Because of its short runtime of 11 episodes the series doesn’t waste any minute here and pushes its plot forward in a fast paced manner. Earlier than I assumed but still as expected the series did a time skip of four years which means that Shion is now 16 years old.
At first everything seems normal until we find out that the system indeed reacted to Shion’s behavior of helping Nezumi. He was stripped of all his elite privileges and had to leave his school and his house. It also seems that Shion didn’t get any other education because despite his age he’s already working in a mundane and boring government job of supervising robots (including a very creepy vow he has to say each morning).
Although Shion doesn’t seem to really mind about his new life style there was the feeling that the system really crushed Shion. This becomes clear during his conversation with Safu where she notices that he’s not jealous of her success and he later flatly tells her he doesn’t know what his dreams are or what he should do in the future. Indeed, what could he expect in this society? Whatever he’d do it wouldn’t help, he wouldn’t be able to move forward. His future basically ended four years ago.
What surprised me is that apparently everybody involved kept silent about this issue. Safu doesn’t seem to know about anything that happened and only wonders why he stopped going to school. So it seems that this state works rather “subtly” with “issues”, although it became clear that this is a true Orwellian society (creepy vows, correctional facilities, non-stop surveillance and so on).
Thanks to the big events in this episode we also now know why Shion’s hair will turn grey at one moment, although I also wonder how he will be saved. Judging by this episode it seems that anyone who’s infected by a bee is aging so rapidly that any help comes late. The origin of this disease is still a mystery, so it can be anything from a natural mutation and military experiment gone out of hand to a terrorist attack. Currently, I don’t think that a terrorist attack is very likely, though, because up to now we haven’t seen any signs of an open resistance (protests, fights, explosions and so on).
And although we haven’t even seen any outsider besides Nezumi yet, the perfect preparation and execution of the escape, the amazingly well trained mouse and Nezumi’s suggestion that he observed Shion for years hints not only at many people but also quite capable people. And yeah, as it turns out, this is less a Water World as I suspected but more of a Mad Max world with city No.6 being completely surrounded by a dessert.
I’m really interested to see how everything unfolds in the next episodes, so this episode did its job of setting everything up almost perfectly. I also can’t wait to see what part Safu plays in the future because her studies of relationship of hormones, behavioral changes and most important brain functions fits too perfectly to be a fluke. And let’s be frank: any girl that so flat out tells a guy she wants to have sex with him is pure win and has to show up more often.
