Hello and welcome, Ultraman Connection readers! This week, we’re back again with a review of the latest Ultraman Arc episode. Like the Ultraman franchise itself, Arc has provided many different tones and styles within its perspective. Finding a balance between dark tragedies, hopeful dreams, and spectacular showcase battles is never an easy task, but this series found space for all of it to exist and retain its emotional impact across many different stories.
So, considering that last week’s episode was an achingly mournful fairy-tale, it only makes sense that this week’s is a ridiculously over-the-top slapstick cartoon.
The opening events for this episode seem mundane enough at first. Hoshimoto City was caught in the middle of economic woes, which I’m sure are all-too-realistic and relatable for many of the viewers. Despite the new, fancy digital payment service everyone’s using, prices for everything from groceries to electricity have skyrocketed!
It’s funny that technology is often promised to make our lives simpler and easier, and yet usually ends up doing the opposite.
Everyone at SKIP tries to cope with the rampant inflation, in whatever ways they can find to save money and conserve energy. For Shu Ishido, however, that means cutting down his coffee intake to only three cups a day. I don’t know about you, readers, but on most days I drink three cups of coffee before 10 in the morning!
What’s a government agent to do in these extreme circumstances? Should he go cold turkey and give it up entirely? Switch to tea? Start reusing coffee grounds? Rather than resorting to such desperate measures, Shu comes up with a different idea, and recruits Yuma to help him out.
He becomes a live streamer and starts collecting tips from live streams.
Look, I never said it was a better idea, but it certainly was creative.
The whole scheme is bizarre and entirely played for laughs, but weirdly enough it fits with the emphasis of the episode as a whole. As I said, technology often is portrayed as magic, an instant fix to many issues of our day. If only things were more efficient, organized, with visible numbers we can align into the right spots, then surely our lives would be much better, right? In this case, Shu’s not passionate about entertaining an audience, but he is passionate about efficiency, and sees his new online platform as the most efficient means to an end.
It just happens that “getting more money to afford fancy coffee” is the end goal for Shu, and one he wants an easy solution for.
Yuma and Shu – or rather, “Alpha” and “Omega”, their virtual streamer monikers – have some stiff competition though. It seems that a Kaiju has already attracted a massive following on the same streaming platform. Investigating the case as SKIP team members, things get even stranger. The Kaiju wasn’t a Kaiju at all, but an AI program that had gone rogue! Its creator, Kanao Dogane, originally conceived of it and the “HoshiPay” app as a clever bit of research into how ordinary people earn and spend money. Again, just like many other pieces of technology, it sounds nice enough on paper, but in practice…?
Without physical needs or limitations, the “Kanegon” AI went off the rails. It only exists to gain “tips” as a livestream personality on the internet, the money transferred to its account goes nowhere! Instead, it only builds up, away from general circulation, and out of reach for the rest of Hoshimoto’s citizens. No wonder inflation went rampant in the city!
There’s lots of reasons why I love Ultraman shows, giving impromptu lessons on economic systems for the audience at home is definitely another one to put on the list.
I should note here that Kanegon is a classic monster from Ultraman history, and has served as a metaphor for decades representing an all-too-human propensity for greed. In its original appearance in Ultra Q, a penny-pinching grade-schooler was warned by his parents that he will turn into a Kanegon if he let that greed get the better of him. Spoiler alert: it does.
In its many other appearances, Kanegon represents similar concepts, the dangers of selfishly hoarding money for its own sake. Many other monsters and Kaiju in the franchise take some aspect of humanity and magnify it beyond reasonable limits, and show its exaggerated effects on the people around us – often in tragic ways. Even though Kanegon is usually a humorous figure, that Ultra Q episode, and its other appearances, still associate it with a curse that is equally as grotesque as its appearance.
Without money, Kanegon will literally starve to death. An ironic end for someone obsessed with hoarding wealth, of course, but still a pretty gruesome end.
Good thing for the SKIP team, this Kanegon is just a computer program. They just need to adjust its programming to return the money it took, and everything will go back to normal. Kanegon doesn’t appreciate the intrusion though, especially since its new lack of funds only made it upset and ravenously hungry! It even pulls Ultraman Arc into its cyberspace realm during the operation against it! (In a sequence eerily reminiscent of 1993’s Gridman the Hyper Agent, no less!)
Throughout this season, Arc’s fights have been characterized by a wild and creative type of imagination, which uses weapons and new armors in unexpected ways. This time however, Arc’s opponent also has the advantage of a realm of pure imagination, with no physical limits! Kanegon seemed to be giving him a run for his money (pun very much intended), but thankfully Rin had planned ahead and enabled YouPi to operate digitally. The robotic duo got a chance to fight alongside Arc as a literal “support vehicle” in this episode!
I mean, it’s a fight taking place literally inside a computer, I would’ve been shocked if we didn’t get Gridman references!
The fight itself is also the most ludicrously cartoonish spectacle I’ve seen from the franchise in years. It’s clear the directors and special effects crew wanted to capitalize on the “imagination” theme without worrying about collateral damage or concessions to any hint of realistic physics whatsoever.
Even more surprising was the way that Arc “won” the battle and defeated Kanegon. Yes, “defeated”, not “destroyed”. Kanegon might be greedy, but it’s not evil. At least, not more evil than humanity in general, it’s based on our own wants and desires after all! Arc beat it simply by giving it exactly what it wanted, a gigantic “coin” with the new software update, allowing it… uh, expel all of its hoarded money, back to its eager audience on the HoshiPay app.
And so all’s well that ends well, as you might say. We’ve learned our lesson about sensible economics, how to appreciate indulgences and entertainment without losing sight of the ways in which spending and savings are connected to the community around us. Technology is designed by and for human beings, and at the end of the day, it’s only useful in the context of that community, and becomes destructive when it loses sight of that purpose.
Someone might need to remind Shu about that however.
Anyways, join us next week for more Ultraman Arc, and stay tuned right here at Ultraman Connection for all your business and market updates, arts and leisure, sports scores… and Ultraman news, of course.
