Flip Flappers

Episodes 9-10

I hadn't planned on having to skip last week's review, but thankfully, these revelatory episodes of Flip Flappers work pretty well as a twofer. We're finally getting all the concrete answers the show has been holding back from us since it began—but your mileage will definitely vary on how those answers make you feel.

At long last, we get the full picture of why Yayaka's been working for the obvious bad guys all this time. The effort to control Pure Illusion's powers has been going on for decades before Cocona was even born, and when the clandestine organizations in charge of this conspiracy detected an amorphous fragment inside of Cocona, they assigned Yayaka to be her "friend" and watch over her. As a child, Yayaka was one of many orphan guinea pigs subject to scientific experimentation for compatibility with Pure Illusion. Of all the children, she was the only one to survive the selection process, (literally!) but even though she can detect amorphous fragments and enter Pure Illusion, she can't track them directly, so the organization considers her only their most useful failure. Yayaka's growing friendship with Cocona may have been prompted by a need for purpose in her otherwise forfeit life, but it soon blossomed into a genuine connection that Yayaka always knew wouldn't last.

Therefore, episode 9's theme is jealousy, as Yayaka resents the natural connection between Cocona and Papika that has changed her childhood friend for the better. At the same time, Cocona is too busy processing her own feelings of jealousy toward Papika's growing obsession with someone named "Mimi" who even makes unwelcome appearances in Cocona's dreams. Their respective feelings of self-consciousness, bitterness, and yearning close them off into defensive shells on the last amorphous-bearing plane of Pure Illusion: an empty field of white.

Even their similar feelings of jealousy and isolation manifest in different ways, though. Cocona fears rejection and failure most, so her prison is a writhing, anxious wad of fur with a pristine Japanese tearoom inside that pushes Papika outside. This mental state forces her to look out from a place of artificial safety on a fuzzy world of uncertainty outside, where Papika's feelings for her cannot be understood or trusted. Yayaka's jealousy comes from a stronger base of self-awareness, so the prison she constructs at the peak of her emotional turmoil is reflective and possessive, trapping Cocona along with her and forcing her to confront their shared history, which Yayaka feels is slowly slipping away the more that Cocona changes without her.

These are strong and simple metaphors for relatable adolescent emotions, and I enjoyed episode 9 for its endeavor to foster a deeper emotional connection with these characters, even if it had to back off the wild creativity and surrealism that has defined the series to do it. In the end, Yayaka can't bring herself to fulfill her life's mission and carve the last amorphous fragment out of Cocona's leg, leading the organization's creepy amorphous-twin-clones to blast her away and abandon her, escaping to deliver the last roaming fragment into the hands of the enemy. The stakes have gotten dire, so it came as a surprise to me when this promising emotional buildup episode was followed with such a shrug-worthy parade of too-expected reveals in episode 10.

Yes, this week's installment of Flip Flappers became a briskly paced yet painfully rote exercise in scattered Evangelion visual references for some reason. After so many episodes of thoughtful surrealist imagery that sometimes conveyed too little for my liking, episode 10 takes a whiplash turn into clear-cut answers delivered in the most direct and uninteresting way possible. Inside of this twenty minutes, we get at least half of the whole enchilada behind Mimi's identity, Cocona finds out firsthand that the last amorphous fragment is inside her thigh (something the audience has known since episode one), Salt and Hidaka sabotage FLIP-FLAP to keep it from falling into the hands of the now-militant cult group, and ninety other small shenanigans and plot developments later, I realized that none of it had much emotional impact on me at all. In a shift that I had expected to come closer to the unexpected change in lead writer at episode 7, I felt like I was watching a different, far less memorable show all of a sudden.

Anyway, here's the short version of everything we learned. Several decades ago, Mimi was the original Pure Illusion chosen one, a remarkable girl who could open the alternate dimension at will. Just as with Yayaka's generation to come, the crazy scientist cult captured a host of orphaned children to test their compatibility with Mimi for entering and manipulating Pure Illusion. Papika, then called Papikana, was the only successful partner, the only child to easily make friends with the reclusive Mimi. Well, maybe not the only one. One of the researcher's children, a nervous boy named Salt, helped foster the relationship between the two girls in the hopes of getting closer to Mimi. So Dr. Salt and Mimi are Cocona's parents. The audience has already figured this out long before Cocona will, but it doesn't mean anything emotionally yet, so it just feels like the most obvious choice the writers could have made. That's disappointing. It's not that any of these developments are "bad," they're just not interesting in any way, and they seem largely divorced from the focus on Cocona and Papika's negotiation of childhood vs. adolescent feelings so far.

We don't get to hear what happened after Mimi and Papikana started traveling to Pure Illusion together because Cocona cuts Papika's story off, overwhelmed by heartbreak. The way Papika talks about her feelings for Mimi just makes Cocona feel even more like she's being used as a replacement for some other girl who had a much stronger connection to Papika than she could ever understand. The wound of Yayaka's betrayal is still fresh too, so Cocona decides to reject everyone around her and run home to hide from all these uncomfortable changes.

Unfortunately, home isn't safe anymore either. When Cocona arrives home, the cult's death-robots are waiting for her, and even Grandma is a death-robot, oh no! On the one hand, the story didn't spend any time actually developing Granny, so this isn't as upsetting as it could have been, but it definitely feels largely pointless and just a little tasteless for the same reasons. Revealing Cocona's entire home life as a conspiracy chained to all these big revelations doesn't add anything to the show thematically. If anything, it mostly diminishes the story's initial focus on Cocona's romantic awakening and adolescent fear of change. The shocking twist that Mimi was Cocona's mother and Dr. Salt her father is a pretty played-out Evangelion reference (on top of several dozen more this episode including a rival organization's assault on FLIP-FLAP's self-destructing base) that transforms her too quickly from an everygirl tangentially connected to the emotional conflicts represented by Pure Illusion to a plot device used to reveal more hyper-cliché backstory and fantasy worldbuilding.

I've seen anime storylines with handsomely bitter Dr. Salt, tragically dead Mimi, and their chosen-one-baby dozens of times before. The number of Evangelion-alikes that Flip Flappers is pulling from could overflow all of Dr. Hidaka's hard drives. It wasn't perfect, but I was enjoying Flip Flappers for what it was before these generally uninteresting reveals took over the show and detracted from its strengths. Cocona's character still got some worthwhile development in her confused reaction to all these reveals, which was the one part of the episode that spoke to me on any deeper level than "well I guess this is happening now."

At the same time, I'm worried that spark of emotional investment could get cemented over by more trite anime twists, when Cocona suddenly absorbs all the amorphous fragments into her body to blow away the death-bots and become possessed by the ghost of Mama Mimi. The most obvious direction this could go is the revelation that this is what Dr. Salt wanted all along, just trying to bring his dead wife back like any Gendo-type should, while Papika will have to reject her old friend Mimi in favor of her new love Cocona's freedom. I hope the finale is more creative and emotionally insightful than that, but Flip Flappers left me less optimistic this week than it did last time.

After so many ups and downs, things have somehow evened back out to yet another week of "we'll just have to wait and see where this goes." Flip Flappers is tripping dangerously close to "too little, too late" territory, and I wish more than ever that, just like its heroine, it could just commit to a direction already before it ends up saying not much of anything at all.

Rating: B

Flip Flappers is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jacob apologizes for missing last week. Bacterial infections are the worst. You can follow Jake here on Twitter.