Babylon Episode 12 Discussion

KANLen09 said:


@Ryuseishun if you're familiar with the figure called Mado Nozaki, it's the same author as Kado: The Right Answer.

BlackCicero said:
I was surprised with the ending but I appreciated it. It's not often you see the villain win out in the end. Babylon was a fun ride with the cat and mouse game between Seizaki and Magase being my favorite part. 9/10

Ryuseishun said:
Sorta long ramble here, cause I can’t keep the bottle cap on anymore.

That was perhaps one of the worst fucking conclusions to a mystery / psychological series that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

What was accomplished? Nothing. What was taught here? Nothing. What was the ultimate point of all that meandering? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Magase’s Quirk....I mean, Esper ability.....I mean, Gifted abil—.....ahhh fuck it, i dunno what to describe. That shit never had any sort of set-in-stone explanation. Shes’s perhaps one of the worst excuses of a villain I’ve ever witnessed. Whatever bit of backstory tossed in for her is silly and bareboned. She’s not sophisticated, she acts so, but there’s no true deeper intent, just a redundant af ideal about what’s good and evil. She wins in the end and is now probably gonna prey on the mc’s son now, but what was the point? It was so anticlimactic and inconclusive, considering how the series kinda lost its spirit by episode 7. Any visual cues this show are mostly too hollow without much foundation to really have much deeper theme, context, or meaning. Tbh, episode 3 was the point where I should noticed the red flag, due to how the course of the story suddenly changes to chasing some crazy bitch with supernatural psychic powers to “talk” people into suicide. Zen himself was as underwhelming as everyone else in the cast. One can argue about fitting oneself into the characters’ shoes and parallelism or realism, but seriously.......does realism alone always constitute good storywriting? No, ofc not. The one good thing I can take away from the show: the soundtracks, cause they help with adding to the tension (or at least attempts at tension).

If this was how the original source material went, this series was already full of problems to begin with, regardless of bad pacing or not (only 3 LN vol, 3 manga vol).

And people compare this to Psycho Pass s1 or even say it’s better than latter...I can’t really comprehend that, tbh, cause Psycho Pass had a sci-fi dystopia setting whereas Babylon does not unless one wants to consider Magase’s “Quirk”. Magase as a character would’ve been more befitting in a more supernatural setting.

I don’t even want to talk in detail about the redundancy about the numerous discussions about this “good Vs evil” subject. The conversation went from thought-provoking to childish real quick. Was this just more of a leeway for Magase to have her way that easily because a bunch of god damn politicians can’t come to a straightforward and obvious conclusion that was right there in front of them the whole time? I guess so.

With all that being said, the foundations for this show were too weak to begin with. It’s like trying to drive a big luxury cruiser without any propellers or engine. It felt like a show where the brainstorming just stopped halfway.

Eonlars said:
I think at the end, Zen had no choice because Alex called him a "Good Man" which meant he shouldn't kill magase while magase called him a "Bad Man" which meant he should kill magase.

Here is the problem that Zen faced, if he killed magase he would be a bad man as he would end someone and he would prove magase was right by calling him a bad man but at the same time he would kill a bad person like Magase.

If he didn't kill magase he would be a good man and he would prove Alex was right about him but he would by leaving magase alive, he would do bad by not ending the worst evil in the world.

Now, killing magase is going to make her right and not killing magase is going to make her come out alive. Former sounds better in theory so it would have been safe to assume Magase was killed but she wasn't as shown in the last scene.

Let's leave that for a second.

Now, we should think about Magase's action as she also followed the same logic(Good=life, bad=end) She claimed to be an evil person and also claimed Zen was also a bad person, she didn't touch him like she did with every other person around him, meaning Zen had a special status as a bad person and Magase didn't kill bad people.

If Magase somehow killed Zen in that scene whom she saw as a bad person, then it would make her a good person because she would end a bad person, making her a good person so this is a reason why she couldn't have killed Zen.

Now, Magase didn't have a reason to kill Zen(Other than the fact she had a chance of being killed by him but I really don't count this as one because she obviously doesn't fear death) and had a reason to not kill him.

So here is my assumption.
1- Zen didn't kill Magase, proving he was a good person and making sure Magase was wrong.
2- Magase didn't kill Zen as well(Bullet shot at the end could be explained with lots of things) and since she was proven wrong by Zen because he didn't kill her like a bad person, it could be argued that she had a change of mind about good and evil.
3- It is possible that Zen and Magase survived, we know Magase survived for sure and it looks like Zen's family is in their hometown, where we saw Zen think about when he was explaining what good was.
Though there are many things I can't explain such as "Well he killed the president, what about him being in jail?" or "the suicide law"
I would love to see what the novel did so if there is one person who read it, I am open to what happened at the end.