Paranoia Agent #2: True Believers Pioneer 100 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 01/11/2005 Reviewed: 03/15/2005

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My lack of commitment to anime is oft times a distressing thing. More often than not, it really just means that I have an extra 2-4 hours a week that I'm not wasting my time watching crap. I will fill this time with many fanciful things. Dancing, socializing, wine tastings and galas at the finest hotels in town. Or, those are all things I could be doing. Generally my non-anime time is divided in two ways 1) "Google"ing curse words in foreign languages 2) Drinking beer. Well, as I expound on in the other review this week I'm sick and nobody's around anyway so I'll actually heed my medicine's advice and not consume with alcohol... this time. Without the choking vice of liquor, I become sort of a productive dynamo. On the bus ride home I thought of a another GQ, an honest to god good one. On the way home from the grocery store I thought of a whole new section for the site. And just about four days ago three of us plopped ourselves down in comfortable chairs and watched the second disc of a series that I love to love so well. It's a funny sort of situation that this disc, of a show that I absolutely adore so far, came out literally days after I watched the first and I couldn't bare to get off my lazy duff and buy it until just now. It's absolutely creepy how my mind works. Like some sort of broken, evil time machine.

The first disc of Paranoia Agent ends at the most perfect, ball shattering moment. It's the ultimate place to cut the viewer off and leave them slavering for more and it couldn't have happened better if Pioneer planned it. Lil' Slugger (or Shonen Bat, if you prefer) has been captured. As such, the inhabitants of Satoshi Kon's little world assume that the attacks committed by the young boy with the golden bat will quiet down. The astute viewer is a smarter fellow than these cartoon automatons. He knows that this is only the beginning. The two detectives take the boy to task and it becomes evident that he is draped in his own illusions. In sterling silver proof that videogames do corrupt one's mind, our young Slugger tells the cops that the motive behind his attacks was to defeat an evil monster so that he could progress to the next level. He's been living inside a videogame this whole time! In his mind's eye the fat kid that he totally wailed on with a bat was really a disgusting monster.

Let me tell you something: When I see a fat kid in my mind's eye all I see is a disgusting monster too. He might not be a spiky backed dragon or anything, but it's certainly not the kind of thing I'd want to associate with. I'm not saying I'm going to hit every fat person I see with a baseball bat but... I'm not saying I'm NOT going to do it either. It's really all dependent on circumstance, I guess. Anyway it's all very "Millennium Actress". This probably shouldn't come as a surprise, as the previous disc had a rather overt Perfect Blue episode. This is not exactly the thing you want to be dropped into the series seeing after two months away from it, you know what I mean? It's not that the episode is weak. It can stand on its own legs, but it doesn't have the same feelings that other episodes have curried. From strange, dreadful circumstances of people getting attacked in dark alleys we're suddenly transported into this Legend of Zelda world that our good friend Lil' Slugger inhabits. For videogame fans the injokes are worth a chuckle or two, but really not much more.

There are more revelations which I won't spoil; I've already alluded to those things in the past. The disc eventually starts to pick up again, but it's really not until the last ten or fifteen minutes that it absolutely starts feeling like the show that I know. The second episode is tense, the third episode even more so. There's a short haired chick in her panties, so that's pretty manageable. My major qualms are with that specious first episode and stuff like this, which I just can't abide. It's wasteful! That's a whole cigarette! Tobacco folly aside, the whole thing feels like the series in a lull. Maybe a gathering point before the "next big thing". I have enough faith in Satoshi Kon to think he's not going to try and kick me in the pants, but I do admit a slight sense of trepidation. Well, considering it took me two months to buy this disc I've probably got another sixty days of waiting to find out. If you, dear reader, feel the gut pressing desire to know more of the story then you need only stop by your local store and pick up the recently released third disc of Paranoia Agent. As for me, I'll see you in May.