Episode 2 picks up where the previous left off; Ibara and Aoi going to find Taeko and save her after they were attacked by a wolf and heard her scream. They find her, but held up by a male survivor who’s gone over the brink of sanity because he cannot find his daughter. Taeko fights him off and Ibara gives him a shot.
The dog that was with Taeko in the first episode was shot and injured – by the man – and Taeko went to it, instead of the man. So that’s where her priorities lie and instead of using the impersonal pronoun when referring to the dog, she gives it a personal pronoun and also refers to the dog as a “good person”.
The survivor(s), Mitsuo Kawabata and his second wife, Yukiko, are fugitives living in a home powered by solar energy and had been given food supplies by a delivery truck that just stopped coming. They haven’t left though because Miku, Mitsuo’s daughter, left to visit her mother’s grave site and Yukiko refuses to leave without her. Ibara, Taeko and Mitsuo go to find her and Aoi is left with Yukiko.
Aoi tells Yukiko about them being Coppelion; genetically engineered dolls and about some story of a doll named Coppelia that was created by a doctor (maybe as some history to tell the origins of the name). In exchange for that story, Yukiko tells her that she killed her own child but wants to protect Miku. She hugged Aoi too and told her that she doesn’t think she’s a doll. Not able to deal with such strong emotions though, Aoi pushes her away and hides in the bathroom for awhile. When she gets out, Yukiko is gone.
Yukiko went to the leaning hotel with Miku and Ibara found her. But Yukiko rejected Ibara’s help because of her fear of being turned in and not being able to take care of Miku. Ibara breaks down because she wants to help her and feels as if she isn’t being given the opportunity to do the job she was trained for. She saves Miku but Yukiko fell to her death after the building collapsed.
Aoi tried to cheer up Miku after that ordeal, telling Miku that she’d be with her dad again and that she had nothing to worry about. Miku held on to that little piece of hope. Ibara went to him after the vice captain and his men saw the red smoke flare signal. Instead of taking her help, Mitsuo decided to die at the racetrack because he didn’t want Miku to see him suffering.
He just wanted to see her smile.
Taeko cried a lot, Ibara was disappointed and Aoi was very disappointed. She apologized to Miku and they left her in the care of the V.P. Ibara was still feeling sad but Aoi gave her Miku’s message of gratitude; which made her smile. And that was the episode.
Emotion was stuffed into this episode and I felt it more for the girls than for Mitsuo and Yukiko. The idea in this was to show the girls’ ineptitude to understand the gravity of human emotions but I don’t like the way in which it was done because I found the parents to be a bit stupid.
They were concerned about their freedom and conflicted about Miku but they should have done what was right from the beginning. When the delivery truck stopped coming, they should have left. I doubt they were getting food at all, so Miku must have been hungry. Even though they have the radiation costumes, Ibara realized in the leaning hotel scene that Miku’s oxygen tank was running on empty; so she could have died if it weren’t for them.
Yukiko is also a nut job, why would she turn the gun on Miku to threaten Ibara to stay away? Obviously she has learned nothing and didn’t change – as Aoi believed – after killing her first child.
Mitsuo’s choice to stay and die was also stupid to me. It was an extension of all that human emotion and what it can influence a person to do – something that Ibara nor the others would understand. He doesn’t want Miku to see him suffer, but he’s making her suffer more by choosing to die. He wasn’t being selfish, but was at the same time. Suffering is apart of humanity, it would have helped Miku to grow some, since she already seems mature for her age. But he had his reasons, very dumb reasons. It is what it is.
Even though Coppelion don’t understand the weight of human emotion, this episode showed that they do feel a sense of sadness and loss when they cannot save a human being. They take their job very seriously and maybe those emotions are just trigger reactions to not being able to help someone. But Ibara’s tears in the end after hearing Miku’s message seemed to have been her own.
Dolls do feel.
P.S: The OP is awesomeness.
I wasn’t really sure what direction this second episode was going for. It felt like it was just a story about stupid people writing their own tragedy. My own interpretation is that this was just another attempt to humanize the three super powered school girls, the problem is that they already feel like the most real and human thing in Coppelion so it just felt heavy handed instead.
The thing with the dad was just… Maybe he was dying anyway? They did say that normal humans couldn’t survive in that spot. I am just intentionally turning my brain off for that one.
I kind of felt like both parents were killed off because they were bad people who had no future anyway. That is possibly just me reading too much into it however. It’s hard to believe that anyone would remember their past if they just left the city on their own. I can’t help feeling like some moral implication from the original writer went over my head with this episode.
I guess what they were trying to do was to show the contrast between human emotions to what an android is made to feel. But the thing with that was, was that it felt too forced and fake from both Mitsuo and Yukiko (which made me annoyed with their characters), whereas with Coppelion, I felt a lot of sympathy for them.
Maybe so, but the Vice President was there, I’m positive they had the treatment necessary to at least cure him because they saved Miku. But he was in that open area too long so probably.
“The ghosts of a person’s past always come back to haunt them”?? Or maybe one will try to do things right in the present to make up for the wrongs done in the past. I can only think of those two. I’d have liked to know what crime Mitsuo had committed in the past. It only seems that he made the choice to die because Miku would have been a constant reminder of what he had done, so he just left her with someone more capable of taking care of her.