As usual, Production I.G is cranking out the awesome with Eden of the East. A brief rundown of the show… A Japanese girl (Saki) on her high school graduation trip meets a naked Japanese guy waving a phone and a gun around in front of the White House. He can’t remember who he is, but he has a fancy phone and an operator named Juiz on the other end of the line that will do whatever he asks (who tells him he’d asked to have his memory wiped and points him at his apartment). As so many amnesiacs do, he finds a cache of weapons and a multitude of passports in his apartment, where he picks one (Akira Takizawa) and goes back to Japan with Saki.
Meat of the show is discovering that Akira‘s one of a dozen or so people who’ve been given these phones, each tied to an account with 10 billion yen on them, and tasked with saving Japan in whatever way they see fit, only to meet their ends once they’re out of money or one of the others accomplishes the end goal of saving the country (however that may be interpreted). Saki, meanwhile, has been looking for work and had an interview scheduled after the trip, but had those plans thrown off while caught up with Akira, whom she quickly hits it off with. The pair have been fantastic to watch on their own but this episode finally gives us the goods on
After some wariness about Saki‘s tale, they agree to go pay him a visit. Turns out she’s been in a club with a similar goal of helping out the country, though they started with recycling. However, along the way, one of their members developed an image recognition system (called Eden of the East) for phones that identifies people and objects in view of the camera and overlays metadata related to them, bringing new value to pretty much everything. While there’s been some internal conflict within the group, the application has already started to become highly useful and they’re working on a business plan to bring it to market instead of having to join in to an existing corporation. Akira likes the idea of it and offers to fund the group. After some back and forth about goals, ideals, and personal values, and at the prompting of Saki, they agree to do it, and go celebrate with some fireworks.
Interspersed with this, we continue Akira‘s plot with another of the selected who showed up last episode and kidnapped one of Saki‘s fellow club members. Unfortunately, the circumstances don’t play to his favor and him not showing up the next day doesn’t really seem out of place. Luckily for him though, before she could do the terrible thing she does, she was called away to take care of something at the company that she runs, and leaves him tied up in her hotel suite. He crawls over to his phone and starts sending texts indicating that he’s trapped along with photos of his surroundings to an image board, which one of the other club members looking for him discovers, he passes it along to the club president and we hit the credits.
