Pluto: Episodes 4-6

November 8, 2023 12:57 PM - Season 1, Episode 4

Episode 4: Professor Ochanomizu brings a battered robot dog home and attempts to fix it. Soon after, a mysterious man claiming to be the owner visits his house. Episode 5: After delivering Adolf Haas to a safe house, Gesicht looks into his past. Meanwhile, Hercules and Epsilon sense a mysterious threat approaching them. Episode 6: Gesicht meets Abullah in Persia to further investigate the case, but detects a lie. He inches closer to the truth when he encounters a robot child.
posted by Alex404 (5 comments total)

Fuuuuuucckkk.

They took out Hercules... that seemed inevitable. Wasn't exactly the deepest character.

Atom has upped his role as a non-entity by being rendered not-dead for the past couple of episodes.

But Gesicht?! For some reason I was shocked when he died. And sad. I know they telegraphed the hell out of it, but still. For me Episode 6 has reached the heights set in Episode 1.

And the mystery continues. Seems unlikely to me that Abullah and Sahad would be behind Gesicht's death. If anything I would guess those characters might recede into the background. Presumably Atom is going to come back to life, and face down... some combination of those anti-robot racists and the mystery ultra robot created by Tenma.

The tone of this show continues to be fascinating in and of itself. For me it simultaneously feels like a show for teens/young adults, yet it somehow musters an incredible amount of depth in its story telling. Its style is both plain and direct, yet it's the product of a clear and unique vision.

Having not read the manga, but knowing the creator is extremely well respected, I imagine that this tone is coming straight from the source material.
posted by Alex404 at 1:09 PM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

With Gesicht learning more about his past I thought the story would go deeper into that and have more ramifications for him continuing to work for Europol, and possibly him going back to Japan to properly team up with Atom. There's something unsettling about his memories being able to be so easily altered and what that would mean not just for him but the other robots as well. Between that and Pluto being able to use robots as puppets I wonder about this world where robots seem to have rights and a measure of equality with humans while their own selves seem so contingent.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:32 PM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Considering the situation in Gaza, it has sometimes been rough to watch this series.
posted by SPrintF at 4:31 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think that Thrace had Gesicht killed. I don't think that they're consciously working with Abdullah.
I'm curious about Gesicht's builders. We know that the professor maintaining him created the metal he's made out of, but doesn't know if his memory's been tampered with. What was their relationship 3 years ago, and how did it change?
I don't think that Pluto has mysterious robot puppeting powers. I think that he was just able to sneak his control unit into an empty body, and then they used the bugs to remove it.
I really wish that Udon had more to do with waking Atom. Her emotional abilities should give her insight into what's going on inside his head. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
posted by Spike Glee at 7:15 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

This show has leaned so far into its "build up sympathy for a character and then violently murder them" pattern that once I saw them doing the "disillusioned cop about to retire" trope with Gesicht I couldn't take it too seriously. I kept waiting for him to start talking about how he was going to buy a boat or start a bar with his old buddy in the Florida Keys.

I really appreciated the Abandoned AIBO subplot. (I was a little too invested in the quest to find discontinued parts. The Struggle Is Real, People.) It also felt like a sly reference to the brief trend of AIBO funerals.
posted by phooky at 2:46 PM on November 9, 2023