#quick reaction

One of Beatbreak’s secret weapons has been featuring a lot of adults as supporting characters. We got plenty out of the likes of Kyo and Klay even before learning about their pasts, but even the presence of Maki, Yosshi, and Kawarazaki fill out the world and make it feel like something more than children having an adventure while the hapless grownups twiddle their thumbs. The infrastructure may be a dumpster fire, but these characters are our best links to it. Every so often we do get the full stories, and it’s nice to delve into a character’s history and get something that isn’t about a five year old. However old Maki is in this flashback (we’re not asking the lady her age), she’s put a life together, already had a history with Digimon, and when Panjyamon shows up on her doorstop the reaction is something beyond “ooh, cool/cute/smokeshow monster, what adventures await us?” There’s instant melancholy, a feeling of inevitable heartbreak that she still allows to manifest and fall victim to. It also helps the episode build out the world in a way that’s been frustratingly lacking so far this arc.

The worldbuilding is important considering how little Glowing Dawn actually does here. They’re present, but it’s a pretty conventional bounty for all of them. The value comes in seeing how chaotic human-Digimon relations were before the Cleaner system, and how that introduced its own host of problems. We also see Maki’s early interactions with Kawarazaki, how she came by her life goals, and how that led her to Kyo. We’ll see how necessary it was that these blanks were filled in, but for now it’s nice that they are, and through a story with some emotional weight. It also ties directly to these Gift people, whom Beatbreak kinda forgot about for a few episodes despite them literally providing the name of the arc. We get better insight into how they operate, who they target, and the vast number of agents they have mindlessly offering their surveillance and battle support. The sheer number of agents they have and their lack of, well, agency, paint the organization in a different light than what we saw from Riku and Jokermon’s deranged-yet-sentient owner.

Having that many agents and presumably plenty of Digimon at their disposal does make for a clumsy ending, however. Yes, Fumamon’s taken care of, but that alone shouldn’t make Gift give up on eliminating Maki. They still know where she works! The only indication that Gift dropped the pursuit is in Miharu’s observation of Tomoro. Her interest in him as a Gift ally was telegraphed in the Jokermon affair and was a pretty obvious direction for the arc to go. It’s necessary for the overall story and his act of stopping Maki from killing the defeated Fumamon make it appropriate for this episode. It and Maki’s talk about her dreams tie in nicely with Tomoro reminding us of his in the previous episode. But for all the mechanical sense it makes, it’s a weird resolution for a mob to be threatening someone’s life and then just… quietly stop over vague aspirations about somebody else.

Underwhelming and slow as this arc as been, it’s become hard to trust Beatbreak to steer us in the right direction. We should be happy that it’s making moves now, but all of them require us to put more faith in the show than we have right now. Miharu’s making her move on Tomoro… is he actually weighing in the serious threat to his friends’ lives that she’s responsible for? Reina’s finally getting some attention… but will her moping about the lack of evolution devalue the moment of her inevitable triumph? Rose and her minions are still here… are they going to do anything interesting or just be glamorous foils? We can be happy to see some progress, but the lack of momentum thus far means there’s a lot of catching up to do for any of these subplots to play out in a satisfying way.

In spite of all the evidence, we should try to trust Tomoro here. From our perspective, the pitch is absolutely silly. Miharu had no idea how much Tomoro knew about GIFT or even if he’d register the “masked streamer” as its leader before revealing herself. And the attack on Maki wasn’t exactly subtle about who was perpetrating it and why. You’d think that would factor into his decision making. Miharu herself only drew Tomoro’s attention a couple times by caring a lot about Digimon, having an older sister, and forgetting that the whole moé thing in anime played itself out a while ago. And yet, you still have to consider it from Tomoro’s perspective. As baffled as he is by Miharu, there’s clearly a part of him looking at her thinking “finally somebody gets it.” Even when she releases her full manifesto, that must not be enough to scare him away. After all, he sees how crappy the system is and only agreed to participate for survival and Glowing Dawn’s specific ethics. Add him specifying that he’s following his beat and it’s just enough to reluctantly buy into the choice to protect her, even if it’s really hard to imagine GIFT turning out to be the good guys all along.

Meanwhile, they seem to have finally realized that watching Reina claw her way out of uncomfortable situations does not equate to a character arc. It’s wild that we’ve gotten this far and despite getting plenty of looks at who Reina is, we’ve seen so little examination into why or watched her progress in any way. In an almost meta way, that lack of progress is getting to her. She’s not doing anything wrong with her job; charging in and disarming a dude holding a hostage at knifepoint was downright badass. But here we are in the second half of the show and she’s looking up at literally everybody around her fighting with Ultimate-level Digimon while she’s working with the same gunnery she brought in the first scene of episode one. At this point, we’ll take whatever Reina angst they’re willing to throw at us, but given her effectiveness without her Digimon you’d have hoped for something better than the usual “woe is me my Digimon won’t evolve” grief that plagued the likes of Junpei and Yoshino. It’s obviously building up to an eventual evolution, but given the way Chiropmon stumbles into a new evolution every time Makoto steps into a Shangri-La Egg, this buildup has to lead to something bigger. Between the backstory that’s only been hinted at, her relationship with femininity, and whatever Rose has up her sleeve, there’s plenty to play with, if only they’d stop and actually do so.