Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Kiba – episode 5

“Land of the Commandment”

The focus is taken away from Zed and shifts to Noa. I’m not sure what to think of this story; it has an interesting take on dictatorships masquerading as utopias (although More’s original Utopia could be considered a dictatorship anyway), but it chooses to frame this story with inexplicable “Noa in the desert” scenes.

Noa wakes up in his desert tent, and finds a box known as arc. The story shifts to what is presumably the past, in the country known as Neotopia, where Noa was found unconscious behind a house. He is adopted by the kind people who live there and becomes healthier than he has been in his life, due to the superior climate.
Noa becomes friends with Kis, a conscientious objector … then everything goes to hell when his adopted parents’ son, Gale, returns from war.

What use is a “previously on Kiba” segment if there is nothing in previous episodes that are pertinent to the current episode? It served no purpose, and this episode really did not need Robes to say “you’re too slow” to Zed before we shifted to Noa.

The Noa story was actually quite good, but the problem with a series like this and all of its shifts is that you can never be certain if any of these characters will recur; as a result I didn’t know if I should invest anything in Kis.
In a country wherein people are subsidised by the government and can do whatever they want with their time, one might get the impression that the society is ideal.
The seedy underbelly of Neotopia is that it is governed by strict rules, the breaking of which is generally punishable by death. Nothing says “utopia” like capital punishment, for sure. I’m also fairly certain that utopian societies send their youth off to war and ostracise those who refuse to do so.

This episode ends on a cliffhanger execution scene, a scene that was actually pretty damned freaked out. In this sort of society, people turn quickly on their neighbours, and a hero can become a pariah in record time.
The way the person to be executed took his execution was a moment of genuine chill that can only be obtained through a non-sequitur of emotion. For whatever reason, I want to know what’s going to happen next.

You know I’m fighting Kiba, but I can’t help myself. Dangitall.