コッペリオン Ep. 02 Review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Ibara and Aoi find Taeko, a wounded dog, and a desperate man looking for his daughter, holding Taeko hostage. After shooting him with the drug for radiation, the man, Mitsuo, takes the trio to where he’s residing, after Takeo tends to the wounded dog. Mitsuo is living in a clean area under the hospital, which has running water and electricity, thanks to solar panels. He and his wife, Yukiko, are convicts who’d escaped during the crisis. Miku-chan, his daughter, was born to him from his first wife, who’s now dead and burred in a nearby horse racing track. Takeo and Ibara go to investigate with Mitsuo, but he’s soon left behind due to massive radiation. They don’t find the girl and Aoi, and Yukiko is missing, whom they suspect played a role in Miku-chan’s disappearance due to her having been convicted of murdering her infant years ago.

Using the dog, they track Yukiko to the tilted hotel. Ibara enters, where she finds Yukiko. Yukiko initially denies Miku-chan is there until the girl shows up. Yukiko wants the girls to go away because if they rescue them, she’ll be arrested again and parted with her adopted daughter. Ibara breaks down since saving people is all she’d been created and trained for. Miku-chan begs Yukiko to help Ibara, so Yukiko gives up, but the part of the hotel they are in collapses. They are able to save Miku-chan but Yukiko lets go and falls to her death. The Chinook that comes to get them stops to get Mitsuo as Aoi promises Miku-chan that the girl won’t be alone. However, since Mitsuo is dying, he refuses to go and they leave him. Aoi apologizes to the Miku-chan for lying and the helicopter takes her to safety, while the trio remain behind to look for more survivors.

Thoughts/Review:

This episode touches the bare highlights of chapters 4 through 10 of the original manga.

As I did last time, after I watched the episode, I read the manga. It is incredible how much material is being skipped, especially what I think are clues to something bigger, though I could be wrong.

For example, when Ibara and Takeo went out with Mitsuo to find his daughter and encountered the massive radiation zone, that was a major thing in the manga. Indeed, there were questions as to why there was suddenly such a massive spike in radiation.

Mitsuo’s death seems bizarre to say the least. When I watched the episode, the notion of him dying so fast, even in an area of higher radiation, didn’t seem possible. The manga goes into a great deal of detail as to why this type of radiation would be so lethal.

I guess if GoHands had been as faithful to the source manga as J.C. Staff was to A Certain Scientific Railgun, the episode would have been at least twice as long. So to pick up the pacing, GoHands is just slashing large amounts of material that help explain a great many things.  I’m not so sure I approve since there was a lot more action in the manga version, including seeing our first mutant animal.

While this was in the manga as well, Ibara’s sudden breakdown made me cringe. She mentions spending eighteen years training for this mission, so her breaking down like that felt forced and fake. Indeed, I thought it was a ploy at first, but reading the manga confirmed it wasn’t.

GoHands did at least bother to provide an explanation as to why there are survivors, but they are doing it in a throw away fashion to save time. Someone was making food deliveries (for the last five years after the government quit the food drops (from the manga)) until very recently. The radiation suits the survivors are wearing, while seemingly of less quality, are actually superior to what the military has.

Overall, because there were a few explanations, this episode was better to me than the last one, but seeing that probably 50% of the manga source materials for this story were cut from the episode, I’m irritated. I’ll keep watching though.