How would you rate episode 16 of
NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a (TV 2) ? Community score: 4.6
A lesson every fan of Yokō Tarō's work in the “DrakeNieR” franchise will inevitably learn is that finding a modicum of happiness or love in the world is the worst thing that can happen to a character. Even for folks who haven't played the games, I have to imagine that the warning signs were glowing in bright neon right above 2B and 9s' heads when “broken [W]ings” began with the flashback to 9S telling everyone that his friends call him “Nines”. It is pretty damned adorable that this friendless dork would be trying to foist a cute nickname upon himself and it is supremely messed up to be reminded of how inherently tragic this pair's relationship is. Even if their entire world weren't in the middle of complete virus-induced collapse, 2B would never want to become so close to 9S as to let her guard down, seeing as she harbors all of that guilt over murdering the kid who-knows-how-many times over their time together.
With the Logic Virus running rampant, things have become even more precarious. The Androids have been consumed, the Bunker has fallen, and our heroes are fighting an almost certainly doomed battle against an unstoppable united front of their former colleagues and their eternal Machine enemy. Given that all of this is going down in the middle of a Yokō Tarō story, two things become immediately clear:
01: 2B is definitely going to call 9S “Nines”, and…
02: It will happen at the precise moment that will cut 9S (and the audience) the deepest.
So, as with the previous episodes at this beginning of NeiR: Automata Ver1.1a's end, “broken [Wings]” becomes a spectacle of tragedy in the most classical sense, where we must sit helplessly and watch as our heroes barrel towards their inevitable unmaking. In this way, you could argue that this is another area in the anime that offers a meaningful and positive change from its source material. The game's strengths lie in the immersive connection that the player forges with the characters and setting through their participation in the dozens of hours it takes to complete; with this anime, though, the story has the chance to hone its focus and streamline the pace of the narrative so that viewers get the optimal amount of pain and suffering injected into their eyeballs at any given moment.
It is an approach that works very well with the crisis at hand, especially with the direction and production values remaining consistent in this second season. The aerial combat can still look clunky, but the narrative tension never lets up long enough for any such issues to be distracting. The desperate battles that 2B and 9S fight to reunite and stay alive are equally thrilling and sad, which is exactly what they need to be to make the episode's final moments hit as hard as they do. When 2B encounters A2 on the battlefield and chooses to end her life rather than be taken by the virus, NieR:Automata captures the mood of the scene pretty much perfectly, and the same goes for the harrowing rage that consumes 9S as he sees his closest friend die at A2's hands.
Throughout this episode, we hear 2B's constant refrain of “Emotions are prohibited”, and I think the more straightforward approach of a television show's storytelling will help prevent any of the hangups people had about “narrative inconsistency” I remember from when the game first launched. The Androids and Machines are all perfectly capable of feeling things—it's the whole point of the damned story—and 2B even laments how much easier their jobs would have been if they'd been programmed without emotions from the very start. Still, despite how much the story hits you over the head with this fact, I distinctly recall reading complaints that it “didn't make sense” for 2B to keep insisting that emotions were prohibited despite the many, many scenes of characters getting all worked up over their Big Robot Sadness.™
As 9S animalistic howls of anguish remind us, emotions are both a feature and a bug for the mechanical life that is left on Earth—and NieR never wants us to forget that. Every character in this story stands to be ruled or ruined by their love, hate, hope, and fear. We're 10,000 years in the future, yet it's the same as it ever was. Don't expect that to change any time soon.
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Extraneous Code
•Can I just say that the puppet show at the end of this episode is just a horrible act of targeted emotional violence on the part of NieR:Automata? The fact that it's all about 9S playing the world's most depressing game of hide-and-seek for decades on end is already bad enough. It's the fact that the two Pods are dressed up in little ghost costumes that crosses the line. Why would this show go out of its way to use Easter eggs like that makes me nostalgic for NeiR: Reincarnation, a fantastic mobile game that nobody on Earth can even play anymore because Square Enix permanently shut off the servers back in April of this year? That's too cruel for words.
NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.
