Summer Time Render Episode 16

After last week’s huge battle, the gang slows down as they recruit Shadow Mio into the group, and it ended up being way easier than I thought it would be. And to be honest, she’s kinda cool lol. I think I like her more than the actual Mio, but I feel kinda bad for her because she hasn’t had that much spotlight in the anime. I just like that Shadow Mio is just straightforward and is able to joke with her usual deadpan face, though that romantic hinting didn’t land for Shinpei because of that. And probably because Ushio destroyed her link to Haine made Shadow Mio so complacent, so much so that she doesn’t even want to kill Mio or Shinpei. And now not caring, she explains to the group about copying and the two ways you can copy and how it works among the Shadows. It does explain a lot more things like how those Shadow babies were made, what with Haine’s birthing. Really interesting to know, and good info too. Knowing that if one of the Shadows they encountered already copied someone, it’ll be impossible for them to copy another person so they won’t be as much of a threat. It’s great that they have another ally, a strong one at that. So the group go to Hishigata to meet with Sou and Tokiko’s father so they can finally get some answers and they see something shocking.

Everyone finds the morgue and the secret passage where the doctor and Tokiko would wheel out dead bodies. Down there they find Sou’s mother choking out her husband as she was under Haine’s control. Ushio to the rescue, she breaks that bond and after some resucitation they somehow save the doctor. And wow, Dr. Hishigata is terrible. I don’t sympathize with him at all and if him helping the gang out now is supposed to be redemption for him, I call bull because he’s done so many awful things. He even went out of his way to shoot his own daughter, and thankfully it was Shadow Mio the entire time. It goes to show that he really does not give a single crap about his own children, even though he wanted them to become Shadows so they can go to Haine’s homeland and live as Shadows together forever. The fact that he says that he has nothing to live for if his wife dies, right as his two children stand before him…man. What an ass. If he really wanted to live with his family, he never would have shot at Tokiko and I wouldn’t know how to feel about that. He only cares about his wife, no one else. He’d rather die, and damn I feel so bad for Sou and Tokiko (though I don’t like her). The pacing was weird. I couldn’t get into the Hishigata drama at all because 1: Dr. Hishigata is awful, and 2: I didn’t feel any emotion from the doctor losing his wife because we’ve barely seen either of them enough in the show. Combined I feel like both characters have been in the show for 5 minutes at most. Who even are they and why should I care? Again, Dr. Hishigata sucks. Not getting into the emotional parts and the drama is the same with the other characters as well. There aren’t enough slow moments between the characters for anyone to get invested in them as the group is constantly doing something. We’re more than halfway into the show and I can’t really say I have a favorite character, so I was mostly here for the story and even that is a struggle for me now. So it’s really shaky, and this time I just didn’t really care all that much.

And to show how crappy he is even more, Dr. Hishigata shows Shinpei and the others the log book of all the patients that died in the village. The ones marked with the Capgras delusion are the ones that were fed to Haine, and some of those people included are Shinpei’s parents. Shinpei’s parents discovered Hiruko cave and were about to make it public until they were killed, with the Doctor feeding them to Haine afterwards. It was made to seem like an accident like many of the other deaths. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that this happened, but Shinpei barely reacted to it.

And when it comes to the Shadows, we learn that if Haine dies then all of the Shadows will die as well. It makes sense, even if Ushio broke the bonds with the Shadows. They are her creations and a part of her now that we know how they were created, so if she were gone then they would too. Which includes Sou’s mother and Ushio. Ushio accepts it pretty easily though I know we’ll get a tearful goodbye once we get to the end. And as for Shide, we know his true identity as an ancestor to the Hishigata family, Shidehiko Hishigata, the first director. The Hishigata family and the Shadows have been connected for a lot longer than we knew, and I am curious who Shide was a long time ago and how everything came to be. So we’ll see.