Kado: The Trainwreck of an Answer

What I once thought of as one of the best shows this season ended with a less than stellar conclusion. Kado: The Right Answer started very strong but in the end, the only right answer was “What.”

Heavy spoilers for the end of the show ahead!

Part of the /r/anime discussion thread of the last episode.

Let’s start from the beginning. Episode 0 showcased Shindo’s exceptional negotiation skills with a metal factory. Throughout the entire series, Shindo’s beliefs are that negotiations should always end as a win for both sides of the discussion. When Kado appears it’s very clear that this is true. All the discussions over the tools zaShunina brought from the anisotropic were all handled with careful consideration over what impact it could cause to the world. After all this, you would think the series end would be a magnificently tense negotiation, right? Wrong. At the end of Episode 10, we learn Tsukai, one of Japan’s foreign relations experts, is actually another anisotropic being who was observing the universe and gave up most of her abilities so she can live among humanity.

The moment they revealed an anisotropic being living among the humans, they introduced a chance that the show will shift completely away from the focus of negotiating and settling things non-violently. This is exactly what happened when Shino asked if there is any way to get rid of zaShunina by force. At least we see the metal fabrication company from episode 0 again when Shindo needs a Fregonics (what they called the barrier between an anisotropic entity and the universe) generating armor to basically be able to go toe to toe with zaShunina.

Final Destination. Fox Only. No Items.

The final negotiation happened on what you can basically describe as a Super Smash Bros stadium. What bothered me most though was that there was no attempt at negotiating the situation. There was some usual banter you typically see before a fight in a generic shonen series and then zaShunina and Shindo start throwing their punches. The fight doesn’t last long considering zaShunina is the who delivered the tools Shindo was using to defend himself. Shindo is killed but that’s not the end of the show.

So how does it all end? Tsukai made an isolated space with a separate relative time so she and Shindo can have a child. A child born of both anisotropic and humanity, one that transcends all information. This is literally the most bullshit ending they can come up with. There’s nothing really smart or intelligent or thought provoking about “we made a baby that’s better than you.”

For a show about peaceful negotiations and the logistics behind dealing with a foreign entity and their technology, the ending was a big disappointment. They pulled an end-all solution out of their ass, well… out of Tsukai, removed zaShunina from this universe and everything that had happened since the appearance of Kado has seemed to have disappeared and everything went back to normal.

This is me watching the end of this show.

Overall, the show started impressively strong. It keeps you wondering about what is going to happen next and how Shindo and co are going to move past whatever roadblock is ahead of them. But when it gets to the end and the answer to their problem was to have a baby, the show immediately tanked. Everything I watched the show for was thrown out the window and basically became an afterthought. Had it not been for this ending, I would have recommended it to everyone. Now I would not recommend it, but if someone asks me about it I would tell them to approach it with caution and not expect an Anime of the Season type show.