Mob Psycho S2E6-7: "Poor, Lonely Whitey" and "Cornered ~True Identity~"

This review was commissioned by @Bernkastel


This is a two-parter that I have some really mixed feelings about.

For 90% of the runtime, this story does everything right. Not only is the execution damned near perfect - a real masterwork of pacing and foreshadowing - but the thing it's executing is also something I've been eager to see since the pilot, and the payoff for all that buildup is top notch.

Until the last couple of scenes, where I was just confused. Confused both about what literally happened in the story, and what the intended takeaway of the entire thing is supposed to be in light of that conclusion. I feel like I must have missed something important, because as it is this just leaves me scratching my head at the plot, the themes, and the characters.

Well. Let's get into it.


"Poor, Lonely Whitey" starts like any number of previous MP100 episodes. Mob is having fun at a social event with his growing circle of schoolfriends and gym buddies, when he gets an urgent call from Arataka telling him he needs to come in to work right now. It's another angry ghost with a derpy cartoony gimmick like the ones that populated the first half of season one.

True to form, Arataka manages to razzle dazzle the clients and then make it seem like he was finally finishing the exorcism process himself when Mob shows up and does the actual work in two seconds.

This time though, Mob surprises and disconcerts Arataka by actually arguing with him for half a minute before Arataka manages to browbeat him into dropping everything for his barely-paying job.

He surprises and disconcerts Arataka even more when, after the job, he tells him that he's not going to be accepting any more surprise work calls outside of regular hours. As Arataka's entire business model depends on handling the phony spirits with his phony exorcisms and being able to call on Mob at the last minute whenever a haunting turns out to be real, Mob's terms would basically mean the end of it.

Reigen Arataka has shown a lot of sides to himself throughout the series. It's hard to say how many of them are really him and how many are cynical masks, but whatever the ratio is he's a character with a lot of nuances. Him ending up becoming a surprisingly good influence and supportive figure for Mob, even pulling him back from the brink of self-destruction on some occasions, has been one of the more surprising and interesting threads running across the show. He's shown what I think is genuine, non-cynical care for Mob on occasion.

But, at the root of it, Arataka is ultimately a criminal, and his relationship with Mob is ultimately one of exploitation and abuse. Everything else, even the more positive stuff, is built on that base. The exploitation is, after all, the reason why Arataka has Mob around in the first place. So, when that gets threatened, Arataka does exactly what you should expect someone like him to do in a situation like this. He starts furiously reminding Mob of how lonely he really is, how nobody at school or at home can ever really understand him, how his so-called "friends" are just stringing him along and don't actually like him, how he shouldn't trick himself into thinking he can have a life of his own, etc. Targeting every teenaged insecurity and every personal weak point that Mob has ever guilelessly confided in him.

There was a moment, back in season one, when Mob made a judgement about former enemy Teru's pre-retcon character vis a vis Dimple's. That some people will take advantage of you in a way that at least lets you think you're happy with it, and some people deliberately inflict suffering in the process of taking advantage. The former being a far less despicable act than the latter.

Arataka is happy to do the former as long as it's convenient for him. When the chips are down, though? He does not give a shit. This is who he is when it matters. Not that "conman who at least lets you keep the wilful self-delusion of contentment" was that high of a bar to begin with.

Fortunately, Mob has had enough social experience and done enough growing up at this point - some of it, ironically, guided by Arataka himself - to genuinely put his foot down. He knows his gym buddies. He knows the psychic kids he rescued from the Claw. He knows Teru version 2.0 who isn't and never was young Dio Brando with telekinesis. He knows his brother. He just got through to that mean rich girl and gave her a transformative heart-to-heart in the literal previous episode.

Arataka's words in this conversation just don't carry as much weight as all of those experiences combined.

Mob doesn't outright accuse him of intentionally lying or manipulating him. His ambiguity of his phrasing, "not everything you say is true," is probably deliberate. But he does tell him no. And he does make it clear that his word is no longer law as far as Mob is concerned. When Arataka tries to cow him with his fake seniority, Mob tells him that he thinks he's going to take a week or three off from work while he thinks about things, and that he won't be accepting any calls from Arataka in the meantime.

What ensues is both a character study of Arataka, and one of the most cathartic, schaudenfraude-inducing forty minutes of television that I have ever enjoyed.

It starts as some understated regret. As if he's trying to give himself permission to acknowledge how badly he fucked up. There might already be some genuine remorse in there as well as self-pity, but as always with him it's hard to say.

He tries to convince himself that he can work with this. After all, most of his jobs are false alarms that he uses to scam people other than Mob. He just needs to push his advertising a little harder, maybe expand it onto some new online platforms, and take more care in avoiding jobs that seem like they might be genuine hauntings.

Mob will be back eventually, probably. Arataka manages to convince himself of his own bullshit for a bit and take comfort in the "knowledge" that Mob really will never have friends or a normal life. Time passes. His work gets harder. And yet, when he happens on Mob around town, or gets updates on how things are going with him from Dimple, he's horrified and ashamed to learn how happy and well-adjusted Mob now seems to be.

Arataka starts scrambling, frantically and aimlessly, trying to expand or shift or double down on his business all at once, now that he realizes Mob really might *not* come crawling back. It's like a high-strung, cartoon scam artist version of a midlife crisis.

In a series of flashbacks and inner monologues, we learn that this is because Arataka IS having a midlife crisis.

A few years ago, Reigen Arataka was an unremarkable white-collar cubicle jockey at "Whitey," a company so nondescript and alienating that he isn't even sure what it did.

Inevitably for a man of his age in his position, Arataka got hit hard by the midlife crisis arrow. In particular, it came down to him rediscovering his old high school yearbook quote, in which he said that the one thing he wanted in all the world was to be someone. And yet, somehow, he ended up becoming the late capitalist epitome of "no one."

He broke down. Quit his job. Used his savings to rent a little office somewhere, sure that he could find *something* profitable to do with it, something that would let him support himself while still being someone. Having some sort of agency, being someone who people might be able to know and recognize. On a wild impulse, he tried to get in on the psychic grift that seemed to be getting popular around that time, solving "hauntings" and "possessions" via placebos, life coaching, and massage therapy.

...

Once again, the irony of him not realizing he could just be a masseur pretty much has to be intended by the author, lol.

Seriously, the guy's skills are obviously at the professional level, and that's the kind of industry that you absolutely can make it in as an independent small business owner if you know how to market. Which he does.

...

Reigen was probably just a few days away from giving it up and coming crawling back to the corporate world when a confused young boy who claimed to be psychic came into his office seeking counsel. Arataka just gave him what seemed like good general life advice that anyone having a hard time of things would probably be able to benefit from, dressed up in a little bit of mystic mumbo jumbo.

And then Mob demonstrated that his powers were real.

...

This is a scene we've flashed back to in more than one previous episode, but seeing it again now makes me realize how good ONE is with character design. Like, usually when I point out his character art it's to gawk at how batshit it is, but this is a case that shows he really understands what he's doing underneath all the Hirohiko-Araki-on-bath-salts insanity. I didn't notice Mob physically maturing over the course of the last season and change, but he's been doing it. It was just so subtle and so natural-looking that you don't even see it until the show jump-cuts to his original look. If you look at him in this scene, and look at him elsewhere in this episode, the difference is night and day, but you genuinely never see it happening. Just like watching a real child grow up.

ONE usually chooses to use his artistic talent for silliness. But that's a conscious choice that he makes, and it's not the only thing he knows how to do with it.

...

The thing is, Mob didn't just give Arataka an exploitable financial opportunity. He also awakened feelings in him. Awe and fascination, but also envy. This was someone. Having an influence on Mob's life is the closest that Arataka ever felt like to being someone himself.

So he latched onto Mob like a parasite to a host. Not just feeding on his labor financially, but also emotionally. As long as Mob was under his thumb, Arataka was a guy who had *genuine magic* at his disposal. He could take Mob's "someone-ness" for himself. But only for as long as he could keep him on a leash.

Him having some real chemistry with Dimple - a literal body-stealing parasite - is not a meaningless detail.

We also finally get to see some of Arataka's personal life, and it's...not surprising, per se, but still kind of shocking. Basically, he doesn't have one.

The closest thing to friends he has are some underachieving sad sacks at a bar he goes to, who he hangs out with mostly just to have someone to feel superior to. Implicitly, anyone in Arataka's life who actually has anything to offer has either pushed away Arataka for his endless advantage-taking, or been pushed away by him for not falling for it. The only person who he seems to even be in remote contact with is his mother who's been begging him to stop this madness and come back to reality ever since he quit his Whitey job a few years ago.

His entire life has become the hustle. Or rather, the hustle is an escape from his actual life, and he's letting that life rot to dust while clinging on to it. He doesn't know when, exactly, Mob became the closest thing to an actual friend Arataka had. It snuck up on him. But this is also another reason why he got so venomous trying to keep Mob to himself; not just the greed, not just the envy and insecurity, but also because - at this point - without Mob he'd be all alone. And now, he is in fact all alone.

Eventually, Arataka does manage - through frantic, sleepless effort and the committing of multiple types of fraud and botnet-farming - to get a reputation he can keep living off of while still dodging any actual psychic phenomena. It takes a lot out of him, but he manages.

Then, after a little while, his growing, bot-farmed internet meme status seems to pay a real dividend. Arataka gets invited onto an extremely popular national TV program, for an episode all about supernatural phenomena and the growing psychic craze. If he performs well, this could cement him with the kind of celebrity status he can coast on for years without needing to do anything again. One big performance, and he gets to pretend to everyone - most importantly himself - that he is someone for the longterm.

It turns out the person who invited him is a rival of his. One of the many genuine psychics who Arataka earned the hatred of during one of the earlier episodes (although, ironically, it's one of the few who has an UNreasonable grudge against Arataka rather than a reasonable one). And, unlike a lot of the other espers we've met throughout the show, this guy is - while not reasonable per se - emotionally mature enough to get legal, aboveboard revenge with i's dotted and t's crossed that will still end Arataka's status for good.

When I said that this two-parter was a schadenfreude gold mine, I meant it. At least, up until the baffling ending.

Both of which I'll be covering in the next post.