Vincent awakes from some unpleasant nightmares and finds himself in the domains of Kazkis Hauer, the mysterious man from last episode. Kazkis seem to have somewhat of a problem with his wine and goes on a rather disgusting drinking binge while he and Vincent idly chats about death and how it seems to follow Vincent.

Meanwhile Pino is out exploring the tower being her characteristic cute self, playing hop scotch when she stumbles across the auto-reives that destroyed Haroth and quickly runs back to tell Vincent. Vincent is devastated and confused, just lying in bed while Pino keeps insisting they should go back to the Rabbit. When she finally loses her patience with him and go by herself Vincent manages to pull himself together, grabs a pistol that is lying around and goes to confront Kazkis about the auto-reives. Kazkis is of the opinion that the people of Haroth did not have a reason to live or even die and thinks nothing of killing them. He goes on to say how it was fate that Vincent would kill his loved Senekis and end up with him. Vincent is shocked to hear this as he has no memories of ever killing anyone and when Kazkis realizes Vincent does not have any memories at all of being a Proxy he goes berserk, tranforming into Kazkis Proxy, the emissary of light.

Accusing Vincent of being a traitor for removing his memories and running away he attacks and in their struggles ends up being shot by his own pistol. Somehow they end up in the basement where Kazkis’ auto-reives are waiting for them. After a quick flash of lightning between Kazkis’ and Vincent’s eyes Vincent starts to awaken, unconsciously blasting the auto-reives with some kind of kinetic energy. After being knocked around some more by Kazkis Vincent have a quick vision of Real and decides he had enough. Making short work of Kazkis now that he is serious, Vincent towers over him telling him in an ominous voice that he is Ergo Proxy, the emissary of death.

When Vincent and Pino are speeding away on the Rabbit Pino tells Vincent how she already knew he were a Proxy but doesn’t mind because he always saves her.

While I didn’t find this episode bad in any way I still think that Ergo Proxy is on a slippery slope at the moment. A big part of my initial interest in the series was all the mystique around the proxies and now we’ve had two completely new proxies introduced two episodes in a row. I’m not really worried yet but I would hate it if they made this show into some kind of proxy of the week, with Vincent duking it out with a new proxy ever episode. I do not really want to see a bigger focus on combat than we’ve seen so far, because I think they’ve managed to balance it out quite nicely up till now.

So now that it is officially confirmed that Vincent is Ergo Proxy we will probably see some changes in the storyline, and I hope it won’t go the way I mentioned above. I find it kind of odd how he was just wearing a mask when in proxy mode. It would make a whole lot more sense if it was his real face because funnily enough I have an easier time accepting that he transforms into a completely different being than just partially transforming (his hands, skin etc) and creating a mask out of nothing. Mutations and transformations are common occurances in works of fiction, but still I get sceptical when inanimate objects are created out of nothing. The luxuries of a hobby critic!

On a brighter note Pino still manages to be bliss every second she’s on screen episode after episode.

“I’ve counted to a hundred so I’m leaving you behind now, Vince! ….. Maybe fifty more..”

I’m not usually a fan of the kawaii sidekicks but she is one of the very few exceptions that I love. In a way she contributes alot to the story though, because she is part of the mystery with the infected auto-reives and her ability to recognize proxies and that’s not common for a character whose main purpose is to be as adorable as posssible.

I tried keeping the summary shorter for this entry but looks like it’s almost exactly as long as previous entries. Bah!

Posted by Matte on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 3:51 pm.