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THIS IS AN ANIME ONLY DISCUSSION POST. DO NOT DISCUSS THE MANGA BEYOND THIS EPISODE.
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So... that was pretty good, I guess.
I enjoyed it a lot, I just wish (obviously) that it gave a more.. clean ending.

The absolute ending during the credits had me lost for a bit, until I paused and realized that I wish more information was given about that...

Also, Yuri's crying is adorable.

This definitely succeeded in making me want to read the manga, though!

Yeah, I don't know what happened with Kumi either she died or it was a dream. Good stuff, a bit strange but I enjoyed it 8/10

That was a f*cked up tease. You would think that they'd answer the question of why or how Kumi died! Bastards! Now I'm forced to follow up on this. I hate it when things are left undone.

It's very obvious that the purpose was to get us to read the manga. They succeeded in my case.

I hate this kind of stuff. I'd like to watch more episodes, but I can't stand this kind of story in comic books.

So it's same to assume that the manga continues past that Yellow Knife event? Or was that last bit made up to end the anime? I'm confused.

I enjoyed this episode quite a lot, because I am a fan of totally screwed-up anime like this. Even if it isn't a complete work, it deserves to have a higher rating than it has.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the manga continues past that point.

Unfortunately, as Central Park, who distributed the manga in the west, have went bust, and only the first two chapters of the manga have been scanlated so far, you are either going to have to buy a second hand copy of the manga or wait for the rest of it to be scanlated.

It was pretty "meh."

7/10

Well, that sucks. I was gonna try to find it too.

Rightstuf happens to have some 'ultimate collection' in stock that comes with the DVD and all three volumes of the manga in one box. It's only 13 bucks, too, so I'll be getting one myself and making the first post in the manga's forum :D Now if only the sequel were available. . .
This sounds weirdly like advertising, but I like tracking down whatever's available for these obscure things.

And about the actual episode;

QQ

Any kind soul to share what continued in the Manga? Thanks.

Definitely the best episode of the lot. I say 4/5.

Overall, though... 5/10? And that's being generous.

Lol seriously..

I wish someone would correct me here so as to be sure, but I'm going to throw out my guess here. They give you a couple of hints that Kasumi didn't come out of the "Yellow Kife" in a stable mind set. I think, if I remember correctly, there is a part where her borg says (when she wakes up in the hospital) "you ARE Kasumi, right?" implying that either yellow knife took her over, or that she didn't come out the same person.

From there I think it's decently safe to assume that Kasumi killed her, since she had already tried to kill her after first exiting yellow knife. Either that, or like someone else said, it was another dream.

However, they don't even drop hints at why the fuck the yellow knife was brought there and who was manipulating the aliens (other than the teachers). Also, it's never clear whether the teachers themselves are aliens, or if they just have that weird "borg like" hair.

It's also hard to note how much of this is supposed to be symbolic or not, since they never really set a clear line. You can assume that the song in episode 2 or 3 "everyone is an alien" and the whole alien concept in general can be correlated with puberty, especially since they are in the 6th grade. I also figured that the 3 boys with borgs on their head was a symbolism of being addicted to sex, and their drills were symbolic of.. well yeah. That's a weird spin though.. but it makes sense in its own right.

I gave it a 5/10 overall as well.

Okay, it seems like many of you are wondering what happens after episode 4~ Fortunately, I actually bought all the Alien Nine manga volumes years ago when they came out, including 'Emulators'. (still have them, god I love them)

Needless to say, there are heavy spoilers coming up. I will explain the cliffhangers in Episode 4, and what happened afterwards. Just a warning, this is going to be a little long. If I try to summarize it even shorter, it will make absolutely no sense.

Here we go~

BOOK 2

Right after Kasumi wakes up from the Yellow Knife incident, the story suddenly picks up with Kumi being found dead in the library. Ms. Hisakawa uses Kumi's borg to view her memories of the day, and see what happened. Kumi and the others have slowly suspected something odd to be going on with Kasumi since the Yellow Knife incident. Her borg has been resisting her, and she seems a bit uncaring about others.

But when Kasumi and Yuri are investigating the library for clues to Kumi's death, they are attacked by an alien that looks like one big mass of eyeballs. Ms. Hisakawa realizes through the borg's memories what's going on, and tries to reconstruct Kumi using a healing gel bath. while regenerating from next to nothing, Kumi hears Yuri and Kasumi in trouble with that unexplained link the borg gives them. To reconstruct faster (she's only a head at that point), she fuses with her borg's drills. She's then suddenly seemingly back to normal, going to rescue Kasumi and Yuri in the library.

The story then suddenly picks up with Yuri walking through a forest full of aliens. She almost gets eaten by one, while thinking about how she's trying to make Kumi and Kasumi normal again. The other girls find her in the Forest of Spaceships (an off-limits area that space ships just randomly land in), unconscious, with her borg missing. Yuri's memories are all completely gone, and she acts as if she's a baby. Kumi and Kasumi venture back into the forest to find her borg, which holds all her memories.

They find Yuri's borg, and are attacked. Kumi tells Kasumi to run with Yuri's borg, but Kasumi replies, "I'll be fine, I'm an alien, too." Her pupils change to the Yellow Knife's odd-looking pupils, and her hair turns into drills, slashing apart all the aliens around her, including her own borg. When Kumi is attacked, her arm is seemingly ripped off. But it's revealed to be a sort of skin/shell that's been ripped off, and her arm is shown to be actually completely made of long drills in the inside. They manage to make it back to Yuri and Ms. Hisakawa, Kasumi on a happy, murderous rampage of all the aliens around them as they get there.

Yuri is returned to normal when her borg is given back to her. Kumi is now living with Kasumi, her arm still in drill form. Kasumi ends the chapter with saying that everything is alright with her, because she's not alone anymore.

The last part of book two is Ms. Hisakawa assessing the girls. She commands Kasumi to let her talk to the Yellow Knife inside her. It's revealed that Kasumi is carrying around the Yellow Knife's consciousness inside her, and that he has realized that the 'Drill Clan' isn't the only clan trying to gain control of humans.
Using the healing gel again, Kumi's arm is restored, the drills covered up again by a sort of false skin. She wonders if she's even human anymore, while Ms. Hisakawa doesn't comment.
With Yuri, Ms. Hisakawa simply asks her why she went into the Forest of Spaceships, to which her answer isn't shown.
The book ends with Kumi declaring to Kasumi that she'll do anything to protect Yuri from becoming like them, while drills are randomly protruding from her body in anger.

BOOK 3

(Throughout this book, there's a page per chapter of a conversation between Kumi and Ms. Hisakawa at a restaurant. It reveals that Ms. Hisakawa chose to fuse with the borg, and that it seems like humans have no choice but to fuse with aliens, ever since the first meteor hit. Kumi also comes to realize that she is now an alien.)

Vacation before third semester has just ended, and Yuri's borg starts to look a bit strange. When she's asleep, it looks angry and wanders around the house. As Yuri's borg starts to seem barely respondent and sick, Kasumi seems to be getting more and more violent (with a nice grin on her face). Ms. Hisakawa shows up at Yuri's house the next night, the borg coming out to meet her. She rips off its tail, revealing a drill used to fuse. She gives the borg permission to fuse with Yuri, even though it might seriously hurt Yuri.
Kumi clings to Kasumi with her drills at their house, wanting to be with Yuri. Yuri wakes up as her borg comes at her rabidly with the intent to fuse. Though Yuri refuses, the borg ignores her wishes. Kasumi and Kumi show up in time, using their drills to stop (but not kill) Yuri's borg. Yuri sees Kasumi's drill hair and Kumi's drill-filled body for the first time, now realizing that more has changed with them than just their emotions/personalities.

The next morning, Ms. Okada and Ms. Hisakawa discuss that more alien clans are coming to earth. One of which is the Sunflower Clan, the Drill Clan's enemy. While the Alien Party members are separated doing their own things, Yuri is caught by an alien that looks like a turtle shell with sunflower petals around the rim (it's the same size as the borg). When Yuri goes missing, every goes looking for her. Yuri, now with the sunflower borg on her head, finds Kumi alone and cust off her arms and legs with a thin cord that comes from the sunflower borg (sort of like the borg drills). It controls Yuri's thoughts, making Yuri believe that Kumi is picking on her when she refuses to put a sunflower borg on her head.

Kasumi shows up, showing off a new trick by forming her hair into the shape of the spiral contraptions that popped out of the Yellow Knife back before they fused. With the huge spirals, she sends a mental attack to the sunflower borg and Yuri, disabling them. Unfortunately, a stampede of large aliens controlled by the sunflower borgs manage to distract her while others take away Yuri to the Forest of Spaceships. The large aliens die, though, as the sunflowers callously observe that trying to fuse too fast will kill the host.

Kasumi's hair spirals are explained to Ms. Hisakawa and Ms. Okada, revealing that she can send very strong pinpoint attacks to disable people. While Kumi is healing in the healing gel tub, Yuri (still being mind controlled) shows up and tries to force her to fuse with the sunflower borg again. Though, she is revealed to only be a distraction to Ms. Hisakawa and the alien party, as sunflower borgs invade the Castelia class and try to fuse with other, normal students (including Miyu). All of the other children are too weak to handle the fusion, until the sunflower borgs find the three boys from earlier in the story ( the ones that love aliens and attacked the alien party).

Yuri comes along and gangs up on Kasumi with the three boys. They cut off her hair spirals and try to get her to fuse with a sunflower borg. Kasumi goes berserk, trying to bash the sunflower borg off her head while crying about how she was so happy and that this will ruin her happiness. Yuri snaps out of it just a little to take the sunflower borg off Kasumi's head, though she doesn't know why she did it. Ms. Hisakawa comes along and brutally kills the sunflower borgs, also threatening to kill Yuri. Yuri and her sunflower borg escape before she can.

Kumi helps Kasumi to the healing gel so that her hair can regenerate. Kumi grabs Yuri's hospitalized borg, then goes after Ms. Hisakawa, who's chasing after Yuri with the intent to kill. Kumi manages to stop her teacher just as she's about to kill Yuri. Kumi kills the sunflower borg, then puts her normal borg on Yuri's head.

A really creepy dream sequence happens, where Yuri is the only human in a school of sunflower borgs. She gets elected to be in the alien party (just like in the very beginning) then goes to kill her human friends one by one, without recognizing them. Yuri starts to morph into a sunflower borg. But Yuri stops when she goes to kill Kumi, realizing that something about this situation isn't right. That's when her borg cuts into the dream to remind her that he's her symbiotic partner. Yuri has lost all her memories, except those of Kumi. The borg uses that to pull Yuri back to her old self, though it kills him in the process.

The book ends with Kasumi happily having her regenerated hair brushed, Miyu feeling glad that her class can pick whatever junior high they want because of this incident, Yuri and Kumi looking at the Forest of Spaceships while Kumi hugs her, and Ms. Hisakawa and Ms. Okada guessing that having a choice over what sort of alien clan to fuse with might be better for humans.
At the very end, the three girls are living together, and are getting ready for junior high school. Yuri looks in the mirror and notices that one of the ends of her pigtails is curling like an alien drill.


And that's the Alien Nine series. Long winded explanation, sorry!
There's also Alien Nine: Emulators, which explains a bit more and adds to the previous story by being a direct sequel. Anyone want the summary for that? lol

Thank you very much for that explanation, now the story doesn't sound like a complete waste of time.