Welcome all, to another episode of Migi & Dali! This week we go full horror, completely abandoning any semblance of comedy to show just up screwed up this family is. And you know what? It’s pretty damn great. So without further ado, lets dive into it!
As I said, this episode dives head-first into horror, starting with Metry and Reiko’s backstory. It starts innocently enough, Metry worked for and idolized Reiko like a big sister, doing everything she could to make her proud. It was actually really sweet! However bit by bit everything started to go… wrong. Reiko is told she’s barren, unable to have children, so she convinces Metry to sleep with her husband in her place. To bear his children for her. Eventually the husband realizes what’s going and confesses he likes Metry more, to which it almost seems like Metry is doing it all on purpose to steal Reiko’s “perfect life”. Of course this is all from Reiko’s perspective, we can’t know how true all of this is, the woman is crazy. Classic unreliable narrator stuff. But we know one thing for certain: Metry did eventually get pregnant. But with triplets, not twins.
Here is where things start to go from creepy to horrifying. With the children born Rieko finally has her wish, children of her own. But of course no one would believe a blonde child was hers, so what is she to do but take the only black haired child of the lot, trapping Metry and the other two in the secret room we’ve seen before? That’s right, Reiko used Metry as a breeding sow and then stole her son and locked her away, all the while acting like she was doing the “right” thing. And of course when Metry and the twins eventually escape, as we know they do, Metry can’t help but go back for her final son. The black haired child she never truly got to know: Eiji.
This is wild twist number two of the episode. Of course it’s less of a twist if you’ve been paying attention to Migi & Dali, more of a dawning realization as the episode progressed. Metry didn’t come back to harm Eiji, or steal him away from his mother. She came to rescue him, only for him to shove his own mother out of the window, killing her. This comes full circle beautifully when Eiji shoves Reiko, his other mother, off the banister only to be rejected by his apparent brothers. It’s incredibly tragic what’s happening here. Eiji finally has the truth, is finally able to see how crazy his “mother” is and has found his true family, only to be rejected for killing his own mother without his knowledge. I didn’t think Migi & Dali could get any more fucked up, yet here we are, and the train isn’t slowing down.
Reiko, completely unphased after being pushed off the second floor (she’s partially phased but we all know a concussion isn’t going to slow her down much), decides… Fuck it. She’s done with this house, this family, and everyone in it. It’s time to take Eiji and go somewhere new, start a fresh. So she just locks everyone in the secret room after faking being stabbed and simply… leaves. Kind of wild, I expected her to do something more, but hey maybe everyone gets out of this alive! Would else could go wrong? Surely everyone else is in a sound enough mental state to wait for the cops an- Oh right Eiji’s world is collapsing around him so he decides to stab his mother and burn the house down. There’s that escalation I was expecting.
Eiji also decides he’s done with everything. But unlike Reiko, he isn’t content to move away and start again. Instead he wants to end it all. I don’t think he knows everyone is trapped in the basement? This seems more for him and Reiko specifically, that’s why he stabbed her for lighting the house on fire. But that doesn’t change the fact that everyone is trapped in the secret room, unable to escape, in a now burning building. And you know the wild part? I wouldn’t put it past Migi & Dali to kill everyone here and end the series on a tragedy. For the first time, as we near the end, I’m not actually sure our leads are safe. Before the show couldn’t continue if they died, so they had plot armor. But this is the finale. The manga is over, there is no season 2 coming. So… Do they live? Or is this like Sakamoto desu ga?, the authors other work, that ends with the lead “disappearing”? I don’t know. And I love it.
Mortal peril aside, surprisingly enough it seems like the father is innocent in all of this. Well, sort of at least. He knowingly cheated on his wife and, whether Metry purposefully seduced him or not, tried to leave her for their maid. He also is clearly negligent, or at least uncaring enough, to not notice how crazy his wife was with the miniature town and how she treated their children. What did he think of that week Migi spent in their household as their “kid”, did he see nothing wrong with that? Yet still he seems like an actually decent father who cares for his kids and has proportional, appropriate responses to their antics, like calling the Sonoyamas when he saw “Hitori” in his house as night. Hopefully next week we will learn just how much he knows, because he didn’t seem surprised for there to be two Hitoris. But overall he seems a decent person. I hope.
So yeah, all in all this was a great episode of Migi & Dali. It keeps finding ways to escalate the conflict that fit within the narrative the show has created. An action packed fight between the twins and Reiko? Wouldn’t make any sense, this isn’t a Shounen, it would never work in the show. Eiji being their brother and having a mental breakdown as he is rejected by his brothers and realizes he killed his mother, causing him to kill his other mother and burn down the house? Fits perfectly into this cascade of tragedy, this whole family is insane. There are some holes in it sure, like the Father and Karen as well as no one in the town having any suspicions whatsoever. But that’s kind of the point of this style of suburban horror. You don’t know what your neighbors are like in private. And sometimes? They’re insane.
The post Migi & Dali – 11 appeared first on Star Crossed Anime.
