Key: The Metal Idol, episodes 12–13, “Virus,” Parts 1 and 2. Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.
Available on Crunchyroll.
We have now arrived at the final of the thirteen episodes of Key: The Metal Idol, and we may in a sense call this the end of the series. Originally, this series was supposed to be twenty-six episodes, but as often happens with anime, the money and other resources fell through, so the series rushed to its conclusion. According to common opinion, the first of the movies is a massive infodump and the second is a bunch of incoherent weird stuff. We’ll see for ourselves when we get to them.
And the weird stuff, at least, may have been planned from the beginning: After all, this anime makes a brief Easter egg homage to Eraserhead:
These two episodes end as the first half of a series often will, with a minor victory for the protagonists and the promise of a new direction.
These episodes move us toward a showdown at Miho’s concert. Everyone who’s anyone is going to be there: Sergei, though still seriously injured, breaks out of his cell by kissing a dude (it’s complicated) and then injects himself with an overdose of gel to get the strength to head downtown. Akane has a free ticket to the concert. Tataki is headed there because he knows the secret of Key’s dark past. Wakagi is headed that way because Key probably is.
And then there’s Key herself. She’s still hanging with the weirdo genius Tsurugi. It’s not at all clear what Tsurugi wants: He taunts Key as a robot and tells her she can never be human, he says he’ll throw her out if she shows any emotion, but then he demands to see her looking sad and hopeless—an expression that apparently drew him to her in the first place. When she begs him, he agrees to take her to the concert, being able to get in because he’s the one who choreographed it.
He takes Key along, apparently, because he specifically wants her to disrupt the concert, though it’s unclear how he knew she could or would do that.
The concert itself is interesting, but also shows quite a few animation shortcuts. Miho’s pilot is in dire straits, and the man who’s controlling her anamatronic backup singers isn’t much better, so things quickly fall apart, and the concert is taken over by a never-before-mentioned understudy, apparently the assistance that Ajo has been searching for during the last few episodes. This is a hiccup in the writing: We should have had more allusions to this character than this.
At the concert, Key jumps on stage, and the robot idols instantly freeze. The crowd is understandably annoyed and boos her. She is able to absorb their anger much as she had earlier absorbed a crowd’s encouragement—and she uses that power to sing a single note that destroys all the robots in the near vicinity, Miho and other robot idols included. It also appears to have killed the robots’ pilots.
However, the military robots that Ajo Heavy Industries has been developing are still around, and Ajo and Sergei plan a new line of attack—getting to Key by going through Akane.
