Episode 2
G A M E S O M E
Still riding with Haberu on the Otaki Factory moped, Mei explains that her field of study isn't about just concocting any imaginary creature, that dreams follow the rules of dreams, and that other universes have their own laws too.
At the outdoor festival, the large pterosaur kaiju is ready to devour Yun and the little boy when Goro Otaki's voice pierces through the air behind them. Jet Jaguar stands up, diverting the monster's attention, with Goro operating the robot from inside the torso and projecting his voice through a speaker. He introduces himself as Jet Jaguar with great bombast but the monster doesn't wait for him to finish before it attacks. Yun carries the boy to safety as Jet Jaguar battles the pterosaur kaiju, which quickly rips off the robot's right arm with its mighty beak. Goro's resolve unbroken, Jet Jaguar charges at the monster once again but it hurls the robot across the festival ground and into a building as people scatter. The kaiju pounces on top of the robot and, seeing Goro inside the cockpit, pecks at the chest grate and tears it off, exposing Goro within. Goro stands Jet Jaguar up again while grabbing the pterosaur monster's beak but the robot loses balance and Goro falls out of the cockpit onto the pavement. He runs away on foot, begging for Great Buddha's protection as the kaiju scuttles forward trying to eat him, when suddenly the creature is stopped and dragged backward.
Goro turns around to see Jet Jaguar on its feet and battling the kaiju, with no pilot! Goro looks across the street and sees Yun standing on the Otaki Factory truck bed, frantically operating a tablet. Goro rushes over, grabs the tablet and sees that Yun is using their 'Play With Jet Jaguar' application. "What did you expect?" Yun asks.
The pterosaur kaiju knocks Jet Jaguar to the ground. Yun takes the tablet back to change the settings. The monster tries to pull the robot's head off, much to Goro's chagrin, as Yun hands him back the tablet and says that it will be 70 seconds until Jet Jaguar restarts.
The monster stops trying to remove Jet Jaguar's head as the robot appears dead. The monster instead turns its attention to the people in the streets. With 40 seconds remaining, Yun rushes out with a large wrench to stall the creature, which knocks over cars trying to catch people until it hears Yun clanging the wrench and roars at him.
Yun flees from the kaiju with 20 seconds to go. It's just about to chomp him when Goro rams the Otaki Factory truck into the creature's head, glaring directly into the creature's eye as he does so.
Before the pterosaur monster can charge at Yun again, Jet Jaguar charges it and knocks it away. Now rebooted and operating without manual control, Jet Jaguar stands ready to fight even with its visible damages. Yun orders Jet Jaguar to get the monster but the winged creature takes off straight up into the sky.
Riding into town on the moped, Mei spots the creature flapping its wings in the sky and wonders if it's a huge bird. Haberu looks over and sees it too, then Mei realizes it's a pterosaur.
The kaiju roars several times as it flies higher into the sky. Yun recognizes its cry. The kaiju suddenly stops moving and falls down to the ground, landing in the grass with a loud thud. Yun goes over and sees that the monster is dead. As people gather around it, one man touches the monster's body and exclaims that it's hot.
At dusk, Haberu and Mei arrive on the moped at the festival ground, which has been cordoned off by the Chiba Prefectural Police with large crowds of people gathered around. Haberu leaves Mei on the moped to go check out what happened. From the police tape threshold, he sees paramedics loading Goro into the back of an ambulance, with Goro sitting up on the gurney and insisting that he's not hurt. Haberu spots Yun sitting next to Jet Jaguar on the back of their truck and walks under the police tape to go and speak with him. Yun states that Goro has a few broken ribs but he'll be fine. On the opposite side of the truck, Mei pushes through the crowd to the front of the police tape and sees the dead pterosaur kaiju. She uses her phone to zoom in and take a photo of it.
The incident becomes the hot topic in Japan, as we see through a montage of television news and talk shows. One commentator notes the creature's resemblance to the extinct Quetzalcoatlus. Several people lament that the creature wasn't captured alive. Alongside footage of Jet Jaguar battling the kaiju, Goro is identified as the robot's operator and designer, with some people commending his heroism and others calling Jet Jaguar a weapon and saying Goro should have waited for the police. One news program shows reporters gathered outside Otaki Factory, which has its shutters closed.
At Otaki Factory, Yun and Haberu examine Jet Jaguar, noting that the robot is badly damaged but surprisingly resilient. They realize that Jet Jaguar's repairs will have to wait until they finish repairing three rover-like work robots topped with mechanical arms, which will take them 10 days on their own with Goro in the hospital, but their co-worker Satomi arrives and shares Goro's instructions to forget those robots and prepare Jet Jaguar for the next battle. She shows them a print of the modified classic painting of the giant shark monster battling the lone samurai warrior in a red ocean, the same painting that Mei observed at the bus stop. Satomi says that the pterosaur they encountered was one of the flying creatures depicted in that painting, and she relates Goro's prediction that the creatures will return in a flock just like in the painting. Haberu points out that the same painting was displayed at the festival. Labeled 'Painting of Godzilla,' Satomi says the local legend is that Godzilla is an apocalyptic monster that appears from the sea when it turns red. With Jet Jaguar's new parts not scheduled to arrive until the next week, Yun shows Haberu and Satomi a recording of radio waves emitted by the pterosaur kaiju's cry, which match the radio waves of the distant monster cry from the other night at the mansion. They realize that the pterosaur monster's species communicates through radio waves, so Yun decides to produce a radio wave signal that can attract them.
At the Misakioku facility, Yamamoto and Sato watch a TV talk show covering the pterosaur kaiju. Yamamoto explains that he was shown the giant skeleton in the basement by the facility's former director, two before him, who was himself shown the skeleton by the director before him. Yamamoto shows no interest in investigating the skeleton's origin, indicating that he's more concerned with preventing information about the skeleton from leaking out. Seeing Sato's concern about the skeleton, Yamamoto gives him the key to investigate the compact archives, a storage facility packed with old books and files.
As Mei researches dinosaurs on her computer at home, Pelops II appears on her screen after performing her requested data search. Pelops II says that it works hard because it doesn't want to be uninstalled, explaining that its character is linked to Mei's computer. "What would you think if you woke up one morning as a big insect?" Pelops II asks her. "Your data may be the same, but the vessel is different." Pelops II offers to organize Mei's notes on transdimensional flying creatures and get them published.
As Sato looks through archived documents at Misakioku, Yamamoto tells him that a museum wants to buy the dead pterosaur's body for three billion yen. Sato wonders aloud how much the giant skeleton in their basement is worth. Yamamoto notices some old microfiche sheets among the archived documents. Sato, after mistakenly fetching an overhead projector and then a pair of floppy disk drives, manages to find a microfiche reader, at which point Yamamoto notes there are now two of them worth three billion yen.
A news report shows another dead pterosaur kaiju on a beach. The next report indicates that four sets of remains have been found in total, and then eight in total. One report shows a crowd of people gathered hoping to catch the flying creatures. A scientist shows reporters that the creature's tissue layers are similar to an electric eel's electric organs. Responding to a question about whether the creatures were found to have starved to death, the scientist replies that they haven't found an organ in the creatures that works as a stomach. Another scientist reveals that the creatures' DNA was found to lack homeobox genes, unlike normal multicellular organisms on Earth. Several reports discuss the pterosaur monsters' corpses containing high levels of the radioactive element radon. Another report notes that the word kaiju is an old Japanese term meaning strange beast. Merchandise abounds as the public starts calling this new flying species radio-wave monster Rodan (denpa kaiju Radon).
As Mei cooks her dinner, Pelops II tells her that someone named Professor Li responded to her paper on the internet. Mei is confused. Pelops II reveals that it finished organizing Mei's notes into a paper and published it online: "Introduction to Biologia Phantastica by Mei Kamino and Pelops II," "The laws of physics distorted by imaginary creatures' time regression…" Pelops II reveals that 32 people have already reacted to the paper and five people have downloaded it, with the one person who sent a reaction email being Professor Li. She wants to meet Mei in Tokyo.
Back at Misakioku, Yamamoto and Sato review the microfiche sheets. One of them contains a document called "Verification of Specimen Electromagnetic Wave Radiation" with a photo of the facility's founder, Michiyuki Ashihara, a disheveled and haunted-looking man standing in front of a large tank filled with jellyfish.
Standing next to his car on the side of the highway, Sato speaks to a woman on his phone, telling her about the Misakioku facility's mysterious alarm system that's connected to a machine in the basement where there's a skeleton of a huge dinosaur. The woman tells Sato to give her a written report and then hangs up. She is shown to be waiting to depart at an airport, and her documents reveal that she's on her way to an event called the Conference on Archetype taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which is being held by a group called SHIVA.consortium.
While riding on a train, Mei researches Professor Li Guiying and learns that she's a computational chemistry expert conducting research on new molecules through computer simulation, and that she's a member of SHIVA.consortium.
At Otaki Factory, Haberu has equipped the moped with a pair of Rodan-luring antennae called Gyro Canopy Tandem 2 (Gyro Z for short). Goro returns from the hospital already with a crutch and one arm in a sling.
Out in the ocean, the water has turned red. Two fishermen on a boat lament how they had a huge catch of deep-sea fish yesterday but haven't caught a single fish today. One of them suggests that they might have better luck selling Rodan buns. Suddenly, a Rodan bursts out of the water in front of them and flies up into the sky, leaving a trail of red dust in the air behind it. Dozens of additional Rodans fill the sky as the fishermen stand awestruck on their boat in the middle of the red ocean.
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This second episode is the first one to open with the show's theme song and it's a total banger. The song is called In Case and it's by a group called Bish. Toho Animation even posted a music video of the song set to Singular Point footage and graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXd4ZwDivsc
The first battle of this Godzilla anime series is Jet Jaguar vs. Rodan! How cool is that? The action here is staged very well, putting us viewers right in the thick of the combat with palpable stakes throughout. The art design and animation on this show is visually appealing, a colorful mix of traditional hand-drawn animation and 3-D computer animation. This show's take on Rodan is certainly unique and potentially controversial, making him huge but not giant and having a whole flock of them appear at the end, but it's not like the notion of multiple Rodans is anything new. This take on Rodan absolutely works in this episode and that battle with Jet Jaguar is awesome! I also love the hilariously meta moment during the fight when Jet Jaguar initially seems to have started acting under it's own self-programming, a la Godzilla vs. Megalon, only for Yun to be operating the robot remotely with an app on his tablet, to which he asks "What did you expect?"
When Mei is researching dinosaurs on her computer, the image she's looking at is a mash-up of the Rhedosaurus from the main poster for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Raquel Welch from the main poster for One Million Years, B.C. The English subtitles translate Mei's comment on that picture as a comment on dinosaurs, "I can't believe how agile they are when they're so big," but the English dubbing has her commenting on the Raquel Welch lookalike by saying "Look at her, she must have to work out a lot in order to get a body like that." The dub also changes Goro Otaki's pleas to Great Buddha for protection as Rodan chases him to instead have him apologize to Rodan extensively for calling him a stupid beast. The voice acting in this show's English dub is fine but I find arbitrary changes to the dialogue like that to be disappointing.
This series does a really good job of building intrigue and keeping things interesting. It's so fast-paced that it demands the viewer's full attention, which it rewards with delightfully fascinating world-building set against a slow-burn atmosphere of mounting dread. It's clear that these characters are dealing with something ominous that's happening beyond any of their control.
This second episode is also the first one to end with the show's end credits song (Aoi by Polkadot Stingray), which is set to a montage of scenes featuring classic-designed Toho kaiju and lots of easter eggs, but this end credits sequence is just a non-sequitur, not something that represents what's to come in the series.