I’m certainly struck by how much moral ambiguity we’re seeing in anime at the moment. From Madoka Magica to Fractale to Letter Bee, we see a similar scenario playing out – innocents caught in between two sides of dubious moral standing. What’s more, we also seem to be seeing a trend where the side that might just be the more “good” is actually practicing the more “evil” methods in pursuit of their goals. Consequentialism is pretty heavy-duty stuff to debate, but these series are certainly enough to get you thinking.

As suspected, Lawrence has spotted Lag’s specialness – even if he, like us, doesn’t know exactly what it means. He urges Lag to get in touch with his hatred, to draw power from it – and to use that power to work for Lawrence in defeating the government (that evil in the pursuit of good thing, again). You can see the doubt in Lag’s eye, but he still doesn’t want to give in to that side of himself – not even when weasely Lawrence brings up the suject of Lag’s mother (did we know her name was Anne?) having her heart stolen, too.

Just when we feel like we might really hate Reverse, we get another display of just why they might be in the right – in the form of Jeel’s memories. If all that we already know weren’t enough, let’s not forget that we know see evidence that the government was performing its experiments on little children, too. The entire sequence with Zazie and Jeel was highly effective – though enemies, they understand each other because both are driven by hate. And Lag, true to himself, only wants to find a way to get them to be friends. Between alternately saving and trying to kill each other they do develop a sort of friendship – which appears to be ended prematurely by a grimly conventional bullet from Valentine’s pistol.

For myself, I couldn’t quite figure out what I was feeling about the cabernet and Zazie’s efforts to kill it – efforts eventually taken over with some success by Lag. After all, is the cabernet not the best chance to stop the government from continuing to steal hearts and perform grisly experiments on innocent people? Yet this is also the same gaichu that apparently killed Sunny and all the other innocents in Lament.

This show doesn’t make it at all easy to know what to think or feel most of the time. Speaking of Lament, next week finally brings the return of Connor, and he doesn’t look happy. One gets the sense we’re heading for a final arc full of sadness and heartbreak.