Episodic Thoughts: Kekkai Sensen – Episode 11

My thoughts on the eleventh episode of Kekkai Sensen.

I’m glad to finally get some more of Mary and William’s backstory and that whole section of the episode was quite well done however I still feel that we don’t quite know everything. I could very well be wrong in this simply because this show has been hard to peg down from episode one and I can’t quite tell what the creators wan’t to seem evident and what should be ambiguous however I’ll take a crack at it.

The episode ends with Black, possessed by whatever entity it was that entered him during the great collapse, shoots White in the heart. With that somberness hanging over things, it came as a bit of a jolt to hear the ED kick in as usual and while I could listen to that song endlessly, I do wish that the show had taken the route of either avoiding an ED entirely for this episode or substituting something to better fit the mood of things at the close. That aside, I feel that things aren’t quite as they are depicted in the episode – this is not to draw attention to the abstract style of progression in which Black appearances to White and then they are suddenly back at the church (this definitely felt like more a stylistic choice) but rather that I don’t believe we really have the full story here.

To firstly speak to whether or not White is alive or not, I don’t think there is sufficient evidence to conclude that she is either however she appears in the first episode somewhat oddly however this would indicate some form of presence beyond the current scene (if only symbolically or spiritually). Additionally, Black speaks directly to the barrier their parents erected in place of her heart when she was young and so to shoot her directly in the heart I feel becomes ambiguous as a method of killing her. I would like to think that she is alive however I cannot say for sure because of the ambiguity surrounding these things.

The other part of the backstory that I feel is the most noticeably missing is what transpires when the entity takes over William during the first great collapse. The show has made a point to show White with her gun each time and even went as far as showing where she got it this episode as well as her running to the scene of the event with it. While this could be written off as just some odd eccentricity of the scene, I feel that White does something off screen (at this point) that we do not yet know simply because of the odd manner in which everything is depicted.

Furthermore, we know next to nothing about the entity possessing William however he seems to drop some vague hints about his past while rambling on this episode. The most interesting of these being that their lives are both the products of lingering affection; in the case of White, her parents, and in the case of whatever is possessing William, we don’t know. In this exchange Black states that ‘you weren’t the only one who lost hope at that time’ which, along with everything else, makes me feel like the two characters have some history with each other beyond that of William and Marry – he refers to her as Marry and states that he loved her before pulling the trigger which further complicates the scene. Amongst all of this odd information, I have to conclude that there is a great deal we still have yet to uncover concerning the past of these characters and that we don’t yet possess the context to know what is happening or even if White is alive.

With all of that said, I look forward to the next episode in two weeks and I hope that the show has enough time to wrap things up as the majority of this episode was spent exploring backstory rather than progressing towards the end of the story as seen in episode 1. The dynamic of the two siblings was wonderful and I am quite happy with how the episode spent its time laying emotional groundwork for the characters, the setting, and White’s decision – I wouldn’t have changed a thing.