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| I think that this episode had a deeper message. I really liked when Spike is flipping channels at the beginning. A strange episode. |
| BANZAI NIPPON. Nippon is the Land of freedom. Nippon is the Land of Peace. Nippon is the Land of Justice and Prosperity. In Nippon, we trust. We love Nippon, we love Anime. Anime love us, Nippon love us. 日本 |
| I like this episode, it's basically a reflection on the relationship of humans and technologies, especially today in social media times. A really awesome episode! |
| This episode was deep. Ein hacked the console and ED doing ED things in a DRESS. Also Big shot being canceled was hilarious. 3 More episodes to go. |
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| I liked the Lain vibe of this episode as well the background music. The cancellation of the Bounty Hunter was the really sad part for me though, it feels like a premonition for the end of the series. |
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| A really great episode, and still relevant in 2020. |
| Aw, I felt a little bad for the kid. Specially when he said "I don't wanna disappear", cause he knew once the program was deleted he would die for real. The cult thing was still creepy tho. |
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| I just wanna say how weird it is to see forum posts like this from 2007, which is like 13 years ago! And cowboy bebop came out about 1998 right, so 22 years ago... dang we are really going down memory lane |
  NYANPASU  whiskey tango foxtrot |
| amazing episode. seems they invented the good ideas toward the end, |
| What a great episode ! It felt as if I watched some fusion between Cowboy Bebop and Serial Experiments Lain. The plot and the execution were so good. |
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| that was a good episode! cults are really dangerous and not enough people realise that |
i wish i was a cloud |
| I must say, this isn't one of my favorites. I get the intention, they want this to be one of the "weird" episodes, and I guess in that regard it succeeds. But in pretty much every other aspect, it fails. I did like that little moment where Ein does something useful for once, and Ed and Jet in disguise got a laugh out of me. Oh, and I guess Spike had a decent scene at the end. But the villain wasn't very engaging, and the resolution oddly felt both drawn out and rushed. I'm hopeing the penultimate episode is better, and (judging by the preview) it looks like it will be. |
| I wonder what happened to this episode that it looks so different. Almost like an upscale. Did it have a different animation process (almost all digital) or did they just never capture it to 35 mm film, choosing video instead? |
| Damn so a kid started this cult? That part about TV(and mainstream media) is true. The higher ups always force their propoganda on us and we never realise it. This episode had some serious dystopian surreal philosophy vibes. |
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| "If you want to dream, dream alone." - Spike encompassed everything I think about religious cults in one sentence. Every single religious cult in history begins with the dream of some sick individual who wants to force it upon every other living person, especially the vulnerable ones. It's something I despise and, no matter how at peace some member may seem to be, it's all, in the end, a great façade. |
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average_panda said: that was a good episode! cults are really dangerous and not enough people realise that And I despise them. Some may seem innocent enough, but you can only tell if you see for yourself how it is on the inside. It can quickly scale to suicide, murder, kidnapping... Cult leaders use vulnerable people to do despicable things, and often things like what I described above. Just like it was shown in this episode, they're childish and want the world to conform to their way of thinking or to simply take revenge on it, by using the childish argument of "If I can't have it, no one can". |
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| Nice, another existential CB episode. This one definitely gave me a lot of food for thought. I'd say this highlights how complex the human mind is, but more importantly how it’s easily swayed. As humans, we constantly search for meaning in our lives, and this becomes more intense when we experience life's suffering and despair. We grasp for an explanation - something that provides clarity and meaning, and makes sense of all the world's injustices. Religion easily offers such meaning. However, this episode twists this concept, since Londes exploits it to get his revenge on others, without ever believing in it himself. He feels hatred toward others because they can experience “normal” lives through their physical bodies. But he also has a materialist view, which conflicts with his strong hatred and jealousy. In the end, Spike is right - he’s just a confused kid playing with a toy. I also appreciated the episode's insight into television. Television is arguably the most powerful form of media today, and its potential to sway and manipulate our thoughts and feelings is almost boundless. We forget that media itself is imperfect and biased, but we don't care; anything that appeases us in the moment we tend to blindly believe. I did find the concept of "capturing" the soul into electronics interesting, though. It's quite unique to have a religion that doesn't believe in afterlife/reincarnation yet still believes in the human soul. There’s a lot to discuss from this episode about the concept of souls, what is truly ethical or not, and sociology in general, but it’s way too long and perhaps irrelevant to put here. Ok, that’s enough wrestling with my thoughts. As for the aesthetics of the episode, they were amazing as usual. I liked the use of TV commercials, as well as the weird/futuristic sound effects. Really enjoyed this episode. |
| 100% this is in top 3 episodes for now for me |
| Wow! One of the best episode so far. Had comedy, darkness, mystery, etc everything was well done |
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| Total mind trip of an episode. And some great points made too. |
MALoween 2024:              x12 |
| The dog is the real hacker here |
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| dont want this to end, i love these impactful episodes sprinkled between the more comedic loose ones. holy shit that track in the end... what a sad story. |
| haha boomervision goes brrr!!! |
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| Fully digitally produced episode so it looked hideous. Hard to say whether it was a stylistic choice to fit the theme of the episode, or if it was just because the episode contained so many shots with computer generated imagery that they did the whole thing digitally for the sake of visual consistency. The show of course featured digital shots before this episode, mainly to facilitate the (ugly) CGI effects they used for things like the hyperspace jump gates, but it would just be a single digital shot before switching back to cel animation. Here they did the full episode digitally with the same low resolution rendering that would be common for the first several years after the anime industry switched over to digital en masse in 2000, and the results are not good. It's hard to understand how the industry had so little foresight about how badly this stuff would age. When Overman King Gainer was produced in 2002, Yoshiyuki Tomino insisted that it be rendered in 1080p, against all common practice at the time, and as a result it still looks good today when viewed at a modern resolution, whereas everything else from the early digital period looks like absolute trash because it was all rendered at ~480p and so is stuck as a murky low-detail mess forever. |
OneMoreFinalSep 18, 2023 9:17 PM
These should be classified filler faye is meh. computer net tv cult by programmer hacker so lets see if next filler as well |
 Without change,we end up becoming the very person we hate. I was dead until the moment I met you. I was a powerless corpse pretending to be alive. Living without power, without the ability to change my course, was bound to lead me to a slow death. |
| Also i dont want to see more of the big shot. glad it cancelled |
Without change,we end up becoming the very person we hate. I was dead until the moment I met you. I was a powerless corpse pretending to be alive. Living without power, without the ability to change my course, was bound to lead me to a slow death. |
| This episode's message was not that deep, and the message was pretty common knowledge. Something that a dumb person would think is smart. Also a pretty boring episode. |
Reply to Scythe_Darwin
@ForgotEyeWasHere Of course a person who's favorite anime list consists of borderline hentai would think the message isn't that deep. And to call it common knowledge just shows how you have already fallen into the trap this episode is trying to warn you about :/
| @Scythe_Darwin Don't sell it short! Two of the favorites in my list are actual hentai, and my PFP is from a hentai too. 😏 |
| despite the involuntary distraction that i couldn't hear Londes, but Mr. Burns from The Simpsons because of italian dub (of course, and the same great man also returned for the movie replacing his coworker as Jet), this is yet another of the most unforgettable episodes, possibly among the best, and with no doubt one of the creepiest. Yeah, i get that even in the late 90's some concepts faced here weren't new (scary cults, "the greatest and also the worst device that humans ever invented") but the execution worked and the same themes are unfortunately still extremely timely from 1998 to 2024. Remember watching this like the rest of the series in 2006 and "It's not easy living in such an ugly, corrupt world. There is no certainty, and nothing to hope for. People are lost, so they reach out. Don't you get it? God didn't create humans. No, it's humans who created God" ...wow. Not gonna lie, i thought Londes was real and so a giant twist happened. Glad that Faye just faked joining the cult, and on a lighter tone it was amusing in hindsight to see such videogames in 2071 that now seem obsolete for such a year, or even Jet and Ed pretending to be father and daughter with poor acting but still successfully sneaking in. Rest in peace Big Shot, it didn't deserve to be cancelled :( see you space cowboys Punch and Judy, always thought you were so funny. |
_untitledMar 11, 12:59 AM
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| What a strange episode. Gives the vibe of Serial Experiments Lain |
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| I wouldn't say that it was bad, it was not at all, but the antagonist of the episode kind of strange, just a "kami" of a young boy's body, didn't notice the BeBop vibe, but found an interesting moment when Spike hung up the phone and walked in da building, the foot steps with reverb effect and the black/gray colors, looks like smth i've never seen in the anime before, suspense effect idk, "terrifying threads from 4chan" ahhh vibe idk jajaja |
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