Anime Retro

Well anyhow, since no-one else is watching it (apart from, one presumes, the 794 people who have downloaded the entire series), I thought I’d enter Spoiler City and discuss the final episode of Nurse Angel Ririka a little more.

One of the notable things about the series is that the heroine is a normal happy well-adjusted girl, unlike many anime heroines, who all too often seem to come from dysfunctional families or have some kind of inbuilt weirdness. She never expected to be the saviour of the world, and she certainly didn’t expect to be dying anytime soon for some super-heroic cause. So when she’s told that the Flower of Life (which is needed to make the Green Vaccine to cure the world) can’t be found because the original Nurse Angel had absorbed it into herself, and that therefore she, Ririka, is the Flower of Life, you can understand her trepidation. To my mind this scene, and indeed the whole episode, is masterfully done.

As Kanon is explaining the back story to the missing flower, you can see Ririka’s eyes quivering in that time-honoured anime way. And when he concludes “…the flower of life IS YOU”, her hand starts to shake. She grabs it with her other hand, but that is shaking too. Cut to general shot: Ririka is quaking like a leaf as she querulously asks Kanon, “But if that’s so… how do you get the Flower of Life out?”

He answers “I’m sure that you must know”, and Ririka exclaims, “I don’t, I don’t know!” only to see a vision of the ritual she must perform.

Afterwards, Ririka goes through a succession of states: denial (“it’s a lie!”), despair (“senpai, help me!”), grief (“I don’t want to die”), resignation (“senpai, please wait until after my birthday party”), and finally arriving at an inner peace (“I’m so glad I was born”). This process of Ririka progressing from outright denial to stalwart acceptance takes up the middle half of the episode.

So, unusually for a “save the world from the forces of evil” type of story, there is no final battle with some nasty enemy. (Indeed the head baddie was killed in episode 26, nine episodes ago! Unfortunately this only made things worse!)

Rather, almost the whole of the final episode is taken up with Ririka learning her destiny, and then struggling to come to terms with the fact that she is the only one who can save the world, and that regardless of what she chooses to do, she herself will not be there to see it: she can either die saving the world, or die with it. So actually there is no real choice to make, it’s just a matter of finding the courage to do what must be done. In a way, this puts the series closer to Evangelion than Sailor Moon, since once she has overcome her inner terror, the end itself follows easily.

Finally, the little aside I made above leads us to an interesting question: during the course of the series, we assume first that the enemy, Dark Joker, is a person, but then when it seems there is no such character we conclude that Dark Joker is the name of the enemy organisation which uses the Black Vaccine as its weapon. But finally (not really finally—3/4 of the way through the series) the last enemy (Bros or Buros, the big boss) is killed. And yet this resolves nothing! Dark Joker persists. So who or what is Dark Joker? I will discuss this next time (please imagine ominous music at this point.).

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 5:29 and is filed under Ririka, anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.