What’s interesting and unprecedented about the summer season is that not only did we have the second half of Space Dandy, but we also had another Shinichiro Watanabe original work – Zankyou no Terror, or Terror in Tokyo. And while most of us came into the season feeling a bit lukewarm toward Space Dandy, the hype for Zankyou no Terror was pretty damn high. Shinichiro Watanabe writing a serious drama about two teenage terrorists in Tokyo is one of those things you can’t help get excited for, because it ticks off so many boxes on the “modern classic” checklist.
You have an acclaimed director, a serious, original (both in terms of not being an adaptation as well as having a distinct premise) story, the promise of post-9/11 reflections and themes (Eden of the East left everyone wanting more), and the potential for a lot of excitement, tension and drama. If Space Dandy was Watanabe unleashing his ridiculous, comedic side, then this would be the same for his mature, sombre, considered side. Needless to say, just the very announcement sparked a wave of excitement and anticipation across the fandom, and – much like Space Dandy – Zankyou no Terror was destined to be memorable even if it bombed.
Zankyou no Terror’s premise is an interesting one. Two teenaged boys named only ‘Nine’ and ‘Twelve’ – presented as orphans from some facility, a mysterious background that’s gradually elucidated upon – decide to carry out a string of bombings in Tokyo while taunting the police through riddles referencing ancient Greek mythology (specifically, the tragedy of Oedipus) for reasons kept close to themselves. Of course, the riddles and the bombings are all planned such that they eventually lead the police to the truth of their past, a truth that would be impossible to get out any other way. Complicating matters is Lisa, a depressed, abused and bullied teenager who – as an unexpected result of the first bombing – ends up joining Nine and Twelve as a means to escape her current life.
And from all that, we get a lot of good stuff out of it. It captures a zeitgeist of sorts with its themes – Nine and Twelve both reflect the extreme end of post-9/11, post-great recession millennial disenfranchisement and disillusionment with traditional power structures and government processes, although obviously from the post-war Japanese side of things, and it arguably puts them in conflict with the recent resurgence of the nationalist right. We get a compelling sub-narrative about power conflicts within the police and how external pressures shape both the conflict and the people involved (although it ultimately plays out in a fairly standard ‘renegade cop’ fashion that we’ve all seen a hundred times, although it’s a lot more laid back and detective-y). There are several fairly original characters whose concepts and personalities are explored and have influence in fascinating ways. Zankyou no Terror has quite a lot to like, and a lot of clever stuff going on – it ticks a lot of boxes that would normally make it a modern classic and easily put it in the running for anime of the year. Normally.
Unfortunately, Zankyou no Terror has a lot of problems, and while a lot of them are quite easy to gloss over, they add up in a damning way. Let’s start with that little list of themes the show touches upon. They’re brought up rather obviously and clearly but it’s a little frustrating because they’re not used for anything. The show is content to focus on Nine and Twelve’s motives and goals and the conflicting aims of those that oppose them but it never takes the short step to contextualise them against anything in the real world and make anything approaching an actual statement. And when the setting and story is so steeped in the modern political climate it is frankly remarkable that it manages to make use of its themes so weakly. The closest thing to a takeaway from it is ‘maybe over-bearing nationalist governments are bad sometimes’ and that’s just lame. Christ, you’d expect it to make some meaningful political statement if only by accident; that it managed to go the length of the series saying effectively nothing is kind of impressive.
On a similar note, a major motif in Zankyou no Terror is the tragedy of Oedipus. On first blush, it’s reasonably well integrated into the story: the terrorist group is called Sphinx and present the people with riddles that, if they fail to solve, will result in death; said riddles include many admittedly well thought-out allusions and reference to classical history, culture and mythology; and Shibazaki becomes the Oedipus figure that Nine and Twelve want him to be. Well, that’s what they said at the end. A big show is made of this motif, with the characters going to great lengths to spell it out, but they’re wrong. The central, driving point of the tragedy of Oedipus (addressed most specifically in Oedipus the King) is that Oedipus is prideful; worse, hubristic. His disrespectful and arrogant actions towards the Oracle of Delphi lead to his downfall at the hands of the Gods; not only does he discover the truth of his awful life – that he murdered his father in cold blood and took his mother for a wife – but he also has to experience his lover, wife and mother hang herself, acknowledge that his children will die in tragedy, and cast himself out in exile as he is no longer fit to be king. He also gouges out his eyes after seeing Jocasta’s dead body, claiming that having seen the truth he doesn’t deserve to see anything else again.
Where the fuck does Shibazaki fit into all that?
So sure, Shibazaki solves Sphinx’s riddles as does Oedipus, and Shibazaki also discovers an awful truth, but the similarities end there. For a start, Oedipus was punished for his hubris, whereas Shibazaki is vindicated for his conviction – diametrically opposed outcomes! A massive fucking failure there! His tenaciousness in finding out the truth has some parallels to Oedipus’, but there’s a difference between a king getting absorbed in uncovering a personal truth and a detective doing his job. Shibazaki is not Oedipus, not in the least.
A case can be made that Nine and Twelve in fact jointly represent Oedipus, putting an interesting twist on their own beliefs, relationships and intentions: there’s a certain level of hubris involved in engaging in a serial bombing of a capital city while also taunting the police, and they ultimately suffer ‘divine’ punishment for it (with a Deus ex Machina no less – but more on that later). But again, where are the other similarities? They didn’t try to discover a truth, they tried to reveal it. They’re also the Sphinx, completely messing with any relationships you could draw from the original tragedy. And if they’re the only ones involved in this allusion, then what the hell are the other actors for?
No matter how you analyse it, the references and supposed parallels to Oedipus don’t make any sense, and are indicative of nothing more than a shallow familiarity with the tale of the Sphinx. It’s the worst kind of literary allusion; the mistaken belief that some simple namedrops and surface-level similarities make for something with greater meaning and depth. Without ever expanding on and incorporating the referenced material in a meaningful capacity it’s at best pretentious and completely falls apart with greater understanding.
The story has broader problems as well, although most of them are not exactly make-or-break ones. But as I said earlier, there’s a fair few and they add up. For example, the usage of their limited episodes. For most of it there isn’t a problem, or at least it doesn’t appear that there is one. Nine and Twelve set up a bomb threat with a riddle, people try to guess it, rinse and repeat as we get to learn bits and piece of the characters. Thing is, once we get to the end we’re rushing through some major plot events and there’s not anywhere near enough time to cover everything in a satisfying manner and it’s then you realise that those early episodes? Basically a waste of time. Comparatively little was learned, even less was actually accomplished, and the tail-end suffers for it.
They needed just a bit more time to spread things out a little more comfortably and address the plot points brought up more thoroughly. Maybe they could have closed up the plotholes left behind – I mean, why didn’t anybody suspect the two new transfer students who showed up shortly before the school trip to the tower that Nine and Twelve bombed and then never turned up to school again? It’s glaring, and it’s strange considering the excellent attention to detail elsewhere. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a work of fiction (and definitely not anime) that depicted real-world cybercrime so accurately! Tor, not-Bitcoin, looking for security holes with nmap, it’s not complex stuff but it’s true to real life and the explanations in-universe definitely show that they put effort into this. Not so much the story though.
Zankyou no Terror’s characters vary a fair bit in quality. Shibazaki, Nine and Twelve are all reasonably well fleshed-out and interesting, with pasts, believable motivations, personalities that aren’t just straight-up archetypes, and emotions that drive and push them. They’re good! Could be a bit better, but still satisfying. A lot of the side characters are decent but forgettable, but it’s enough to make the conflicts between all the groups and interested parties engaging at the very least. There are a couple of characters that are worth going into a bit of detail, though.
First up is Lisa. She could have been an amazing character, to the extent that the series could have revolved around her and been incredible if handled correctly. She’s introduced as a victim of bullying, before Twelve decides to help her out on a whim. From there we learn that she’s heavily depressed and bulimic, without a father and with only a deranged, paranoid and emotionally abusive mother. But after she’s made to hold onto a bomb at the tower, she’s offered a chance by Twelve to escape her past and join the two of them, or die. And so she does.
And of course, she gets in the way, can’t help them out too much and even gets them embroiled in more trouble than they would have otherwise been, but she tries to be helpful and show her gratitude to her unlikely saviours. And she’s still wracked with self-doubt and depression, and runs off by herself on multiple occasions.
Is that not a fantastic setup for a character – for an entire story? The growth of a depressed, probably suicidal young girl through her relationship with the pair of charismatic terrorists that saved her? That would be incredible, but Zankyou no Terror just wastes her! She never progresses beyond being useless and just ‘there’, and contributes very little. Which is such a shame, given the amount of potential she had.
The other character is Five. Oh, Five.
Unsurprisingly, she comes from the same facility as Nine and Twelve – except she’s an antagonist! And she ends up driving a lot of the opposition against them from around the midway mark, being able to solve their puzzles effortlessly and provide them with equal challenges in return. A huge deal is made of her, with a lot of the mid-story revolving around her and her merry band of Americans. And then we get to the end and she was pointless.
She had no motivations. Her personality just didn’t make sense. She very clearly just existed as a way to setup the ending scenes that you know they came up with beforehand and were struggling to find anyway to reach. Seriously, her whole character is resolved incredibly suddenly and poorly right when there was no more time to fit her in any longer, and it’s terrible.
On top of that, a key scene of hers halfway through was basically a puzzle out of fucking Phi Brain. She looks like a Phi Brain villain too! Now I love Phi Brain, but there’s a time and a place for it and that is not smack in the middle of a thriller-drama about sympathetic terrorism in fucking Tokyo! It stretches belief to breaking point, but it’s over mercifully soon.
I guess I can’t avoid it any longer: the end. God damn that end. So the final scenes I mentioned earlier, the ones Five existed to setup, were not actually that bad. A bit inexplicable and forced, but nice enough. But after that… uuurrgh.
The water fight was goofy and a bit out of place but whatever. The Deus ex Machina punishments that both Nine and Twelve suffered were nonsensical and without any reason and basically wrapped up the story in absolutely no way whatsoever besides ensuring that it is an end but whatever.
No, what kills it is… well, right at the start, when Nine and Twelve steal some atomic material (and elsewhere) they leave a ‘calling card’ of sorts – the letters ‘VON’ spray-painted in plain sight. Later on, Twelve mentions that the music he’s always listening to is ‘music from a cold place to the north’.
Every single post-rock fan knows exactly what’s coming and yes they are all but name-dropped. It’s given a really weird amount of attention and weight – it’s not a throwaway thing, it’s like the last reveal and is treated as a very big deal. It’s fucking bizarre and the explanation of what ‘VON’ means is incredibly groan-worthy and the question I’m left with is why. WHY bother with that? It’s just… so forced and not really clever? I don’t know, but it accidentally made the ending hilariously bad.
Despite all the criticisms – and they can’t be simply brushed aside – Zankyou no Terror does get a lot right as well, and even with the flaws it’s still really entertaining. At its core, it’s a dramatic thriller, and it does do that really well. The tension of the race between the police and the bomb’s timers, the suspense as Nine and Twelve try to pull off their plans without getting caught, the counter-bombs they’re forced to disarm, there are a lot of gripping moments in this series and yeah, it’s a heck of a ride. On an episode-to-episode basis it’s usually great fun and I was always left wanting the next episode that much sooner. Zankyou no Terror is a great thriller. The problem is that it seems to think that – and acts like – it’s that much more, and that it has some very important stuff to say.
It does on occasion reach those heights that it likes to believe it’s always at; not often, but frequent enough that, despite the iffy plotting, Shinichiro Watanabe’s stellar direction shines through clearly. There are a lot of little scenes, but the one most vivid to me is the sublime Ferris wheel scene. It’s tense, quiet, slow, and powerfully emotional in an understated way, showcasing Twelve and Lisa beautifully. When Zankyou no Terror does shine it’s more about the emotional qualities as opposed to the intellectual ones it would perhaps prefer, but it does get to shine.
And, unsurprisingly, Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack carries a lot of it, even into scenes that would otherwise flounder. It’s hard to explain just what she was aiming for with this, as it’s a blend of many styles and tones that remains purposefully indistinct, although the influence of the ‘music from a cold land’ is noticeable and appreciated. There’s nothing to complain about music-wise in Zankyou no Terror, and its sound is frankly unique. I’ve never heard another series’ soundtrack that sounds even remotely similar. It’s astonishingly good, and unbelievably powerful and emotional while retaining so much subtlety.
If this review comes across as very negative, know that it doesn’t come from a place of negativity, but rather disappointment. Disappointment that something that had this much potential squandered it, yet failed to notice and so continued on as if it hadn’t. Disappointment that what could have been an instant classic became ‘merely’ an enjoyable and engaging thriller. But if you tale for what it is and not what it wants to be, it’s far from bad. Zankyou no Terror is a pretty good thriller, and a more thoughtful one at that, as long as you don’t put too much thought into it. It has charisma and charm, and it’s genuinely tense and exciting, but it just isn’t anywhere near as clever and deep as it pretends it is, and that will probably be a sticking point for many people. So no, despite all the criticism I can’t say I hate it – it tried to do interesting things on top of its solid core but it failed, and how it failed makes for a lot of interesting discussion and critique – but I can’t say I love it either. But it tried, and I can respect that.
7/10
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