Mirai Nikki – Episode 20

Last episode on Mirai Nikki, our heroes were about to shoot Eleventh in the head when our old friend Akise Aru showed up.  Although, it seems as though Eleventh’s diary had predicted Akise would show up and save him?  So it’s not clear in what sense our heroes were “about” to shoot him.  They were in fact about to be stopped by Akise, as was foretold.  I guess it depends on whose perspective you’re looking at the situation from.  From Yuno’s perspective, she certainly expected to shoot him, she even told him “GG” to mock him, so she would say she was about to shoot him.  From Eleventh’s perspective, he expected not to be shot, and did not consider himself in actual danger of being shot. He would say she wasn’t about to shoot him.  Deus, the God of Space-Time, presumably, can see all outcomes and knows what’s about to happen, and so he would say that Yuno was not about to shoot him, because from his omniscient perspective, things can only be about to happen right before they actually do happen.  I, as a viewer of the show, did not know that Eleventh’s diary had predicted Akise would show up until he said so.  However, as a savvy consumer of entertainment, I suspected they wouldn’t let him go down quite that easily.  So I did not actually expect her to shoot him, and yet I still say she was about to.  What accounts for this?

Anyway, probably most people do not find issues of modality in linguistic descriptions of events as interesting as I do, so the point I was driving at is that Akise Aru had big news – apparently one of the bodies found in Yuno’s house was the body of one Gasai Yuno!  Which suggests that this Yuno is an imposter, which I have argued may not be such a big deal.  But we’ll have to see what sort of explanation she puts forward in episode 20 of Mirai Nikki.

…thirty minutes pass…

 

I can't believe it took me this long to realize that John Bacchus is modeled after Steve Jobs.

Well, it sounds like Yukiteru agrees with my analysis of the whole Gasai Yuno’s DNA situation.  Good for him!  He’s really leveled up compared to two episodes ago.  I’m not sure what the point of that scene was, though, in that case.  Maybe it was just to set up something going horribly wrong with Yuno down the line, and then Akise Aru can step in and say “I told you so”.  Maybe it was just a convenient way to do a cliffhanger; certainly it’s suspicious that they dropped a bombshell at the end of an episode and opened the next episode by dismissing it completely.  Maybe it was just to remind us that Akise Aru exists, so that when we hear that the citizens of the city have been given their own diaries to play with, we can put two and two together and realize that Akise Aru is certainly up to something.  Since he’s a diary apprentice he can’t win himself, but maybe he’ll find a way around that.

I gotta say, I wasn’t really moved by the whole Minene/Nishijima romance that went into full blossom in this episode.  There is a great romance at the heart of this show, but it’s not that romance.  Maybe if they hadn’t been so rushed they could have made Nishijima a bit more fleshed out?  I mean, I like characters in the general style of Nishijima, the subordinate who gets pushed into a situation beyond his paygrade but responds earnestly and faithfully.  But they didn’t give us enough time with him after he was released from Kurusu’s rule, and even those times we did see him he was often just subordinated by Akise Aru anyway.  They tried to reap a little more than they had sown in this episode, and it ended up just feeling dry and pointless.  Minor characters doing minor character things, jumping in to tell their story just as Yukiteru’s character was getting really interesting, and stealing screentime from Yuno who was always interesting.

Last episode I complained about the Copy Diary, which could mimic the abilities of another diary holder.  Now it turns out the John Bacchus has the Watcher Diary which mimics every diary holder.  Sigh.  I guess it’s a power that grows weaker toward the end of the game, at least.  When it’s down to a one-on-one situation, he doesn’t have any more power than the other guy.  But until it is, he’s strictly better than everyone else.  I’m getting flashbacks to when I was watching Heroes, and not in a good way.  You know, I wonder what would happen if you used the Copy Diary to copy the Watcher Diary that was watching the Copy Diary?  It’s a moot point now since the Copy Diary is dead, but I bet it would have ripped space and time asunder.

I wonder how Yukiteru and Yuno plan to beat the Watcher Diary?  Do they know what it’s doing and how to spoof it?  I guess the fact that they even made it to the point that they could gun down his guards with assault rifles suggests they do, but even if he can’t access their diary, he can access the diaries of a substantial fraction of the citizens of the city.  Yukiteru thinks he can use the citizens against Eleventh, though.  Maybe he means he’s going to trick him using their diaries, but the way he said it sounded more like he was going to use them as hostages.  I could believe it of him, now.  He gave Yuno an assault rifle in a crowded building and told her to “create a ruckus”.  His behavior these days is downright goal-oriented.

Bonus Image Corner:

Steve Jobs reads about the iPad in his Sales Projections Diary.

 

A short but sweet appearance from Yuno in this episode.