Babylon

ZetsubouKaiji said:
The new episode is broadening the scope of the story, which would be fine if there were more than four episodes left.
Introducing the idea that the suicide law is going international would be interesting except there are too many loose ends in Japan that need to be tied up. The US getting involved and the weird introduction of the president was kind of funny. I think the wrap up for this one is going to be open ended or a real mess considering that the president isn't even sure if suicide is a bad thing even going to the bible to point out that suicide isn't specifically a sin.
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I'm honestly just trying to wrap my brain around the logic of how individual cities could enact such a major policy change. I don't know about France, but at least in Canada and the US, I'm pretty sure that kind of thing would never fly on a local level. I don't think something that major would necessarily even be possible on a state level, but I could be wrong on that. I don't know if this reflects a certain ignorance on the part of the author about world politics, or is intentional because the world of the story doesn't function quite the same way as our world- I mean, the entire story revolves around a fictional city-state of sorts.
 
ZetsubouKaiji said:
Episode 8:

This show is completely unbelievable.

I could only dream that the president of the United States is a thoughtful MMO nerd that doesn't go for knee jerk reactions.
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This is the gamer representation that we never asked for but the one we deserve! I actually liked this despite how much of a reach it was.
The episode felt rushed overall though. And the switch between first half and second half was... turbulent. Did Seizaki's Kid grow up by a year instantly? I'm going to ignore the legal stuff for now because laws are a social construct and the story might as well be set in distant future where local governments are more in-power and central governments are just decorative.
Also, very unsubtle commentary on America's politics? xd
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The show's gone back to square one,

where it re-explains key points of the suicide law and its pros and cons, this time, with talking heads on the other side of the world.

I'm withholding making big comments about the episodes until the show's finished, so all I'm really going to say is, Zen wears Crocs and that's somehow the biggest takeaway I have from this so far.

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Franconator said:
The show's gone back to square one,

where it re-explains key points of the suicide law and its pros and cons, this time, with talking heads on the other side of the world.

I'm withholding making big comments about the episodes until the show's finished, so all I'm really going to say is, Zen wears Crocs and that's somehow the biggest takeaway I have from this so far.

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Oh gods, I never noticed that.
My opinion of him has suddenly plummeted.
 
up to 10 and loving it. I'm glad they're expanding the scope of the plot a whole lot here, zen's journey is getting all the more interesting and the president guy is awesome. And it's getting more and more philosophical too.
 
There are only two episodes left. I doubt they're going to be able to wrap anything up satisfactorily. About the best that can be hoped for is a final confrontation between Zen and Magase and that feels kind of small when considering the scope of the series now.
 
Episode 11:

Well that was one hell of an episode.
As I've come to expect from this show the presentation was immaculate even as the content strayed pretty far into pretentious territory. The thought of a group of politicians from a small group of countries defining good and evil for everyone is a bit daft, but at the same time it does serve as a way to tie up all the themes of this anime and set up a potentially unique finale.

A lot of the concept discussed in this episode are based in actual thought experiments and philosophy, but it doesn't go too in depth on any of them. It creates a lot of hypothetical situations that show the complexity of the problem, but luckily they're interrupted before coming to answers or agreement because that would have been unbearable in a twenty minute episode. The episode was dense enough already without forcing a conclusion.
 
11

this was frickin galaxy brain, dudes.

Yeah it's silly that country leaders would actually debate philosophy at a summit but maybe that's the point of a story with this kind of premise, to show that it's a question that would cause us to face these questions.

I loved the visual representation of their conversation in this episode. Very much monogatari-esque, with artstyle switching and everything. I was super impressed with the dialogue in this one.

That ending though. Yikes. This is quite a plot development.

I have high hopes for the next one with how alexander thinks of things going up against magase. If there's one person who's a match for the whore of babylon's twisted-ness, it's this guy.

Maybe.

Basically I'm just excited to see her acting at full power. Assuming that WAS her on top of the tower... looked like her... hard to say since she has no definitive face.
 
Final thoughts:
Well, there you have it, another anime that starts off strong and finds itself devolving by the end. And looking into the creator's history, Mado Nozaki, he chooses to make the same mistake as he did with Seikaisuru Kado. He takes a beautiful idea and then he proceeds to waste whatever he was building up to. That really makes for a disappointing experience, everyone knows that the ending is one of the most important parts to an anime. To screw that up is like shooting yourself in the foot.

That's why how a creator ends a series is such a big deal to me, since some of my favorite series end well. To those curious, if you must watch it, just do the first seven episodes. Going beyond that will disappoint you. Overall, 2.5/5.
 
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12

Oh my God, and holy shiet.
This did not go down the way I was expecting at all. Not even a little bit. It was totally out of left field in a lot of ways, I expected them to have some kind of big pretentious discussion on the rooftop but it ended up being a lot more sentimental yet intelligent, right in character for our dear ol' presidante.

And then everything goes absolutely cockwise.

I think what the author is getting at with Magase is she really is more of an abstract representation of "the knowledge of good and evil" which is brought up so often in the bible, possibly a satanic incarnation whose purpose is to tempt people into another layer of knowledge of the two juxtaposed sides of philosophy such that they end up killing themselves, because such knowledge isn't meant for humanity.

Which is pretty straightforward, if you think about it. But what humanity CAN figure out is this shallower definition of good and evil; good is to continue, evil is to cease. I don't know if it's even that cut and dry, but you know, on the whole, they may be onto something there.

Zen made the smartest choice opting to kill the president, because if he killed himself after what he said, that would have certainly made the whole world adopt the suicide law with what just happened. Zen put the blame of the president's death on himself. In the end, he was the ultimate self-made scapegoat for magase's twisted schemes. She didn't truly win in the end despite her smugness.

Often times an ambiguous ending is a bit of a cop-out, but here it represents the author's philosophy on things. Even with the answer he came up with for what good and evil is, he was still unable to cement it in reality, because really nobody can do that without being pretentious. That's why I feel Wood is probably the author's self-insert. This anime ends, but the story doesn't. Thus making it, from his perspective, not a bad, or good thing that it stopped at 12 episodes. This conflict may go on forever.
In the end this show went above and beyond a simple thriller to become a pretty abstract yet thought-provoking discussion with the viewer about the knowledge of good and evil, while having excellent presentation. I can't complain much about this anime. It was awesome through and through for me. Not perfect though, I thought it could have benefited from perhaps one or two extra episodes to flesh out the tense atmosphere before the show ended. But I'm not too bent out of shape about that.
9/10
 
I didn't really think this show could pull it together, but the last two episodes sold me. This was the best ending of anime from 2019.
I was expecting some sort of pullback there at the end, but Babylon just pushed forward to end things in the only logical way possible. It plays out like a Greek tragedy with our tragic and flawed heroes falling, but accomplishing something with their deaths.
 
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