English Dub Review: FLCL: Shoegaze “Gene-Bato (Generational Battle)”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In flashbacks, after the events of Alternative, Kana grows up and ends up volunteering for Kanda’s N.O. experiments in the hopes of “making things how they were”, but to no success.

In the present, Kana tries negotiating with Harumi by buying her all the candy she wants while Kanda tries informing Masaki that Harumi is actually a Medical Mechanica sympathizer. The two kids move further up the building to the top and begin trying to activate the device, presumably to restart the flattening process, but when Harumi begins to explain herself to him, Masaki’s N.O. energy begins to activate the device. Later, when Kana finally arrives with Harumi’s candy, she gets in an argument with Harumi, which ends up being oddly inspirational. As she throws the candy down on them, Masaki realizes he’s in love with Harumi, and the tower activates again, bringing forth another weird ghost that spooks one of the snipers, who shoots Harumi.

OUR TAKE

Apologies to the ostensible protagonist Masaki Aofuji, who is practically made an afterthought this episode as so much ends up focusing on Harumi’s antics and catching up with Kana since the events of Alternative ended. To be frank, while I liked it better than Progressive, I didn’t exactly love Alternative that much either, with much of it feeling padded or thematically confused, so while getting a follow up to Kana and Kanda sounds interesting on paper, it didn’t exactly get me super excited to see what they had been up to. Kana seems to have basically become rather bitter in the decade(?) since she saved her hometown but lost Pets, one of her best friends who apparently has not talked to her since then. Her other two friends, who both got focus episodes in Alternative but I don’t remember the names of, are still around though, so things aren’t all bad, but her life has been consumed by Kanda’s hope that her N.O. power will help them reclaim something that he doesn’t go into. He later says he hopes it will open up a new world of some kind, but that too is very unclear.

N.O., at least as described by the FLCL wiki, “is the power to mentally call other objects and energies through light years of space. It calls upon both sides of the user’s brain’s thought processing abilities to open channels through multiple dimensions to instantaneously pull things through.” It’s basically been the main sci-fi thing that justifies how stuff comes out of the people’s heads like robots or flowers or musical instruments. I may be wrong, but Shoegaze may be the first of these seasons to want to go somewhat in depth with this concept, though given how poorly these findings go, it almost feels like a meta commentary on how we’re on the edge of over-explaining deliberately vague and unclear aspects of FLCL and why we should just stop making new seasons. And you know what else is unclear? Harumi, who is profiled as a Medical Mechanica sympathizer and says she doesn’t like how the world is, but her goals are still a mystery, even if her and Masaki’s relationship seems to be a stripped down version of Haruko and Naota’s. I feel like I’m missing some things to talk about, but it also feels like there’s a lot more little things not worth mentioning than things that are.

In a recent announcement by tweet, Jason DeMarco made clear that while Grunge and Shoegaze have been ratings successes, next week will be the final track on the vespa riding playlist, for better or worse. It’s currently unclear as to what the reasoning is for stopping now as opposed to five years ago, but it’s also still somehow hard to believe that next week will be the end of FLCL…again. For the third or fifth time. Out of all of these new seasons, Grunge has really been the only one I’ve really liked, and with one episode left to go, I don’t think Shoegaze is gonna join it. Where Grunge made good use of the halved episode count, Shoegaze probably could’ve benefitted from three more episodes. Or maybe I just wouldn’t have liked it regardless. Either way, we’ll see how it all comes to a head next time.