Wolf's Rain

Episodes 19-20

Hopefully everyone took my advice last week and skipped the recaps of Episodes 15-18, as Episode 19, “A Dream of An Oasis”, is where Wolf’s Rain picks the story back up again from the pack's botched rescue attempt at Darcia Castle. Once again, this is an occasion where the two-episodes-a-week format of these Classic Streaming Reviews works to the show's benefit, since “CONSCIOUSLY” is very much the conclusion to the story that “A Dream of An Oasis” sets up. The real question is whether or not this is a good story, and I'll answer that by saying Quent gets only a couple of minutes of screen time at the beginning and end of this two-parter, and he spends most of those minutes dying of hypothermia. So we're already in a pretty good spot.

I'm mostly kidding, but although these really are some solid chapters in the Wolf’s Rain saga, they are just as messy as everything that has come before it. In order to really break down what these episodes represent about Wolf’s Rain's strengths and flaws, I'll need to get the plot summarizing out of the way first. Thankfully, that won't be too hard, since the plot covered by these episodes is straightforward enough, and easily separated into two distinct halves.

On one end of the plot, we have the three survivors from the Darcia Castle attack: Tsume, Hige, and Toboe. Kiba is missing, and Hige has basically given him up for dead, and Blue is apparently MIA as well (I refuse to accept that she's actually dead at this point, because that would be a really stupid waste of a character). As the wolves figure out what to do next, they encounter a man named Iyek from a tribe of nomads called the Hmong, who are all modeled after vague stereotypes of the Great Plains Natives of North America—specifically the Dakota and Lakota—despite sharing the name of a very real indigenous Southeast Asian people; Anyway, the trio get some mythos-dumping about how Wolves actually created mankind, and that the world will end when they find Paradise. This is a lot to take in already, but then they also learn of a patch of grass out in the “Desert's Bones” that will spirit the living away to the Garden of Eternity. Correctly assuming that they might find Kiba there, Tsume and Hige head out while a shaken Toboe remains behind, but he changes his mind soon enough. The wolves beat up some Jauguran forces, rescue Kiba, and set off once again on their journey.

Meanwhile, Kiba spends the entire two episodes trapped in the dream world of the Garden of Eternity, slowly forgetting his old life and his friends as he succumbs to the perfect beauty of the oasis he finds there. He also meets another animal/pretty girl named Mew, who the internet tells me is an African wildcat known as a caracal, and the two share some dreamy romantic chemistry until Mew changes her tune and helps Kiba remember his true calling. That weird owl from way back shows up again to hoot vague clues at Kiba too, for some reason. Then Kiba wakes up, and everything's all good again.

So, as far as plots go, these two episodes see Wolf’s Rain using a fairly standard formulas of threatening to disband the group when things are at their lowest and also sending one of its characters on a kind of vision quest/emotional trap that they have to overcome to succeed in their journey. Anyone that likes to apply Joseph Campbell's model of the Hero's Journey to stories will have a field day here, and that model is so pervasive for a reason: It makes for solid, compelling storytelling at its core. We don't want Toboe to give up on the journey; we want to see Kiba remember his friends and his quest; we like seeing Tsume step up to take ownership of the search for Paradise in Kiba's absence. Even the presence of the Hmong nomads serves a purpose, despite how terribly cliché and insensitive their depiction is in these episodes, because their abstract “Native mysticism” anchors the wolves' journey to something concrete and meaningful. They aren't just a pack of mismatched strays looking for a perfect home; they're harbingers of an apocalypse that is already well underway.

So, Wolf’s Rain's story remains sloppy but functional, at least on the surface. My issues come into how it feels like everything Wolf’s Rain is doing is about what is happening on the surface. There's the way that Kiba's time in the Garden of Eternity doesn't seem to address anything about his character aside from his single-mindedness and closed off nature, which has been present from the very first episode. The only thing we do learn is that, when his pack was killed by the nobles, he was taken in by Nomads. That's technically new information, I guess, but to what end? What did Kiba really learn; how did he grow, outside of appreciating his connection to the other wolves' more? And did it really require two whole episodes of a mostly cliché spirit vision to accomplish?

Or take the Hmong, this patchwork of obvious Native American signifiers who exist to provide mystical backstory about “Mother Earth” and how to live according to nature's will, or what have you. They suffer the same problems as basically every human character that isn't Darcia, which is that they feel ripped straight out of movies and stories that the creators of Wolf’s Rain wanted to reference, but without any specific purpose behind them. Why does this story need Quent, specifically? Because bitter detectives in need of a redemption are cool, Why is this world's mythology specifically based on broad stereotypes about Native Americans? I can only presume it is because Keiko Nobumoto or someone else involved in the story's creation saw similar tropes in Western movies and wanted to mess around with them too.

We're approaching Wolf’s Rain's endgame now, so I'm not harboring any illusions about what this series is trying to be. It's more a tone poem of a series than anything else, an opportunity to inspire broad pathos and mashup a bunch of different genre styles all in one show. That's perfectly fine, and I think Wolf’s Rain works in that respect more often than it doesn't. When it leans too hard into obvious cliché, though, it loses the power to mystify and inspire. It simply becomes another example of a bunch of artists and writers celebrating a bunch of other works that they like a lot, which can only get a story so far.

There was precisely one scene in this episode that drew me out of this loop of allusion and artistic indulgence, which was the flashback that revealed how Toboe accidentally killed the old woman who was caring for him in a fit of excitement. It's a shockingly dark reveal that completely recontextualizes how you look at the kid, whose innocence is forever frayed with the guilt of having murdered the person he loved the most in the world. Toboe's animal nature betrayed his most meaningful human relationship, and the tension that comes with how the wolves' tread a fraught line between beast and man is such a specific and powerful thing to evoke. I wish Wolf’s Rain was confident enough to give us more tough and challenging moments like that, and less of the characters walking and talking in circles around details that don't really matter. It's the end of the world, after all, and time is running out for man and wolf alike.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• Who's a Good Wolf!?

I was going to give it to Toboe this week, until the whole “He smothered an old lady to death” thing. So, congrats Tsume, you earned the trophy simply by learning to be less of a dick!

• Seriously, if Blue is dead just like that, you can expect a future recap that consists entirely of expletives and attacks on Quent's personal character.

• I didn't have room to go into it up above, the combination of that goofy-ass owl and Kiba's dream perfect girlfriend named “Mew” makes his whole vision-experience just a little harder to take seriously, in my book. I feel bad for Mew, though. The poor kitty now has to spend eternity in a dream void, and she doesn't even have a cute emo dog boyfriend to keep her company.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.

Wolf’s Rain is currently streaming on Funimation.