Darwin’s Game (Episode 3) – Ignition
The event is on and while it’s billed as a treasure hunt, battle royale rules are in place. There’s also not enough items for everyone to find the treasure and if you don’t it’s game over!
What happened?
Kaname, finding himself in what appears to be a hotel room, takes a moment to go over the event’s rules and tests out the new apps. With one, he can see the world as an apocalyptic alternate reality. It also shows the locations of the bracelets, but not the characters, however, if you have a bracelet, well, I’m sure you get it. He makes a move and begins to search for Shuka, but runs into the outcome of a massacre. Before long, he meets the one behind it and gives up his ring in exchange for his life. The masked man gets into the elevator and leaves Kaname to lick his wounds. Moments later, he’s joined by Rein, the Analyst who tells him about the Florist!
What was your favourite element?
There were quite a few things that caught my eye in this episode. The first is the way that they were able to make the general public leave the battlezone. That is curious, but then I guess if you have the ability to teleport people and give them special powers, then why not. After that, we saw the alternate reality that the event is set in. This, of course, makes me wonder if that is in fact the actual reality and everything else has been a facade. Finally, we have the people watching the event and gambling on it. There is one group of people who appear to understand the true nature of things and one commented that if Shuka were a male, she would have been selected… Selected for what though?
What have you learnt?
It’s no lie that there have been a lot of holes in the story so far, but I’m giving the writers the benefit of the doubt and believe that these may be intentional. I am certainly finding myself questioning everything and performing some incredible mental gymnastics to get it to work. I’m now of the opinion that the world as we see it is a fake, either a VMMO or similar and the world has been invaded by aliens that are searching for someone. Possible the key to reviving their race, which is why they need a male. Crazy. Possibly, but why not? I think what I’m getting at here is that if you leave details out for the readers/viewers they will try to fill them in, getting themselves invested in the story, even if only to see if they were right.
Other reviews in the series
- Season One
- Bonus Posts
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Episode 3 certainly opened up more possibilities and sort of indicated that maybe the story does have a plan. It was enough to convince me to stick around until the end and hope that maybe it all makes sense.
For sure, there’s still a lot to be explained and the possibilities kind of opened up exponentially. If nothing else, we now have plant zombies…
That was somewhat unexpected. I’m not entirely sure that plant zombies fit with the other characters and abilities but you know that’s probably the benefit of a lack of explanation about how things work, I can’t say it doesn’t actually work within the established rules so I’m just going to have to watch and find out how it fits.
I figure the technology here is so completely over the top that anything is possible at this stage. I think that’s why I’m leaning towards artificial world or aliens… haha! Maybe both!