Pet is a pretty good show, but damn – it sure is depressing.  I always leave an episode feeling thoroughly disgusted by the state of affairs it depicts, and while that may be exactly the intent it doesn’t make the experience any more pleasant.  As I said a few weeks ago my sense of its message is that people are basically awful, and the only thing limiting the damage is our limited ability to damage each other.  Take away the limiters and let people go directly to someone else’s misery zone and Pet is the result.

The experience of people like Satoru and Hiroki is genuinely a sad one (if it wasn’t I don’t think the narrative would work even as modestly well as it does), but someone like Tsukasa is a total write-off.  He’s been evil pretty much since we met him, but his experience of being crushed and de-crushed seems to have left him mentally unbalanced as well as physically ravaged.  And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, though I’m impatient waiting for him to really get what he deserves (and somewhat pessimistic that he will).

Hiroki is the closest thing to a blameless person in this group, but he’s such a petulant child that he’s awfully hard to genuinely like.  Satoru is more relatable and less annoying, but he’s got baggage himself.  He’s clearly adrift without Hayashi in his life, and he’s dealing with Jin trying to use him on one end and Tsukasa preparing to crush him on the other.  He tries to turn Hiroki against him, and so far whatever direction Tsukasa pushes Hiroki eventually goes (which I assume is what being a pet is) but you can see that Hiroki doesn’t instinctually want to go along with it.

The scene where the two lost boys crush the stepson of the CEO is right up there with the bleakest in the series so far, and that’s saying something.  Neither of them wants to do it – Satoru has basically conditioned himself not to let himself think about it, and Hiroki is only really bothered because the man’s wife is present.  These two are victims to be sure but they’re perpetrators as well, just as Hayashi was.  Eventually Hiroki sends Satoru (who’s opened up to him about his feelings of abandonment) off to do the grunt work while he finishes the stepson off himself, but something clearly goes haywire here because Hiroki ends up in the next ambulance over.

Indeed, this is a grim state of affairs.  Tsukasa’s growing madness is the one bright spot – perhaps he’ll go off the deep end before he has a chance to crush Satoru, or perhaps Hiroki will recover himself and somehow rebel against him.  As for what caused Hiroki’s collapse I’m disinclined to think it’s guilt, since he’s had plenty of occasion to feel that already.  But something inside the stepson’s peak definitely messed him up – maybe something do with Satoru being the one to have opened it, though there’s no evidence of that yet.