Directed by Shinichi Kamizawa. Written by Junki Takegami. Airdate Nov. 15, 1996.
“You’re a highly creative inventor with a contagiously cheerful personality.” This is how one of Horii’s friends describes him in this episode. That’s an accurate, precise portrait. It explains why Horii works so well when he gets the role of the main character in an episode of Ultraman Tiga. He’s fun to be around, even when dealing with dark events.
This is Horii’s second starring role (after “Second Contact”), and like his first big show, he’s dealing with tragic consequences that have fallen on someone close to him. It’s also Ultraman Tiga’s second attempt to do its own version of the classic Ultraman episode “My Home Is Earth.” It’s apparently a contractual obligation for every Ultra show to chase after that episode at least once.
Horii comes to the beachside Neo Resort to follow up on recent traces of kaiju activity. He’s eager to test his new invention, a tracking device he’s dubbed the “Monster Catcher.” At the resort, he runs into Ryosuke Sanada (Ryuma Sasaki), a member of the Space Development Center who was Horii’s close friend at university. Sayaka (Michiko Shimazaki), a woman who was part of a past love triangle with Horri and Ryosuke, also shows up at the resort. She’s looking for Ryosuke, convinced something is physically wrong with him.
Ryosuke is the tragic figure of the story: a man whose obsession with being number one at everything has caused him to spiral into despair and the feeling that he isn’t worthy of anyone’s love unless he’s the best. The madness for achievement has driven him to test Evolu (alien cells) on himself, turning him into the monster of the week, a mutant creature that must absorb electricity to live.
Yukio Masuda again drives the story with his performance as Horii. The episode is even better at defining the character than the previous “Second Contact.” Horii is upbeat, funny, and flawed. He embraces every bit of his personality. While trying to talk Ryosuke down from his monster madness, Sayaka hilariously lists off Horii’s defects — he’s fat, has short legs, tells bad jokes — while Horri is standing right there. But he’s fine hearing all this. These flaws are part of who he is, and it’s Ryosuke who is driving himself insane because he can’t deal with his own imperfections. Everybody loves Horii both in spite of and because of his flaws, and Masuda knows exactly how to play this.
In fact, Sayaka’s analysis of Horii might stand as a meta-examination of the episode: it’s flawed, but it still works. The big flaw is how disarmingly lightly the story is played, and how ineffective it is at elevating its tragic side. For an episode called “Requiem to the Darkness,” this is one of the visually brightest episodes of Tiga so far, with most of it taking place at a sunny, fun-looking beach resort.
It’s not just that the episode looks too cheerful. It’s that it never delves far into Ryosuke’s personal pain. We don’t have enough time with his personal demons to feel the perfectionist madness that made him turn himself into a monster, and the love triangle with Sayaka and Horri feels more cute than dramatic. You really just want to see Horii, Sayaka, and Ryosuke sit down at a poolside bar and settle everything over Mai Tais. It’s just too nice a day to have a personal monster crisis. Horri can tell some jokes and they’ll all chill out.
Good acting and characters will carry you far, and if “Requiem to the Darkness” doesn’t fully work as a tragedy in the mold of “My Home Is Earth,” it works as time spent with Horii and as a more thoughtful slant on a monster of the week outing. “My Home Is Earth” is a tough act to follow, and it’s expecting too much for Horii to rise to the level of Ide, his predecessor in the realm of “comic inventor who shows surprising emotional depths.” Enough of the drama of poor Ryosuke manages to get through to give the episode greater weight than just another tale of a scientist who went too far, and the drama carries over well to the final big monster fight with Tiga. The colorful resort makes for a nice location to have a kaiju battle, and Tiga shows the appropriate amount of sympathy toward the monster Evolu in the climax to make the whole endeavor feel worth your time.
Sayaka will return in a pivotal episode for Horii near the end of the show, “Goodbye the Darkness,” that’s both a direct sequel to this and to another key Horii episode, “The Fog Is Coming.” We’re building up real romantic tension for Horii.
Rating: Good
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