Toaru Kagaku no Railgun S Episode 4: Sisters

“Oh, and before the next experiment, could you clean those up please?”

Impression

Kuroko’s right – seeing an overly cheerful Misaka really is creepy. I know she was really relieved to learn that the original cloning project had been abandoned, but wow, I’ve never seen her actually pay for a canned drink at a vending machine before. Usually she kicks them, or messes around with the mechanics inside – but she’s paying for them now? o.O There were numerous moments this episode where certain characters mentioned something (purely nonchalantly) yet it served as painful foreshadowing for the events that were going to happen – especially if you’ve already seen how this arc ended in the original Index series. Saten-san talks about how the money cards are merely the tip of the iceberg for something even bigger – and everyone (including Kuroko and Uiharu in Judgment) shrugs it off, yet she’s spot on with that guess. It’s not just that – the money cards aren’t leading up to a large-scale event, experiments are already happening right as they speak, while Misaka is running around Academy City choosing sexy swimsuits for Haruue-san or emptying capsule machines for a Gekota badge. Seeing her so happy after filling up three baskets of capsules made my day 😀

Then you have Uiharu’s accidental slip, where she referenced the cloning project of a Level 5 – but Misaka still thinks its all baseless rumours, and seems perfectly happy to talk about what they’d do if they had a clone. Misaka never answers, but in fact she’s the one that has the highest chance of actually having a clone…or a few. Or a couple thousand :S Finally there’s her conversation with the kids in the park, one of which is an electro esper much like Misaka is – and they talk about the chances of Misaka being able to “phone” the kid, with Misaka answering that it’s impossible, with many interfering electric signals from the rest of Academy City getting in the way. But of course, it might just be possible if there’s a network of people whose brainwaves are all similar. Oh. OH. Well isn’t that convenient xD

While all this is happening, two lady scientists are growing a MISAKA sister in a lab – who turns out to have the mental level of a newborn baby, and has knowledge of how to survive as a human being forcibly pushed into her brain in order to speed up the learning process. It’s inefficient, and they don’t last long like this – but really, that’s the entire point. As they were made to be killed off in the first place, there’s little point of implementing emotions (not that they can, anyway) because they serve the express purpose of levelling Accelerator up to Level 6. This sister turned out to be MISAKA 9982 – the unfortunate soul who also appears in Index and engages in battle with Accelerator. I think the most jarring thing about all this isn’t even the piles of dead MISAKA clones chucked in a room in the lab, but rather their reactions to it – while the younger of the two scientists seems inexperienced and very much in awe of the entire process, no-one reacted to seeing the bloody corpses of the hundreds of MISAKAs in there, and MISAKA 9982 doesn’t even complain at casually being asked to clean up the bodies of her predecessors – she must know that she’ll be the next one to end up like that.