The Perfect Insider

Episode 11

Magata Shiki is nonsense incarnate.

Her mystery is total nonsense, to start with. Most mysteries depend on some belief-stretching contrivances - as I said in a previous episode review, they're mostly about making the audience believe a mystery is grounded when it's not. But in Magata's case, her mystery involves multiple personalities, a secret pregnancy, incestuous lovers separated for fifteen years, the slow conditioning of a daughter to eventually mimic someone's entire personality, and a secret code based on the hexadecimal system.

So. Given all that, I'd say it's fair to declare that her mystery requires a bit more suspension of disbelief than most mysteries, to the point where it falls squarely into “total nonsense.”

But beyond just her mystery (the mystery this entire show is built around), her philosophy is also nonsense. It's solipsistic and empty, constructed of convenient pieces and never arriving at anything approaching a coherent point. I'd initially assumed, and continued to charitably assume right up until last week's remarkably disappointing episode, that the show knew this - it knew Magata's philosophy was a coping mechanism born of total isolation, and it knew Souhei was a lot less insightful than he took himself to be. I assumed this show was actually framed from Moe's perspective, the only reasonable member of the group. I assumed the final takeaway would be Moe hopefully drawing Souhei out of his own self-absorption, or perhaps even Magata proving to be more compelling than Souhei had hoped her to be, and thus a more engaging character for Moe to finally interact with.

These assumptions were, unfortunately, incorrect. I generally try to assume the best of a show until I've been absolutely proven otherwise, because I find that when you start off thinking a show will be bad, you will only recognize things that validate that assumption. This philosophy can sometimes result in me having pie on my face - but it is a delicious pie. It is the pie of optimism, and I hope to never lose my taste for it.

The Perfect Insider will not shake my faith in that pie, but it certainly tried. Essentially every scene of this episode that contained Magata was a bunch of pseudo-philosophical gobbledygook, from her first conversation with Souhei to her final spirit journey with her daughter. There were some nice visual articulations of Magata's thoughts, but aside from the endearing moment of Magata trying one of Souhei's cigarettes purely for the experience, little of narrative value could be drawn from these scenes.

Fortunately, this episode had one good scene as well, when Moe returned to Souhei's office. As Moe once again got rightly upset at Souhei's emotional distance, he calmed her down with a great little story about her father's style of teaching. Numerous jump cuts portraying Souhei and Moe at their various ages added a nice touch of intimacy to a series of recollections that actually had some emotional weight to them. Even Souhei referring to Magata's daughter embracing death as a “natural thing” (and not, you know, the result of a lifetime of abusive conditioning by a poorly written mother), couldn't quite steal the satisfaction of these grounded personal moments.

But one solid scene (and one solid dramatic thread), in the context of many much worse sequences, cannot carry an episode (or series). I'm disappointed in The Perfect Insider - I gave it a lot of chances, but it didn't respect my trust. It's never fun to see something with potential fail to follow through.

Overall: C

The Perfect Insider is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.