Infinite Dendrogram (Episode 5) - La Porte de l'Enfer

Ray happens upon a woman begging some bandits to give her brother back, but they want more money. Tian or not, Ray isn’t about to sit back and watch these criminals do unspeakable things to the children!

What happened?

As Ray rushed in to help the woman so did another master. Unfortunately for him, the bandits noticed him first and knocked him to the ground before he could activate his weapon. Ray stepped in and hit the first one to attack, forgetting that his gauntlets increased his strength a thousand times. He picked up the other master, Hugo and together they took the mission to rescue the woman’s little brother. Well, that all sounds delightful, but things took a very sinister turn as it was revealed that the bandits were kidnapping children and something was eating them…

Infinite Dendrogram Episode 5 Ray punches a Bandit

What was your favourite element?

This series has had some up and down moments so far, but this episode was the best of the bunch for me. Early on I commented on how the idea of these infinite number of quests and possibilities all rolling together was cool, but then we didn’t see anything of that until this episode. In fact, we’d spent far too much time having tea! Well, those days are gone. Now we have a monster that eats people and has a bag of heads to snack on when he gets hungry. That’s right, a bag of heads and they’re probably children’s heads too! Things just got a lot darker and given the revelations of the last episode, it’s much darker than that.

Infinite Dendrogram Episode 5 Gouz eating a Bandit

What have you learnt?

I’m still a little annoyed about the demon looking guy in the last episode potentially spoiling the premise. That was even worse in this episode considering that Hugo was hinting a lot of that too, but if we already know why is it still hinting at us. In reality, we should still be piecing together the possibilities of whether the world is a game or not. I want to be questioning what we’re seeing and even getting a moment much later where I look back and am shocked to discover exactly what we’ve been watching. You need to give the readers/viewers answers, but you also want them to have a chance to work it out themselves before some demon blurts out the answer for no good reason!