Pluto 7

Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 8 volumes

There are still several huge questions floating in the air as of this volume, so it falls to the very last to have the final confrontation with Pluto and explain the last few big mysteries.  All this time, we have been faced with the mystery of Bora.  It hasn’t really meant anything, just something Wassily said, and the name of the survey group, but it didn’t really seem to have an affect on the plot, which appeared to be… more or less Abullah putting his robot against the world.  Later, we find out that the robot is his son, in a way.  Their father/son relationship is much different than, say, Tenma and Atom’s, but it is still there.  Tenma explains the problems with advanced AI and how you have to go against robot laws if you want advanced AI to succeed last volume, and we are treated to a flashback that shows us how things went down in Thracia years ago that led to the awakening of… a robot.  As I was reading it, I assumed it was Pluto, but it could be one of three possible candidates now.

That flashback was my favorite bit of storytelling in the volume.  It explained several things, opened up several more, and my absolute favorite part was how Tenma bailed out after he saw the robot.  Granted, the place was being bombed too, but still.  I thought it was funny.

Most of the volume was set in the present, and was about Epsilon and Wassily.  We see a lot of Epsilon interacting with his orphans, we see how he and Wassily met, and Wassily begins to come out of his shell and speak a little more.  In a flashback, it is revealed that Wassily was the last surviving person in a village that had been evacuated so that Epsilon could destroy it.  Wassily had apparently seen something that he shouldn’t have, and inexplicably, Abullah sees fit to destroy this child in an elaborate plot to get around Epsilon.  Epsilon and Pluto fight twice.  Neither one really wants to.

Incredibly, after having the whole series to get to know Epsilon, I felt that the scenes with him and his orphans just didn’t have the same emotional impact as some of the other sections of the story.  I’m still blown away by how sad that Mont Blanc section at the very beginning of the first volume is, and I don’t care how obvious it was, I also liked the North #2 story.  There are certainly a lot of things to humanize Epsilon in this volume, and the contrast between him and his orphans and the rather insensitive way the humans in the military treat him is notable, but… even the final scene, with just his hands protecting Wassily, just wasn’t as powerful as I thought it would be.  I’m guessing this has more to do with the fact that the result of that scene was going to inevitably lead to the final battle and was full of more anticipation than sadness.  It’s no real failing in the storytelling, I was just surprised it wasn’t a little more sad.

We also learn a little more about Pluto.  We see him speak, and we learn that he’s being controlled, possibly by a third party (there’s an elaborate metaphor involving Pinocchio that Uran walks us through).  Seeing his little smiling face while being ordered to do the most terrible things against his will is pretty horrible.  His face only really looks like its smiling in one scene, but it’s still pretty creepy.

So, we’ve got one more volume.  I like 20th Century Boys better, but Pluto is great in the sense that… well, for one, I can always tell where it’s going, and I know what the outcome of the last volume will be, of course.  It’s an old-fashioned story, in some ways, so I can see what’s ahead, and there is something to be said about the familiarity of a story like this.  But it is, if nothing else, an old-fashioned story told on a grand scale, so there’s still quite a bit left up in the air for the last volume to unveil.  That’s what I like most about Pluto.  20th Century Boys is a more ambitious story, but Pluto is very solid and still quite amazing.  I like both series far better than I liked Monster, and I’m still blown away by just how far Urasawa’s storytelling abilities have developed since Monster.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.