I’m moving tomorrow, and it’s pretty much a given at this point that anytime I’m swamped by major life events great anime episodes will appear in force.  Why should this time be any different, and indeed this ep of Godzilla Singular Point was a cracker.  I’d love to spend a ton of time breaking it down but that’s time I don’t have, so I’ll have to strive for brevity and conserve my ammunition for the series review next week.  Such is the lot of the anime blogger.

Indeed, I have only one complaint about this episode, and that’s that it didn’t have enough Godzilla.  I don’t expect to see much of the boss in the first half of any Godzilla outing, but once he made such a dramatic splash in Episode 10 I thought he’d be a big presence these last three eps.  Godzilla had a minor appearance last week, and nothing at all apart from a giant cloud of red dust, speculation, and his roar this time.  That the episode was a compelling as it was is testament to how strong the rest of the series has gotten.

Another observation I have at this point is that while the main characters are perfectly fine, for me the most engaging characters are the A.I. – and among the humans it’s Bearach Byrne.  I’m seeing Jeff Goldblum in my head with B.B., he has that sort of cheerful disjointedness to him.  I like Mei and Yun well enough, and they even have an oddly winning chemistry considering they’ve never met.  But B.B. is just plain fun, a perfect mad scientist character for this sort of story.  Brilliant, a bit nuts, opaque in his motives but probably a force for good in the end.

As for the A.I., one reason they work as well as they do is that they’re so different.  Pero II is something of a comic relief character if we’re honest, but he’s the funniest thing about Godzilla S.P. so that works out just fine.  Jung by contrast is a philosopher, EnJoe Toh’s main vehicle for exploring a lot of the questions he clearly puzzles over, and he looks kick-ass in a fight.  Pero is basically the key for getting that message from Mei to Yun – which we now know is the code for launching the orthogonal diagonalizer – and JJJ is the key to keeping Yun alive long enough to use it.

EnJoe has kept my Googling skills sharp, I’ll say that much.  Combinatorial explosions are a thing, but how many people outside of the math or physics arena have ever heard of them?  I don’t fully get it, if I’m honest, but making sense of an infinite number of potential futures seems to be the heart of the problem.  Bearach blithely dismisses Pero II’s suggestion that his meddling with Shiva in order to prevent the catastrophe might itself be what caused it – but he can’t be sure, really.

Things are a mess, that’s for sure.  Godzilla is parked (outside Tokyo Station, natch) and has grown to over 100 meters(!).  A new plant kaiju has appeared, which the scientists have taken to calling “the blob” (which was the one movie that truly terrified me as a kid).  Salunga has broken free in India as the temporary effects of the diagonalizer wore off, and is heading towards Shiva.  Which is where the shit is going down, pretty much – the final showdown between B.B. and Tilda, and the biggest roll of the dice science has ever undertaken.

The last scene of the episode is truly glorious – that extended montage as the long-form version of the “Alapu-Upala” plays for the first time.  I have no idea if this is an actual Indian thing or a Sawada kan original (edit: it’s composed by Sawada with lyrics by Goro Matsui, and performed by Indian singer Annette Phillip) but it’s both beautiful and creepy as hell, and this whole scene has a terrible beauty about it that isn’t soon forgotten.  I get that this style of Godzilla flick is not going to be everybody’s cup of tea, but I’m finding Godzilla Singular Point to be a fascinating mix of the franchise’s core mythology with anime styling.  And it beats the pants off any other Godzilla incarnation in the past two decades.