Digging Into Yurei Deco - Episode 8

Hey there, and welcome back to Ringtail Reviews! Today I'm excited to get back to Yurei Deco. I honestly don't have a lot to say up front this time—last episode teased a lot of interesting plot developments and added layers to the show's exploration of truth and fiction, and I'm excited to see it expand on both. And on a more personal note, this is the first time since the show started where I'm releasing an episode writeup the same week it came out. I'm so close to catching up, y'all. Let's do this!

Episode 8

Hack sleepily walks up to their shared room with Berry and pushes her out of bed. In an alternate universe, Hack is showing up on a Reddit roommate horror stories post for clipping their toenails on the couch

Berry finds Finn secretly working downstairs, using his Hyperverse machine to study the feather Mr. Watson found last episode while ominously saying "Mark Twain." Guess we're in for some plot developments this episode!

Also, we haven't found out much about Finn himself so far. We know he's a serious guy who studied the art of building Hyperverses under Kearney (AKA Hackitt), a Customer Center employee who led some sort of revolution in the past. Plenty of material to mine from, but aside from the basics, we honestly know more about Mr. Watson than we do Finn

Hank owns a tiny boat called the SS McDougal and collects scrap from the ocean floor to resell. Lots of interesting ways they could take that, like the gang dredging up weird junk that teaches them about the past

They run into a man named Pudd'nhead Wilson, who owes Hank some Love from gambling. This character's name is taken from a Mark Twain book that I haven't personally read, but from the (extremely racially charged) summary, I suspect this is just a punny name without any extra meaning behind it

Wilson gives them a hot tip, saying the Customer Center is preparing to collect a treasure "flying down from the sky": an old satellite past its prime that's crashing 

Berry has no idea what a satellite is. More knowledge the Customer Center has deemed unimportant, apparently 

The sky is once again being gestured to as the key to many mysteries, much like the literal city in the sky we saw last episode

Back at base, Hack has donned Kearney's goofy avatar in the Hyperverse and is doing what appears to be a dungeon crawler to try digging up information for Finn. This could lead them closer to Phantom Zero and the Zero Phenomenon, since Finn believes Kearney was investigating the same mystery they were 

Hack finds what appears to be a debug room with a bunch of unused avatars frozen in place, including glitchy-witchy's at the end. It's a reproduction from stored data, which apparently proves Kearney encountered her before he died

Everything in this hidden room is copy protected, meaning they can't extract the data to analyze further. But then Hack figures out a "puzzle" Kearney set up by walking through a mirror that leads to the real data room, where they can download everything 

A lot of this Hyperverse stuff feels kinda... floaty, in a narrative sense. This sort of whimsical puzzle solving, and even stuff like the Decopedia library from a couple episodes ago, works for a more pure fantasy like Discworld or Harry Potter, but it clashes with Yurei Deco's science fiction trappings. Hyperverses are extensions of the internet and VR, things from our real world with commonly known rules, but none of this feels like something an actual programmer or game designer would set up to protect their data

I wouldn't mind any of this so much if the moment-to-moment stuff tied in with a character arc or something, rather than only being Hack running around playing Etrian Odyssey  

They find a card that allows them to access the Angel Fish Club, a special, private search engine. Hank uses this to pull up information about the satellite, which apparently contains a core including records of experiments the Customer Center has been running. 

So that's their goal—retrieve the satellite and catch the core. A good narrative hook to bring the whole gang together, and one that also puts them at risk of running into the Customer Center themselves

Also, that city in the sky appears at the Angel Fish startup screen

Finn studies the sky city by himself after everyone else is in bed. "A terminal disguised with information camouflage. A veritable ticket to heaven." 

Doron the drone comes back to help them train to catch the satellite, along with a polycule of other equally ugly drones. #goodforhim

They decide to play baseball to practice catching the satellite. Do they think this thing is gonna be the size of a walnut? Does anyone know what a satellite is?

Lol, and then they announce that Madam 44 is going to be the one to catch it, complete with badass rock music. I can accept this

The narration is working overtime to frame this as "the whole group finally working together for a big goal," which means we're likely heading for a major revelation that'll break them apart

Hank kindly divulges some Finn backstory right on schedule. Hank met Finn at his old shop, where Finn commissioned him to make the SOS machine. Finn's got private motives and was mysterious even back then. 

Also back then, Mr. Watson was just kind of hanging around

The important piece we learn is that Finn actually can't use a Deco—"Using one does a number on his inner ear and he gets real shaky as a result." Now this is a super interesting angle for the show to take—Deco usage as accessibility issue. Believable, too, given the number of real people who can't use VR headsets without motion sickness. 

The Customer Center mandates Deco usage to participate in their society, and of course they haven't addressed the issue of Deco-sickness issue in a way that allows people like Finn equal access. Like how so many other accessibility issues are handled by tech companies, we're sold these rosy, utopian pictures of technological bliss while conveniently not addressing the minorities who the technology marginalizes

This recontextualizes the stuff in prior episodes where Finn never wanted to enter the Hyperverses he created. "He's stuck looking at the worlds he makes from the outside."

Berry asks why Finn's so interested in the Zero Phenomenon. Hank says, "It's because he wants to clear your and Hack's name," and then they both immediately laugh it off. Yeah, good call

Finn brings out a weird tuna can device (a music box?) from his robes. He's also holding this thing in the OP

On the big day, Finn and Mr. Watson shove off on Hank's boat, while Berry, Hack, Smiley, and Madam 44 go on a smaller one. Separating the group feels ominous

Hank's boat will collect scrap, while Berry's boat is there to collect the satellite capsule. They send out fake data to throw the Customer Center off course, too. That feels like a bit of an anticlimax—the only real conflict now is whether Madam 44 can catch the capsule, which is all but a given

"I haven't felt this tense since my first secret tryst." You go Madam

Madam does such a good catch that her mech has to vent and the boat almost capsizes

Meanwhile, Puddn'head told a ton of other scrappers about the satellite, and it never even fell. Yet another episode where our group doesn't get paid—a classic trope, and perhaps a knowing reference to Cowboy Bebop, which Dai Sato also wrote for

We get a big, happy dinner scene with the whole gang. Smiley ominously eats dinner with her mask partially off her face, a tacit threat to viewers everywhere that she could remove it at any time

Finn says he couldn't learn anything from the capsule since the records were damaged. Clearly he's being duplicitous. Finntom Zero twist incoming?

The others catch him analyzing the capsule that evening, so it's clearly not broken. Not only that, he knew the whole time the satellite wouldn't be coming down

Finn's immediate reaction to being called out on his lie is to say he's not their friend, that he was using them the whole time, and that now he doesn't need them anymore. The show's trying to make this feel like Finn is massively betraying this found family, but in the moment, it just seems like he's just being a dickhead for no reason

Yeah, this whole thing doesn't land for me for a few reasons: 

1. The scene itself is awkwardly written. The conversation starts with "Hey, weird of you to lie to us and do stuff in secret," which the group immediately escalates to an unearned "You've betrayed us," but then Finn immediately accepts this and says, "Yep, I betrayed you, it's over." You feel the writing really tugging on the strings here—characters are making logical and emotional leaps in order to make this seem like a big, irreversable misstep on Finn's part, when it's not. Finn's total detachment also robs this scene of emotion

2. Finn has never been super integrated with the group to begin with—there aren't emotional bonds between him and anyone else. Aside from cooking for them, he feels more like an employer than anything else. To be fair, it's not just Finn—despite many of the other characters having focus episodes, none of them feel emotionally attached to one another. The prior stories weren't so much about connecting the characters as much as they were about digging into the world and themes, which would be fine if the show wasn't now trying to do this

3. What reason does Finn have to keep this information to himself in the first place? Obviously, there are many things the show is holding back, and I suspect we're due for a big Finn moment along the lines of "I was doing this to protect you." But right there in the moment, the audience isn't being given any reason to see Finn's move as rational in any respect. If he's been using them for free help, why completely cut ties the moment they get suspicious? They're trying to make Finn out to be a villain without him doing anything truly villainous. His move truly just feels petty

Post-episode thoughts

Welp, if this was Yurei Deco's baseball episode, I'd have to say it was a swing and a miss. The central narrative to catch the falling capsule was weirdly abbreviated and tensionless, almost there as an afterthought between Kearney speculation and Finn's backstory. Meanwhile, Finn's betrayal at the end was heavily telegraphed all episode, and then not very believable when it happened—a real double whammy for unsatisfying plot progression.

That final scene really does feel like Yurei Deco's first big misstep, so if you'll bear with me a while longer, I'd like to do something different and really dig into this storytelling maneuver. Me just saying the scene doesn't work is one thing, but how about fixing it? Without making too many structural changes, how would we improve Finn's betrayal? 

Let's start on the show's terms: this episode wants its cool, collected, mysterious side character to betray the rest of the group so he can hoard plot-critical information for himself, thereby preventing our main characters from learning things that might solve their own conflicts. But crucially, the show also wants to keep Finn's motives for doing this a secret (I'll come back to that part later). That means the real question is how to make the scene emotionally investing while playing everything close to the chest. 

One small way to accomplish this could be to make this the moment where Finn's emotional barrier cracks—maybe he yells at the group, or he tears up, or he just can't look them in the eye as he tells them to get out. Any of that would give viewers a sense that what he's doing is important to him, and that he truly believes no one else can accompany him on this part of the journey, even if he's conflicted. Without revealing his motives, we'd know more about Finn as a person. Think back to Hack's freakout when they discovered Berry snooped on them—we still don't know what Hack wanted to stay hidden, but we saw exactly how important it was to them in the moment, and that carried the audience's emotional investment through the scene.

Another tactic would be to make the betrayal itself more consequential. One weird thing hurting the scene's believability is that Finn is presumably just gonna continue analyzing the capsule in the detective club—a place where everyone knows he lives. Hell, Hank works nextdoor and Hack and Berry live upstairs. What's actually changing here? What are the real, measurable consequences for our protagonists? From that angle, there would be several ways to make this moment bigger—Finn could ban them from the detective club, or pack up his gear and leave in the middle of the night without telling anyone. Or, for a real act of betrayal, Finn could reveal he's gotten what he needs from the capsule and then destroy it in front of Hack and Berry, guaranteeing they can't access it later. 

Those are just some simple ways, and there's so much more that could be done to tie it into the series themes—are there ways to tie this into the blurred distinction between fact and fiction, or Berry's coming-of-age journey? And, like... I joked earlier about Finn being Phantom Zero, but what if that were the twist revealed this episode? That he was just acting a pawn for her, or was an android she'd possessed to collect the capsule? Or what if he were in league with the Customer Center, striking a deal in exchange for that capsule? That would be a true betrayal of the detective club's anti-establishment ideals. Maybe one of those things is still in the cards, but saving that reveal for the future doesn't do this episode any favors. 

I think a mix of everything above would help, but it still doesn't fully fix the fundamental problem of humanizing Finn. His decision just doesn't read logically in the moment, so making him cry or act out more would only be a half measure. So with that in mind, there is one change that I think would fix this whole thing—and that would be to reveal Finn's motives ahead of time during the episode. This would be a big change, obviously, and might risk dispelling Finn's mysterious aura. But too many shows make the mistake of thinking that characters keeping secrets and acting mysterious creates tension by itself, when in reality it's often creating the opposite of tension. Audiences always need a "way in" to invest in stories, and simply withholding information like this, where characters make pivotal decisions for confusing reasons, keeps them at arm's length from the drama. For a betrayal, I think the audience's lingering thought should be "Oh my god, he actually did that," instead of "Why did he do that?"

Picture this: The first part of the episode is roughly the same, with everyone learning about the satellite capsule falling from the sky at the beginning. When the others go off to practice catch with Doron, we cut away to Finn alone at the detective club. Instead of him just looking at his mysterious device, we are let into Finn's world fully here, through a conversation or a flashback or an internal monologue, and we see the precise thing that's driving his actions—he's in league with the malevolent force behind the glitchy-witchy, or someone he cares about is in danger from the Customer Center, or he knows that something in the capsule data will put the others at risk. Perhaps he also stumbles upon Berry's diary and reads a silly passage about himself, or just smiles looking through her notes, cementing some sort of bond with the others that he doesn't present publicly. Then at the end of the episode, before he interrupts dinner, we cut back to him and stay in his headspace as we watch him makes a choice: either keep the information to himself and fulfill his own goals, or let everyone else in and risk losing what he's been working towards. Then, when he makes the selfish choice a moment later and denies the group at the end, the audience knows what brought him to that point, and is there in the moment with him.

I don't know about you, but I'd find that a little more compelling than what we got. 

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Alright, I promise this is actually the end. If you made it through this whole thing—first off, good lord, thanks so much for reading! But second, I'd honestly love to hear your thoughts on this stuff. Maybe my reaction to the betrayal scene was stronger than yours, or maybe you don't think my outline above would make for as compelling of an episode—lord knows there's more than one way to write a good story, and more to making good anime than a plot outline. One way or another, I'd love to hear from you, and I hope you'll stick around for my thoughts on the next episode. I'll see you next time!