Series Summary
A group of students on summer vacation find themselves transported to another dimension and granted superpowers to survive there. (IMDB)
Episode 1 Summary
Midway through summer vacation, 36 students, some with newfound super-powers, find themselves all alone in their high school, adrift in a black void, unable to contact the outside world. (Hulu)
Notes & Thoughts
• Japanese school gets stuck in a black void and some students develop superpowers.
• Art style reminds me of Devilman Crybaby and Hayao Miyazaki. The students look like teenagers, which is good. Sometimes anime's gloss over the fact that their kids/teenagers look too similar to the adults in their respective stories.
• There’s a conniving dude, student council representative, named Tanigawa. He’s smart but duplicitous, and has a star under his left eye.
• Tanigawa, a big guy, and a pony-tail girl try to create order with a rules system that asks those with powers to refrain from using them.
• There’s 36 students.
• The pointy tail girl is Student Council President Machi.
• They vote for a leader and the big guy gets chosen.
• There’s a short haired girl and long haired boy who seem to be the main characters.
• There’s a girl with long hair with a lot of Amazon boxes.
• One of the rules, no using powers in the school.
• The class communicates through Group Talk, an app on their phones which still work.
• There’s a boy in a red shirt who can “fracture” reality, making the world look like it’s being viewed through cracking glass, which also breaks things.
• When someone breaks the rules, the big guy points at them and yells penalty which makes a black “x” show up on the rule breaker’s face before they have to carry out a determined punishment.
• The red-shirt boy protests the new rules. He uses his power and is punished with continuous long division all night.
• The short-haired girl’s name is Nozomi.
• She refuses to participate in the student council’s new rule system. When she breaks the phone they give her, she is punished in the form of laps around the school.
• When the black-x’s fade from their faces, the students’s penalties are over.
• The big guy with the baseball hat is called Captain, or Cap.
• There’s an Indian kid who’s studying the black void around them and the rules of their situation. He draws a circle on his hand and sticks it into the dark but when he pulls back the circle is gone. Does the dark undo change made inside the school—or does it revert students to their exact condition when the school moved to the void?
• There’s a focus on Nozomi’s eyes and she mentions seeing lights in the black void that no one else can see.
• The long-haired boy’s name is Nagara.
• One of the red-shirt boy’s friends is a blonde girl with an electrical ability. I find it fitting and funny when yellow-haired characters have electrical powers.
• Tanigawa asks Machi why she’s studying and when she says they’ll still have exams when they return to the real world, he looks concerned or upset at the idea of them going back. I don’t think he wants them to return to the real world.
• The structure of the school gets distorted, folded in on itself and twisted around. Gravity is off in different areas. This is the doing of the red shirt boy and his friends. There is a mullet boy who is able to reshape their environment.
• Machi and/or Tanigawa have secretly had powers too. One or both of them can switch places with targeted objects. They use this ability to free themselves after being restrained in basketball hoops and a cage made of student desks.
• There’s a moment where a floating light bulb in front of Tanigawa splits into two identical light bulbs. I think his power may be object-cloning and Machi’s is location-trading.
• Nozomi wants to escape the black void and the school, which will put her at odds with Tanigawa who I think doesn’t want to leave.
• Cap is an athlete who played baseball. When red shirt says Cap only got nominated because of Hoshi, he gets emotionally triggered.
• It’s revealed that the reshaping of the school was red shirt’s friend and not him, making him immune from penalties. He even wonders if the rules and penalties are an independent system and not actually Cap’s power.
• Cap clobbers red shirt with a baseball bat, leaving red shirt on the ground with blood around his head.
• Cap says it’s ok for him to break rules but I don’t know if not hurting students is a rule. He threatens Machi when she says he’s gone too far. Tanigawa doesn’t look worried.
• Currents rules: do not dirty or damage the school, do not break school supplies.
• New rule: let’s follow the rules without teachers around.
• Tanigawa scolds Cap for breaking the rules and reveals the rule-penalty system isn’t Cap’s power by pointing at him and putting a black-x on Cap’s face. Cap’s penalty is to strip and hop naked like a frog, which other students laugh at. Not sure if Tanigawa specified the penalty or if penalties are random.
• Red shirt asks what the point of the rule-penalty system is. Tanigawa says it’s to keep them quiet and obedient. He taunts an angry red shirt and then a gaunt man with a scythe appears. Images of the students looking gaunt like the scythe man are shown(The gaunt look may represent death, that they are all dead, and this is some afterlife, limbo, or hell). Maybe object-cloning is not his power but instead some form of hallucination-control.
• Red shirt and the other students are terrified.
• Nozomi and Nagara go outside. She sees a feather and takes a running start before jumping into the black void—but Nagara hangs off a fence and catches her. The fence breaks and the two fall into the dark.
• The void changes to something bright. Nozomi and Nagara land in water. They look up at a cloudy sky and at the ocean around them. The students are happy the school has moved. Amazon Box Girl is happy. Cap is still hopping naked and Tanigawa looks at Nozomi and Nagara with a displeased look. There is a nearby island with a mountain on it.
Analysis & Criticism
This episode seems to revolve around the governing of groups, the idea of punishments being automatic or enacted by individuals, and individuals desire to escape old systems for new ones. Ironically, it is not the persons who like chaos that abuse the powerless but those who want order. Tanigawa wants to control people while Red Shirt doesn’t want to be controlled. Despite the property damage from their powers, no one was hurt until Tanigawa’s student council tried to enforce their rules on others. Cap, the strongest but dumbest member of the student council, when given power becomes violent and claims immunity from the rules and penalties he deals on others—a common real world occurrence. This episode might be asking if obsession with order, leads to the very chaos that order was supposed to counteract or prevent. I am curious about Amazon Box Girl. Why does she have so many recently delivered goods? Can Machin only switch herself and others with objects she can see? What is Tanigawa’s power? If it is object-cloning, can he clone people? if it's hallucination-control, can he make anyone see anything he wants them to? And the ultimate hook of the show, what happened and is happening to the school and the student?
