Friday, 11 September 2009

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 - Episode 10

With the end of the last episode of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 pretty much sealing the deal for anyone who still had doubts over the future or otherwise Yuuki, this penultimate episode of the series handles Mirai's unravelling mental state.

As she continues her journey home on the back of a truck carrying the wounded, we see Mirai wrestling with (but again denying) Yuuki's death, and as the return to her hometown coincides with her meeting school friends and class mates of Yuuki, so we see her still unable to let go of the fact that he's there, even though she can only see him when nobody else is around.


On the more positive side of things, we hear from one of Mirai's friends that both of her parents and alive and well, with her father injured in hospital but generally okay and her mother sheltering at the nearby elementary school. With her Mum away from the shelter to get more clothes for a while, Mirai ends up wandering around with Yuuki's friend Itsuki, as Mirai's mental state even begins to become clear to him before an aftershock and its fallout seems to bring her, finally, to the realisation of what really happened with Yuuki collapsed, and so we too learn what was a dream and what was reality within the confines of that episode a couple of weeks ago.

While part of me can't help but feeling that Mirai's mental state has been allowed to go on a little too long in terms of the story as a whole, I can't help but be impressed by the way her realisation of Yuuki's death was depicted come the end of the episode - Despite the fact that we've been on the outside looking in with our own knowledge of the circumstances, seeing Yuuki's death once again as an absolute truth was honestly painful to watch, and thus gives at least a fraction of the understanding of what a young girl like Mirai would have to go through in such a situation. It's this ability to focus on the human damage of a major earthquake over merely the technical details that has really brought Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 to life, making it a cut above your average disaster movie or documentary. This show isn't about the faceless victims of a major disaster, it's truly "real" and in your face in terms of how it handles such tragedy.