To Aru Kagaku no Railgun - Episode 12

Harumi Kiyama may have been defeated and on the brink of being taken into custody by Misaka towards the end of the last episode, but that was far from the end of the story as things looked set to take a turn for the bizarre (and downright creepy for that matter).

With Harumi defeated, the network of Level Upper users she created "gives birth" to an entity of its own - A foetus-cum-monster made up of the thoughts of disillusionment and frustration of all of those Level Upper users on account of their inability to get by as well as they might have liked in Academy City with their insufficient powers. Thus, Mikoto now has a new threat to worry about, with this odd semi-organic monster looking set to go on an indiscriminate and seemingly unstoppable rampage.


The only way to resolve the problem seems to be the use of the "treatment programme" for Level Upper users already provided to Uihara by Kiyama, leaving us with a race to put this treatment into action and awaken the network of Level Upper users before the monster born from their thoughts does any major damage - A pressing concern considering there's a nuclear facility directly in its path.

This state of affairs leads us into what must easily be the most action-packed instalment of To Aru Kagaku no Railgun so far, with Misaka in particular given a free reign to show off her full range of offensive and defensive abilities... and let's face it, that's one of the reasons why we're watching this series in the first place. This focus on the action side of things above all else made for a predictable but watchable episode that suffered in terms of animation quality (a rarity for J.C. Staff) on account of all of that movement, while still doing a good enough job of closing off this particular story arc. It may not have provided any surprises in its big set piece finale, but was anyone really expecting it to?