FLCL: Grunge Episode 3 Review

FLCL: Grunge wraps Okura’s longest night with the story of a girl whose family life is being lost to poverty and sickness. As a skilled scavenger and assistant to Okura’s last swordsmith, Orinoko learns that the key to her future may involve leaving her old life behind.

Once upon a time, the city of Okura’s government granted generous funding to artisan workers who were upholding cultural traditions. As a result, Orinoko’s family received a robotic assistant who could hammer blades and sharpen knives, allowing her father’s swordsmithing business to prosper. However, when the planet’s iron ore resources dried up, so too did her family’s business and the government funding. This has left Orinoko’s family to live in poverty in the wilderness, and the resulting health issues have killed her mother and are slowly deteriorating her father. The only people left in Orinoko’s life are the robotic assistant who has started doing laundry instead of steel work, and her friends – Shonari and Shinpachi – who provide too many hand-outs.

Nowadays, Orinoko spends her time scavenging the town’s junk mountain for leftover steel that her father can craft into everyday kitchen appliances so they can still eat. However, even with the proper resources, her father lacks both a steady hand and a proper whetstone to sharpen blades on. It’s here that Orinoko encounters Haruko, who is also scavenging for the missing parts to her signature yellow Vespa. After finding the Vespa’s missing wheel and sharing her life story with the Space Brotherhood agent, Haruko offers to repay Orinoko by finding her father a proper whetstone. On top of that, Shonari provides Orinoko with a magnet that she could use to scavenge for iron much more effectively. Cue one dead yakuza boss and a stomach-less Dainari later, and Orinoko’s family has both enough iron ore and a proper whetstone to produce her father’s signature blade – a katana. But this stint of good luck doesn’t last long, as both her father’s final hours and the giant iron above her family’s home loom near.

The big highlight of this episode is the dynamic between Orinoko and the robotic assistant, who’s recently been displaying a heightened level of concern for her wellbeing. With her mother gone and her father practically catatonic, Orinoko is forced to fend for herself on a daily basis. Seeing the robot doing dishes or tending to her father’s health only adds to Orinoko’s frustration. However, moments before the Medical Mechanica plant activates, it’s revealed that Orinoko’s father actually transplanted her mother’s mind into the robotic assistant prior to her death. MontBlanc Pictures takes this opportunity to once again blend 2D and 3D visuals, and we get to witness her mother’s memories displayed as still art across the robot’s user interface. Honestly, Orinoko’s father probably should have clued her in on the whole digital-copy-of-mom thing… that could have alleviated some of the loneliness in Orinoko’s recent years. As a very remarkable production note, Orinoko’s mother is voiced by the late Samantha Weinstein, who posthumously makes her anime dub debut in FLCL: Grunge.

Episode 3 holds arguably one of the most special moments of any FLCL sequel, which is the revealed origin of Haruko’s signature midnight blue Rickenbacker. Haruko takes the katana forged by both Orinoko’s father and Dainari’s whetstone and stabs it right into Shinpachi’s forehead, fusing it with his innate N.O. energy to create a brand new weapon. It didn’t occur to me until this episode that this is the first time we’ve seen her bass guitar since the end of the original FLCL. But that’s impossible, as she had left that guitar with Naota after their climactic duel, right? Which means that FLCL: Grunge isn’t a sequel… but instead a prequel to the original.

The entire second-half of this episode is all FLCLimax, as we see events unfold past episodes 1 and 2 that nearly level the entire town. Everyone’s chasing after Haruko, who’s chasing after Medical Mechanica, which has begun its smoothing of Okura’s wrinkles. These final moments are filled with nods to the original show, including a zooming 3D-tracking shot during Haruko’s mouth-to-mouth with Shinpachi, and the camera angle of the fall that she takes while battling a Medical Mechanica goliath. How fitting to recreate the original’s 3D-tracking shot in a show that’s primarily CG! There’s tons of stylish action scenes, and the pacing keeps ascending until the very end.

How Grunge answers the question of “future” for each of its three protagonists is a little open-ended, and in certain circumstances, unclear. Orinoko is the only one who makes it off the planet, which makes sense as it was her father’s katana that Haruko used to summon the Rickenbacker, so it’s a fair trade. Her home is literally destroyed by the giant iron, and the tattered family life she clung to is now gone, so the only future for her is somewhere else. But you don’t get to see what that future entails. We last see Orinoko arriving at Earth’s atmosphere with the A.I. copy of her mother, and my best guess is that she’ll continue her father’s legacy as a swordsmith.

It’s a little tragic to see Shonari declare that Okura is where he belongs after all the suffering that Dainari endured to grant his younger brother a future. However, Shonari never really asked for that, and he now possesses an insatiable desire for fighting the Samueda gang in memory of his brother’s death. Shonari already had to flee the genocide of his previous home planet, and fleeing to yet another may yield the same societal struggles that he’s faced here. It’s very likely that Shonari will go down a path of revenge, but he could also become Okura’s samurai of justice. A town that ragged could use a strong but kind-hearted hero. Gotta admit, that final scene of Shonari pummeling Samueda goons in slow-motion is pretty badass.

Which leaves the sushi prodigy Shinpachi, who doesn’t get any clear answers to what he wants or where his future will take him. Upon seeing off Orinoko at the shuttle departure gates, she asks Shinpachi what he’ll do, to which he replies, “my future is here”. But we don’t get any context as to why Shinpachi feels this way, especially considering how much he despises Okura’s garbage and flies. Our last scene of Shinpachi shows him sharpening the crude chef’s knife that he commissioned from Orinoko’s father, so it’s clear that he’ll continue working at his father’s shop. But that means he’ll have to continue abiding by his father’s style and making more deliveries to the yakuza. None of Grunge‘s protagonists truly know what they want either at the beginning or end of the story, and that’s okay – these are high schoolers, after all. But Shinpachi seems to get the short end of the straw out of everyone. Having a fourth episode could have provided all three kids a bit more closure.

One could also argue that the absence of a full-blown solution to all three kids’ problems also fits within the theme of “future”. You never really know what it holds, and life’s problems aren’t solved all at once. Even Naota’s life carries on after the end of FLCL, where he continues to live in Mabase with his burn-out dad and his three classmates. The only thing that really changed was how Naota saw himself, and all three Grunge protagonists undergo the same change. None of this detracts from Grunge’s ability to conclude the main plot – the Kita Gyushu Unification War comes to an end, all the corrupt figureheads within Okura are gone, and Haruko chases after Atomsk towards Earth.

FLCL is full of sex, violence, adolescence, humor, aesthetics and more… but what truly makes a story in this series succeed is how well it ties all those elements together. And I’m pleased to announce that Grunge sticks the landing with a story told from three different perspectives that align in the end, albeit a bit rushed. Grunge has very quickly become my favorite of the FLCL sequels while also standing on its own as an entertaining story with a lot on its mind.

EPISODE 3 SCORE: 8.5/10

OVERALL SHOW SCORE: 9/10