The Eminence in Shadow

Episode 8

The dark humor of The Eminence in Shadow is on full display this week, and it makes for the funniest episode of the series so far. People are being rounded up and killed, but Cid is busy embracing his inner Batman, standing and brooding as he observes the situation from atop a high building (complete with jumping off said building at the end). Then we have the escort mission gag where Sherry tries to sneak through a building while letting out loud gasps and wearing squeaky slippers. Cid kills many people just to keep her safe, and yet she thinks she is actually quite stealthy/lucky. But perhaps my favorite joke is in the background of the episode's main action sequence, where Cid faces down Rex, the Game of Betrayal.

During the fight, Cid knocks Rex into a classroom filled with the posed corpses of all the cult members Cid has killed. This means that, on his way to get Sherry's supplies, he saw Rex coming, rushed around and collected all the bodies of his victims, and put them in the seats like students—just to have Rex experience a bone-chilling moment when Cid palm heel strikes him into the room. That's some dedication to a bit.

And really, that dedication is what this episode is all about. Throughout the series we've seen how committed Cid is to living every facet of his dream, but that reaches a new extreme in this episode. While in episode 4 we saw he was willing to be tortured for days, he wasn't in any real danger. At any moment, he could have broken free, healed his wounds, killed the guards, and bust through the wall to freedom. In fact, we've never seen anything even close to mortal danger approaching Cid up until this point. Yet, it's not some enemy that pushes Cid to his physical and magical limits, it's Cid himself.

In this episode, Cid not only takes a gushing wound across the chest but then literally stops his own heart to play dead—simply because it's a background character's job to die in place of a main character to show that “things just got real.” He then uses his magic to keep his remaining blood both moving and in his body—even though his magical control is severely limited. When it comes time to restart his heart, it takes him three tries to get it beating again. Cid himself admits that he was in mortal danger and could have easily died. Or to put it another way, Cid will literally gamble his own life for his game—and if he dies in the process, he will consider it having been worth it.

With this, we finally see the true extent of Cid's dedication: While we've known from the start he will kill for his dream, we now know for sure that he is willing to die for it. Emotions like “fear” and the need for self-preservation don't even factor into it. His act as The Eminence in Shadow is the most important thing in his life—despite the obvious contradiction that he can't continue to live his dream if he is dead. That is the core to Cid's insanity and the lens through which his every action should be considered.

Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• I love that Cid wants to wait for nightfall just so his outfit won't clash with the ambiance.

• As this week's Kage-jitsu! shows, the Cult members are super lucky Delta isn't in the city. She wouldn't have waited for nightfall nor would she have cared about any anti-magic field.

• The little scene of the lower-ranked Shadow Garden member whose magic power was so low she was having trouble keeping her slime suit working is a nice touch.

• It's interesting that Cid willingly goes from background character to sidekick in this episode. It seems like even Cid realizes that without someone in such a role, Sherry will die, and he won't have the chance to play The Eminence in Shadow in the finalé. After all, without a hero and a villain, there's no place in the story for an Eminence in Shadow.

• Welp, it looks like Iris is down to one subordinate she can fully trust.

• Nu's interaction with her ex-fiancé is dramatically different in the manga. She's only tempted to kill him after Cid's arrival (fearing Shadow's secret identity might have been discovered by their conversation). But by her almost killing him before Cid shows up, it makes it seem like she's out for revenge for being abandoned by yet another loved one when she got cursed.

• Nu's conversation with Cid about the artifact tuning is a joke in Japanese (and is basically impossible to translate directly into English). In, the conversation, Cid never uses a single personal pronoun—i.e., he never says “I,” “she,” or “we.” Of course, he means “she” or “we” when talking about the tuning process, but Nu doesn't know Sherry is involved so she assumes that he is doing it all himself—that's why she is so impressed. This is a classic case of comedic misunderstanding using a well-known peculiarity of the Japanese language.

• I like how Nu apparently snuck her way into the gym to act like she was just another captured student by the episode's end.

The Eminence in Shadow is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

Richard is an anime and video game journalist with over a decade of experience living and working in Japan. For more of his writings, check out his Twitter and blog.