It’s happening on all fronts. Monsters old and new turning up everywhere, Godzilla himself making a spectacle in Tokyo, all the scientific gobbledygook you could ever ask for. About the only thing that isn’t moving is the body count, which is still officially at zero. There were suggestions at the end that it might finally have its first click, but with Singular Point and kills it’s “pics or it didn’t happen”. Until we see hard evidence I’m defaulting to everyone still being alive.
Hell, even Ashihara is probably still alive – and he’d be 120 years old or whatever. He hasn’t been picking up his mail but he’s got a pretty good excuse if he’s been living in India. The exact relationship between Ashihara and Shiva is an interesting and probably vital unknown. Did he found the company? Just what exactly is Shiva’s endgame here? BB seems genuinely intent on trying to discover how to stop the world getting destroyed but Tilda’s motives are a lot more ambiguous. One way or another Shiva is the thread that seems to tie all the disparate elements of the mystery together.
As for Godzilla, it looks like that was indeed a pre-evolved version (talking a cue from Anno here). We even got a roar that had just enough echoes of the one we all know and love to act as an unmistakable ID card. He appears to immolate himself in some kind of gas-fired explosion, and in the aftermath the skies over Tokyo clear and even the radons are dead. But what the big fellow has done is put himself into some kind of pupa, and I imagine what emerges is going to have a much more familiar look to it.
Meanwhile Mei’s investigation heads to Ashihara’s old library – and in the direction of “transtemporal” as a key concept. Ashihara apparently figured out a way to look into the future using a sort of supercalculator, but kept running into errors – as if the future itself was an error. His research offers clues to Mei – the titular singular points, perhaps each both a supercalculator in itself and its own universe. Are these multiple supercalculators competing against each other as Pero II suggests – and could that be causing the catastrophe that Ashihara apparently kept seeing in the future? The science started to come together for me this week, and make a sort of sense – which I think is important progress for the series.
Outaki seems genuinely disappointed that Godzilla was defeated before he had the chance to take him on, but that’s obviously not going to be a problem. And anyway, the arrival of another kaiju from the Toho lexicon keeps him plenty busy – Kumonga, the giant spider that first appeared in 1967. Or rather a lot of kumongas, and nasty beasts they are. Jung Jet Jaguar can take out a few of them at a time, but not only are there apparently dozens at the seashore, they seem close to unkillable. Maybe they have captured and killed one of the workers, but like I said – as long as the meter is at “000” I require proof before I buy in.
One other interesting note: this week Netflix Japan added English subtitles to Godzilla Singular Point (including the first 7 episodes, retroactively). Whether this is a comment on its popularity overseas I don’t know, but it’s not something I recall them doing before – certainly not midstream like this. And they’re pretty good too – not perfect but certainly not machine-generated or anything like that. For selfish reasons I hope this is a sign of a change in policy for them generally.
