Iggy appears in front of the city council. He gets berated. Real calls Iggy. (This is all a flashback.) In another scene, he combs Real's hair. Astoundingly, Real looks very, very beautiful.
Back to the present: Iggy is in a truck surrounded with a snowstorm. He drives by.Trapped within a snowstorm, as Pino treats Vincent's injuries, Real talks about Proxy and (I think) berates Vincent.The child autoreiv returns. She sees Iggy land near her, and runs toward him.The child autoreiv knocks on the door near the cockpit as Iggy thinks about Vincent Law as the Proxy. The thought then dissipates: he recognizes the autoreiv.
The autoreiv repeatedly bangs on the door, stops and then disappears. A resonating sound, loud and striking, rocks the plane (whatever it was Real was riding before). The young autoreiv broke a section of the rear of the craft; Iggy, concerned, grabs a flashlight and goes down the plane. The child then enters the plane and tries her best to remove the dead proxy from its coffin.
She does (or w/e) and Iggy just looks as she pulls the cadaver away. The child autoreiv brings the cadaver to a dry place, and rubs its head. An emotion of sadness emerges from its face. (Arguably, it has Cogito already.)
Iggy discovers that the place they once went to, the seemingly sylvan place was once a dome. He discovers it after rubbing some vegetation off a metal surface. (The hypothesis of one proxy-one dome is simply strengthened.) The child autoreiv stops Iggy from further removing the vegetation; she replaces the vegetation to cover up the metal that could be seen.
The scene changes back to Real and Vincent. Vincent blankets Real with his overcoat while she was sleeping; Real wakes up. As he wants her hair to be arranged the nekomimi way, she goes to her suitcase, grabs a comb and commands Pino (arrogantly, I may add) to arrange her hair the way Iggy once did.
She commands Pino to do it, but Pino makes a stand and keeps on reading. As Pino is unwilling, she then commands Vincent to fix her hair. A childish Real protuberates with these actions, and we discover that beneath all the shields she has been putting up to seem insensitive and inconsiderate, she has problems as well. (Where, in real life, could you find a 19 year old girl who doesn't know how to comb her hair? One can make a case for her seeming to be a princess, though – this is only a shafting, a destruction of how she really belongs in the world. Romdeau has been a trap where she wasn't able to grow as a person because she lived like a princess.)
Vincent can't do it well, of course. She then thinks and talks about Iggy. Real thinks (I think) that Vincent's okay with fixing her hair, and then walks away.
Iggy finds Real; she's surprised that he hasn't gone to Romdeau yet. (This simply confirms that he's infected by Cogito.) He was infected, back at Romdeau, when he defended Real against those other autoreivs.
They talk; a surprise later comes when Iggy punches Real in the chest after affectionately holding her hair. Real is knocked out. Iggy carries her.
Pino really is developing her feelings now. Her face forms when she stands by her decisions, as when she's stubborn to not follow any errand while she's reading.
Iggy traps Real inside the casket he once placed the dead proxy. Real asks if who Iggy is; Iggy simply replies that he is Iggy, the entourage. Real spits out harsh words. Iggy only replies with an angsty shout, and I mean angsty. Noticeable also is the fact that Iggy isn't bridled with his words anymore; he speaks with anger if he feels anger; he speaks with sarcasm if he feels he needs to. Iggy has simply spoken what I wrote about before I even saw this scene. Real is a child; she is nothing without Iggy. The whole spectra of Real's emotions from childishness to a fear clearly seen in her eyes depicts her being human, no matter how she tries to avoid to be.
After their long, angsty chat, Iggy walks away – there in the background is the child autoreiv. The child autoreiv approaches the glassy casket where Real is, and Real shows a face of fear. (Seriously, with this episode, they have branched out the humanity of Real.)
Scene changes: Pino finds big mushrooms for Vincent, and one mushroom drips what seems like snot. (Yeech.) By the way, Vincent collects firewood. Pino's personality diversified as well – but one thing's for certain – she's pretty loyal to Vincent despite everything he is and isn't. She gathers firewood as well – in a very cute way, I may add.
She approaches another piece of firewood; in the background, Iggy stands. When asked by Vincent as to where is Real, Iggy replies that he has killed her. Back inside the ship, the angered child autoreiv beats at the glass casket with a monkey wrench. Real can not do anything because of her chains.
As Iggy talks, the glass slowly breaks. Iggy speaks harsh words to Vincent, like him being a monster and such. Vincent quickly dissipates into thin air as Iggy aims the single FP bullet into Vincent. He hits Iggy's arm and the gun is thrown some distance away from the two. He then faces Iggy with a look that's so cool, I took a screeny of it. (Just find it somewhere – I took a LOT of caps.)
In Real's side, the glass breaks. She dexterously grabs the wrench as it breaks, grabs and pulls the autoreiv inside the casket, and scrambles to escape from it.
Vincent is REALLY serious when it comes to Real. It's as if he REALLY loves her. I never saw Vincent's angry face before, but wow – it's scary. Iggy runs away after seeing this face, and Real also runs away from the child autoreiv.
Real trips, and the child autoreiv utilizes this to ground Real, and then, when the child autoreiv almost stabs Real, a flame burns in its chest. Iggy saves Real by shooting something.
Vincent, Real, and Iggy meet together. Seeing Vincent have her FP anti-proxy gun, she seethes in anger, but to her surprise the autoreiv sets itself to self-detonate. Iggy quickly comes to Real's rescue as she's pinned down already: he quickly takes the child and runs as fast as he can away from Real, and Vincent covers Real from the massive explosion. (Sweet, really. It's really sweet of Vincent.)
Real finds Iggy's head, and they chat for the last time. He berates Real as she cries. Pino plays her recorder again, as if ironically doing Iggy his last rites. They dig a grave for Iggy, and Real puts flowers on it. After Pino departs, Real cries over Iggy. Vincent comes to Real, and he smiles when he sees her crying. (This is a really, really well-made episode. Vincent realizes that Real here is human too.) He then grabs her hand. She's angry at first, but she then realizes that he has returned the gun with the single FP bullet left.
IMPRESSIONS:
Among the recent Ergo Proxy episodes I've seen, this has been the only one that has deeply moved me. I applauded at the end of the episode – there's so much character development, so much improvement in animation and character design, and a very, very beautiful story. I'm going to go as far as saying that this is even better than the first episode. There are a whole lot of revelations, a whole lot of change that makes these characters more dynamic. It's perfectly beautiful, now, if only they'd maintain quality like this, I'll promise to myself that I'd at least buy the DVDs to the latter episodes. It's a really, really, really excellent episode. This is what Ergo Proxy is all about; this has been what I had been waiting for a very long time. If Ergo Proxy delivered like these in the next episodes, I'm going to personally retract EVERYTHING bad I said about Ergo Proxy and praise it like a serious fanboy, not only after Real.
This is the shiznit. THIS is the shiznit. THIS IS THE SHIZNIT.
If the more or less 45 screencaps weren't enough to tell you how I loved this episode, perhaps the summary will. This is simply perfection. I've put that much work because this episode deserves nothing but praise. Wow. Wow.
(a romance is bound to be great when the only solution to a forbidden love is a sacrifice far heavier than life and death itself)
anime|otaku 