10 Second Anime - Dimension W - Episode 3

Mira adjusts to life as Mabuchi's partner. Mabuchi meets the new local boss of New Tesla.

File.03 - "Chase the Numbers"

Heh.

For an episode where all that happened was Mira getting her own room, buying furniture, making friends with the neighborhood kids, adjusting to living with Mabuchi, Mabuchi buying a cell phone and talking with a grandmother, it sure didn't feel like the non-stop thrills and action we got in the first two episodes. But this was good. A little breather to build this sci-fi world, develop some characters and even expand a little bit on the theme of accepting another person's humanity.

Mira got her own room, with her own money. No plumbing, though.

Even a trip to get an old Air Streamer and accidentally walking in on a girl using the toilet were good vehicles for exposition on how Mira works as a robot. She needs sleep for the nanomachines in her "blood" to work repairs and she uses the toilet to exchange the nanomachines in the tap water. Does that mean this future world uses nanomachines in potable water instead of fluoride?

Mira is an independent young lady who doesn't want people to know she's a robot.

I think people might notice a little girl carrying her furniture around, though.

Mary the information broker told Mira to check her chest to understand why Mabuchi hates coils so much. I'm still looking...

Kids these days. I'm sure that was a "fig" underneath that censorship when the blonde little girl asked if "housewife" Mira had "done it" with Mabuchi yet.

I did like how the junkyard cars falling down caused Mira and the kids to violently confront the fact that she is a robot on the run, no matter how well she tries to mimic a human girl. I even liked Mabuchi's quiet moment (really, all his moments are quiet, he doesn't talk much) at the New Tesla office where the robot model that Mira was based on greeted him. It looked so similar, yet different because it lacked Mira's personality.

Papa Mabuchi says get over it, Mira, and play with your new friends. Part of the encouragement came from Mabuchi thinking he could trust the kids to keep the secret about Mira's nature. Not only that, she's only two years old, so she need some socialization with people closer to her age. And this gets her out of his hair along with the coil in her chest.

The little slice of life interlude, which really wasn't, ended before the episode was over. The cell phone guy conveniently knew all about the numbered coils, Numbers. As an old-time tinkerer, I'll buy that he would have known about the beta testing on the "micro gates" which really opened small wormholes to another dimension and drained energy somehow from the other side.

It looks like to me that they're siphoning energy off the quantum background energy of space-time, which might be more energetic or easier to capture in this alternate dimension. It's not a coincidence that the deep holes of the Numbers turned red at the bottom.

The local COO Skyheart, also grandmother to the little blonde scamp Shiori, let slip that there was "another" beast of Grendel left in this world. Mabuchi wasn't the sole survivor of his anti-coil commando group. I wonder if this force chose the name Grendel because the foe of Beowulf was described as a "shadow walker" or "night-goer." The flashbacks don't show this group acting very stealthily, although Mabuchi certainly has the skills for that kind of operation.

Interesting too that Skyheart didn't think there was anything wrong with Mabuchi's gruff nature. Well, it's not like he'd be working for New Tesla again in the marketing department.

I hope there's payoff to all the world-building, character-building and relationship-building from this pause of an episode. I still found it interesting and enjoyed the little comic notes and decorations, but I believe those things are just there to add emotional impact to the action sequences and thrilling events coming up. A red eyed butler robot killing its master certainly points toward that with Skyheart's ominous hope the world isn't destroyed by their new energy source.