Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Plastic Memories
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HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
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In the anime thread I got pretty much shot down for having this same ridiculous opinion. I was taught there that this is the natural way big companies function citing Microsoft no less. How could I possibly have thought there might be one corporate lawyer or even marketing exec in 10 years who might think ahead to this situation. Anyway I agree it is stupid but it is also the foundation of the whole story and probably not worth thinking about too much. I just finished reading the original Philip K Dick inspiration to this story and it is even worse with regard to corporate reality than this but it doesn't matter. What matters is what happens to the emotional investment the characters make. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18537 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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They haven't "conveniently ignored" it; they just have gotten to it yet. We are still only in episode 3, after all. (Now, if they haven't dealt with it by the end of your series, then I will consider this complaint valid.)
Not necessarily. This could be a case where the company was not initially aware that the Giftias would deteriorate after a certain amount of time; after all, it seems unlikely that there would have been almost 10 years of testing them before they went to market.
Despite the whole "living with Isla" thing being a misstep, I entirely disagree. No other series I've seen this season has been consistently better. |
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Raebo101
 Posts: 818 |
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Because Japan still thinks that's funny. It's not funny. It's never been funny -_- |
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MysticMew
 Posts: 91 Location: Bremen, Germany |
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Glad to see the show back on track at the very least. I can't say there is anything I disagree with in this review as it pretty much mirrored my opinion. Let's just forget last episode happened.
Leaving us hanging like this at the end of the episode was mean though... 
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HaruhiToy
Posts: 4118 |
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So Unit One has at least 5x the cost of any other of what appears to be dozens of units. They certainly don't show how this could be in any way. Other than cost of labor and transport and boarding I don't see them spending any corporate money so it must be that the other units retrieve a huge number of units more than Unit One does.
So how do they do it? By not wasting time throwing sentimental birthday parties for as part of the service? Maybe that high-tech training facility is on Unit One's budget? So not only the legal structure of the SEM company is a mish-mash but its ops are just as illogical as well. Although none of this is really the story I can't help but feel they could have done a better job with it. As for the main story, we have another example of a Gifta perfectly at ease with dying at a near-term set time -- cheerful yet only concerned for the wrecked kid in her wake. They all seem to act that way except for Isla. At least this explains her emotional distance -- she doesn't want to do to anyone else what Souta's Gifta did to Souta. |
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CaRoss
 Posts: 457 |
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I'm glad that there's someone else who thinks this way. It's always been a tough form of humour for me to reconcile with (the only series that manages to get away with it, for me, is 'Is This A Zombie?') and even led to some of my favourite series in the past no longer holding up in the present. It won't ruin my enjoyment of this series, but hopefully it doesn't stay too strong as it goes on. I would hate to have to put up with it to absurd amounts. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11642 |
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What did she do to him? Raise him and love him until her time was up? What should she have done instead? |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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It's become the standard vaguely-sexist-to-both-genders thing, apparently. Guy accidentally doing something that looks naughty is funny because guys are all perverts and want to do those things intentionally. Girl beating him up is funny because girls are supposedly weaker, so he isn't a "real man," and it's just a hilarious misunderstanding anyway. Sigh... I think with this one they tried to make it funny, even though it's stupid, by doing it over and over, but that just made it more irritating. With this episode implying that the other retrieval teams aren't nearly so kind and helpful as our heroes (who use way more funds per job than the others), I'm even more convinced there's something shady about all this. Why would these perfectly human robots just suddenly break down in a matter of hours, at an extremely predictable time, after working fine for years? There's got to be something they haven't told us yet... |
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HaruhiToy
Posts: 4118 |
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It is not too hard to imagine technology that would behave that way. Consider that the computer you are now reading has billions of transistor circuits and even more memory bits. For a very large number of those it would take just one failure to bring your computer to a complete crash. There are many more that would cause to to act flaky, and a likely majority wouldn't be noticed or even matter. We can mitigate failures to some extend by implementing ECC (Error Correcting Codes) and other forms of redundancy, but when these end up being used you generally are not far away from redundant failures that they cannot work around. Designs that can tolerate any single point of failure are fairly common -- more than that becomes very complex and expensive very fast. It is hard to predict when modern day solid state circuits will fail. They have relatively long life cycles compared to their R&D time so we have to conduct what is called "Accelerated Life Testing" which will try to stress the components to their lifetimes, then calculate out how many years its MTBF will be. (Mean Time Between Failure). That fits our common experience. Some devices fail very quickly, others live for an amazing amount of time, but the average is fairly predictable. So that kind of device doesn't fit this story. So suppose these Giftas use some sort of neural-net solid state device based on materials currently unknown to us but is a material that degrades when used like that at a very known rate. There are a lot of materials in our world that behave that way. Suppose the Gifta memory is plastic and uncopyable just like our brains are. That would explain the premise on which this story runs in very realistic terms. |
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CoreSignal
 Posts: 727 Location: California, USA |
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Better than last week's episode. I agree with the review. Most of the humor in this show isn't working for me just because it's prettymuch standard stuff you see in a lot of other shows. Otherwise the stuff about Giftias going past their expiration date and the black market retrieval-thing at the end is keeping me interested for next week.
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vahid22
Posts: 5 |
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First episode seemed good, but then it all went downhill. i like its animation but the story is not very atractive and characters are not well developed. PM has a very good idea but it couldn't make a good story with it.
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2625 Location: Germany |
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It´s kind of bullshit that the black market dealer looks like a Neanderthal (or that his profession exists at all), that the military/PMC goons would allow a child to road around a dangerous slum or that Tsudere-chan would be angry at the soldiers for saving her and Kazuki´s (!) life years after the fact but this two parter was well directed and interesting overall despite rater predicable "twists" so were are back on track.
A B- it is and the addition of attempted child murder and the exclusion of moe "comedy" is highly welcomed. The animation took a dive though this week and i further can´t believe how far i am willing to suspend my disbelief for this show. 8 more to go. |
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Gewürtztraminer
 Posts: 1028 Location: Texas - Its like whole other country. |
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Yeah, It stands to reason that the Giftias know exactly what will happen if they let it go on, and that there is NO alternative for them. Seems like if they cared at all, voluntary shutdown would if not built in, be chosen. At least in the cases presented so far. |
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Hameyadea
 Posts: 3679 |
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It has been said during Episode #5 repeatedly that not all Giftias who operate beyond the recommended 81,920 hours will become Wanderers, but might become ones. Also, I suspect that there aren't any shutdown devices/mechanism on the Giftias because it'll probably anger Human Rights activists (that's the same reason that Giftias don't have any locator/beacon on them). |
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Angel M Cazares
 Posts: 5519 Location: Iscandar |
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I have been harsh with this anime, but the producers were finally able to tap into the series' potential thanks to an episode 5 that was able to effectively combine the positive qualities of Plastic Memories to produce 20 riveting minutes.
More episodes like this one will convince me that Plastic Memories is a good sci-fi anime with deep themes. |
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