Mob Psycho 100 S2E9: Show Me What You've Got ~Band Together~

This review was commissioned by @Bernkastel .


Every once in a while when watching Mob Psycho 100, I have to stop and marvel again at just how fucking weird this show is. I feel like I always forget a little while afterward, until it happens again and I'm reminded.

So, like, season 2 has handled some fairly heavy, thought-provoking material. The way trauma changes people. The way that genuine experiences - even unpleasant ones - are commodified and traded vicariously in a society of information-consumers. The nature of difference and the question of what being "normal" really means. I haven't always loved this season's offerings, but its episodes have virtually always had more weight and substance to them than its predecessor's.

So, after all that, we're going to wind down and have a nice, lighthearted, relaxing romp about a supervillain trying to conquer the world and our heroes needing to gang up and stop him.

No, really. That's an accurate description of this story arc.

With few exceptions, Mob Psycho 100 has this thing where the bigger and more dramatic the in-story events are, the lower the emotional stakes actually end up being. With a consistency (the one solitary exception being the Mogami arc) that feels like it has to be deliberate.

...

At the end of S2E8 "Even Then ~Continue Forward~," an elite Claw member burned Mob's house down with his brother and parents inside of it, leaving Mob to come home to his family's charred corpses. At the time, I said that the following episode was either going to be a transformational one that changes the nature and direction of the entire series, or a gigantic letdown that establishes once and for all that the Claw is a waste of the audience's time and makes me wish they'd get out of the way so we can get back to the important stuff.

Turns out, it's the second one. Like, 100% exactly what I was afraid of it being.

However, the way that it plays out sort of makes it seem like the story knows that that's the case, expects the audience to understand that this is a low-stakes superhero sidestory and not desire any more from it, and intends it to basically be a fun little breather before it gets back to what the show is really about.

And like...on one hand, this isn't what I want out of Mob Psycho, and I don't think it's what most of this show's audience are here for. But, on the other hand, the fact that the show is telegraphing it so openly inclines me to go much easier on it. Like, sure, it's not what I was wanting or expecting, but if Mob Psycho 100 wants to take a break for an episode or two and just have stupid shonen action scenes where nobody actually gets hurt and we plough through a series of grotesquely drawn villains who take turns going "n-n-nani???" before being defeated, I suppose it's earned that right.

So, let's go bang some action figures together.


Dimple can tell that these bodies are constructs, seemingly transmuted from ambient materials and left to be consumed in the blaze, Mustang ploy style. While his assurances keep Mob from being totally consumed by grief and rage, the fact that he still doesn't know where his parents and brother are gets him filled entirely with determination to go find them and ensure their safety. So, for the time being, he's perched at 100%. Not ??? - that probably would have happened if he was allowed to really believe his family was dead - but 100.

Knowing that creating fake bodies would require some impressive psionic power, Mob scans the city for high-powered auras and goes toward the largest concentration. Predictably, he encounters some elite Claw members sent from other cells to clean up after Division 7's failure. And, predictably, they're totally convinced they can handle him, brag about their weirdly specific powers, and then get effortlessly crushed by him.

It turns out that these guys actually didn't burn the house down, though. They had been on their way to do that, but found the house already burning and the family within already corpses when they arrived, and now they're just bemusedly trying to figure out what to tell Claw Prime about what happened. Presumably, the creepy Claw Wunderkind boy who we saw knocking on the door before Mob came home last episode did whatever he did to his house and family without informing his coworkers.

The most interesting thing about this sequence is Mob's behavior in it. I was about to say that he's acting more like his brother Ritsu, but then realized I was only thinking of Ritsu because of the visuals. Their family resemblance is much more pronounced in the rare cases when Mob is actually emoting.

And, that in turn led to me figuring out what I'm now pretty sure the importance of the emotional power percentage thing actually is. Why the series' title has "100" in it.

...

Mob reaching 100% emotional power doesn't result in a loss of control, either of his powers or of himself. At least, not exactly. Rather, it means a loss of self-awareness.

Most of the time, Mob lives in a state of paralytic repression and self-analysis. Saying or doing anything can only happen after feverish mental conversations about what would be right to do, or what he's allowed to do, or what should theoretically make sense for a person to do. He interrogates everything he feels and thinks, and interrogates his interrogations.

His 100% state is when he's fully focused on what's around him rather than what's within him, and acting in pursuit of his goals without any psychodrama. When his emotional needs have broken through his repression.

And, in scenes like this one, when he's in that unbound state, Mob turns out to be...basically normal.

That might seem like a weird thing to say, given that he's Superman-flying around the city beating information out of bad guys in this scene. My point is that in these circumstances, with these powers available to them, a normal, basically well-adjusted person would probably do what Mob is doing. I thought of Ritsu, but that's because Ritsu looks like Mob while acting like a more typical person-with-power.

I guess it's kind of the ultimate illustration of Arataka's point, about Mob's powers not making him special. When the chips are down and he can't be self-conscious, Mob behaves the same way anyone else does in dire situations.

Part of Mob's identity crisis concerning who and what he is when he lets himself free is obviously down to accidents involving his powers when he was a kid. I think the bigger part of it is because he thinks his autism is a bigger deal than it actually is. That it changes his fundamental essence further from the human norm than it truly does. In truth, the more desperate the situation is, the less freedom people have, and thus the more they tend to act alike.

For what this episode is, I do appreciate that it also manages some character study of Mob around the edges. This definitely advances my understanding of the character and what the story has been trying to say about him. That said, only a small percentage of the episode's runtime has anything to do with exploring this, heh.

...

Anyway, after finding that these Scars don't know anything, Mob is surprised to be approached by some other Scars. Familiar ones, this time. After the dissolution of Division Seven, its former membership swore off the Claw and have been trying to figure out their own, less violent, paths through life. Several of them have been harassed by powerful Claw agents over the last few hours, so now they're racing around the city trying to collect everyone who they think might also be targeted so they can raise a unified defence.

That weirdo psychic-obsessed billionaire, his collection of weakly psychic kiddies, and Arataka are already hunkered down in a bunker owned by the former. Just in the nick of time in Arataka's case, as his office has already been attacked.

It turns out that his recent mixed-bag celebrity status made him easy for Claw Prime to identify as the guy who fucked up his Japanese operation. And, from him, tracking down the addresses of Mob, Teru, and other involved individuals was simple. Hence why this is happening now and not before.

Well...sort of. That is put forward as an explanation. But the other reason this is happening now is because Claw Prime has decided it's time to go ahead and conquer the world already, and getting revenge on old enemies and traitorous former lackeys is something that he apparently thinks he ought to do while he's at it.

Which, uh, okay I guess.

Teru lets himself get brought in by the former Division Seven Scars shortly after Mob's own arrival. It turns out that he'd already been targeted by a Claw agent, but came out on top. Meanwhile, it turns out that Creepy Claw Wunderkind boy underwent his own character development offscreen since he teleported away at the end of season one. He's not ready to actively fight against the organization that raised him just yet, but he did act to protect Mob's family from them. In a really stupid and wasteful way, but to be fair this kid doesn't really have a concept of normal lol. He teleported to the house before his erstwhile comrades could get there, evacuated everyone present, and then burned the house with replicas of them in it.

He's with Ritsu right now. The idiot parents, meanwhile, have been convinced that they won an all expenses paid trip to somewhere fancy and went ahead and took it without thinking to bring either of their sons with them lol.

With a bit of arm-twisting, Ritsu manages to get the kid to admit to the other reason why he went about this the way he did. And why he didn't go inform Mob about this, despite Ritsu being able to tell him where his brother was. Wonderboy is hoping that Mob will get home, see the carnage, enter his ??? state, and do something that convinces Claw Prime to call off this stupid world domination attempt before it gets any more embarrassing.

Turns out that Wonderboy is, like, Claw Prime's adopted son, sort of. And that part of his recent behavior is down to teenaged rebellion, as he deems his dad's supervillain plot to be cringe.

Heh.

Ritsu just shakes his head, expresses some pity for his brother, and tells Wonderboy that he'd better hope for his own sake that Mob doesn't fall for it.

As world domination schemes go, this one is genuinely cringe though. In fact, calling it a "scheme" at all might be dignifying it too much, because no two members of the Claw's leadership seem to be on the same page about what they're actually doing. They psionically hijack the world's airwaves to announce to all of humanity that the planet is theirs now, but they don't seem to be moving to make it so. Nor do they seem to have been spending the last few years using their powers to subvert governments and take over big corporations like you'd expect someone trying to conquer the world to do. Claw Prime says that he's going to completely destroy the nation of Japan as a show of force, but his troops only seem to be going through plans for fighting soldiers on open battlefields (where would these battles even be taking place?), and one of his top Scars abducts the Prime Minister of Japan to use as a hostage (a hostage for...what? the destruction of the country? lmao).

There's also a coup attempt within the Claw's upper echelons within an hour of the televised announcement. It fails, but like, it causes enough chaos and disorder within the already chaotic, disorderly group to seriously impede things.

I guess it wasn't just Division Seven that were a bunch of unserious manchildren with nothing going for them but so-so psionic powers. The entire Claw is like that, up to and including the big boss.

Anyway, there's a bunch of fights. Teru tries to rescue the Japanese PM from the Scar who came to abduct him, but gets overpowered. Eh, Teru will be fine, the Claw can't actually hurt anyone. Nothing else that happens in this episode is really worth talking about, it's just dramatic low-stakes fights where people explain their cool powers and then get beaten up or whatever.

...okay, there's actually one bit that really annoyed me. It's brief, but for a few minutes early-ish in the episode there's a dialogue between Dimple and Arataka that makes it seem like Dimple might have been lying to Mob about those bodies being fake.

Dimple wasn't lying. He just wasn't quite as 100% sure as he made himself seem. However, this scene seemed like it was trying to actually make me worried about Mob's family, and like...show? Really, show? Don't insult my fucking intelligence. You've told me so clearly, so repeatedly, that the Claw is harmless and nothing they do will ever actually matter, that trying to cast doubt about it at this point just makes you seem delusional. We agreed that this arc is a fun cheesy break in the actual story of Mob Psycho 100, don't try to fucking cast doubt on that when you know there's no room for it.

This only goes on for a couple of minutes, like I said, so it didn't ruin the episode for me. But it did annoy me while it lasted.

Anyway, episode ends with Mob collapsing in a pile of physical and emotional exhaustion in the hideout, Teru getting captured (I think?) by one of the Claw guys, and Ritsu and Wonderboy still watching and waiting to see if Mob acts against the Claw and/or finds them.


6/10 it's okay.