sake of destroying, even when mankind has passed the bird’s “test” and shown empathy by not killing Rei. The last boss has finally appeared, and surprisingly its not a super-Alone, but rather a giant winged monster that the crow’s morphed into after…eating Rei. Damn…she’d better get out in one piece.
