Parasyte is an excellent anime and if you’re not watching it right now, you really ought to rethink what you’re doing with your life. As a matter of fact, if Yuri Kuma Arashi wasn’t also airing this season, I’d be ready to declare my favorite anime of 2015. Parasyte’s just that good.
However, that doesn’t mean Parasyte is perfect. First off, it gets far too haremy at times, especially when it comes to how it treats its female characters. Kana showed potential when she first entered the scene, but she was eventually reduced to a girl who existed for no other reason than to love Shinichi. Second, Parasyte can be way too heavy-handed. For instance, Murano has to remind us every five minutes that Shinichi’s changed. Similarly, I still have a bad taste in my mouth from that scene where Tamiyo calmed the baby and the caretaker reacted like she had cut the baby’s limbs off.
It’s perhaps because of this flaw that Parasyte is at its best when it’s trying to be subtle. When I think about it, all that professor was doing was talking about speculative evolution. Unless you had some traumatic experience at university, that shouldn’t scare you. But Parasyte has been diligently crafting a theme about altruism and the purpose of life over the course of its run. Within the context of the show, hearing someone casually mention that altruism has no metaphysical purpose is downright disturbing. And if you didn’t feel chills go down your spine when the professor started talking about infanticide, then you’re probably a parasite yourself.
Ironically, one of this episode’s more subtle moments involved something that is usually a recipe for a heavy-handed disaster: villains laughing maniacally for little to no reason. Of course, Parasyte’s playing off the contrast between Tamiyo’s usual deadpan behavior and the inherent irrationality of maniacal laughing. You could argue that her noting she forgot the facial expression for laughter was the show slapping us in the face and saying “Hey! Do you remember how emotionless parasites are supposed to be?” But even so, this is a relatively subdued way of doing it. Tamiyo could have had an internal monologue about how she’s supposed to be a deadpan alien. She didn’t, and I’m grateful for that.
Naturally, subtlety in a vacuum is meaningless, and Tamiyo’s maniacal laughter tied into this episode brilliantly. It’s not just the fact that Shinichi mirrored her laugh at the end of the episode, but how it developed this episode’s theme of parasites taking more interest in human behavior. I doubt Tamiyo was at that lecture hall because he thought the professor might have something insightful to say about parasites. And while Migi’s appeal to the private investigator’s pity could easily be written off as a survival strategy, in previous episodes he wouldn’t have even thought to appeal to such a distinctly human emotion. Hell, Migi was even willing to follow Shinichi’s no-killing policy this episode.
Best of all, there was a distinct lack of Murano, which is always a good thing.
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