As we seep into the second installment of Toho and Netflix’s sci-fi mystery (or should that be “mist-tery”? – no, definitely mystery. Sorry about that), we find something of a surprising shift. While the first episode of Human Vapor sealed it’s science fiction credentials by bookending itself with scenes of vaperous action as the titular killer stretched his intangible legs, we find “Informant” putting the kibosh on any and all vapor-based activities to focus more on trying to figure out the mystery behind it all.
Yep, it seems watching detective Kenji and reporter Kyoko hunt down the self proclaimed Human Vapor is going to to get far more complex than we originally thought as the search to uncover what The White Centre is means that covered-up meteor crashes and even the Yakuza now come into play. Can these sudden and rather wild deviations from the main plot cover for the fact that in only it’s second episode, the Human Vapor himself has seemingly already dissipated?
As they shake off the sight of an entire strike team getting their heinies handed to them by a man made of mist, both Kenji and Kyoko tale stock of the situation they’ve found themselves in. But while they separately try to think up their respective next moves, we get a handy flashback to show us what happened between them four months ago to breed all this animosity.
After being placed with Kenji for a story, both he and Kyoto fell in love to the point where the detective was contemplating marriage, but after an investigation into a former member of the Yakuza drugging and killing a minor goes bad, the budding reporter takes it upon herself to take all the info and run a whole news story on it and even tries to interview the man on the street. The result is that the suspect commits suicide, Kyoko is promoted and Kenji is suspended for “leaking” vital information on a case – which explains his distrustful nature of her.
Meanwhile, both of them actually make headway on the bizarre case and discover various leads. While Kenji finds that the clothes that the Vapor left behind contains a lead that suggests his next victim will be a victim of the Yakuza, Kyoko manages to piece details from the killer’s video and finds a source who can tell her more about this strange White Centre he keeps mentioning. This, in turn, leads her to Hiroki Obata, the former director of The White Centre, who has been plagued with guilt-induced flashbacks of his time taking part in a grand conspiracy. Despite being a shelter for orphans and the homeless on the surface, the company used them all for forced labour on a clean up of a meteor crash site 27 years ago and one of the “missing” victims in Obata’s hidden files looks suspiciously like the Human Vapor.
However, while Obata wants to finally come clean and offload decades of guilt, yet another interested party seems eager to keep him quiet – but why would the Yakuza want to get involved with all of this?
After a solid start that laid out both the police procedural and the sci-fi aspects of the show, Human Vapor pops a childlock on their VFX budget and instead goes all in on conspiracies, betrayal and the effects of prolonged guilt on the human psyche. To be fair, I’m not entirely surprised as I wasn’t expecting the team of Toho, Netflix, Yeon Sang-Ho and Shinzo Katayama to be shelling out eight whole episodes of non-stop, Vapor happenings; but it does mean that the show now has to fly solo without the training wheels of ambitious visual effects sequences to back it up. While the show noticably ramps itself down in order to accommodate the noticable lack of vaperous humans, it does start expanding the scale in some other interesting directions.
For a start, there’s a noticable upping of emotional content thanks to both the moral conundrum of the haunted Hiroki Obata and the fact that we discover what Kyoko actually did to get Kenji suspended. To tackle the last subject first, it’s actually a very telling reveal as we discover that not only were the pair a serious item, but Kenji was actually going to propose to her the day she stabbed him in the back – professionally speaking. However, while what she did was underhanded and had grave consequences for virtually everyone except her, there is an argument to be made for Kyoko thinking that she was doing the right thing as her decision to “out” the slimy Mori seemed to be born from Kenji’s drunken frustration that he couldn’t nail the man for his heinous crime. This seems to kick off a continuing theme of guilt and responsibility that continues through the episode with the introduction of Obata, who proves to be the missing link between the Human Vapor and The White Centre that everyone is looking for.
Utterly consumed with guilt to the extent that he’s having vivid, almost dementia-style hallucinations/flashbacks of past indiscretions, the old guy finds that his own, existential trauma is being mirrored by one of the children in his care who is also having problems coming clean about something he’s lied about at school, and the whole mini arc does well to explain Obata’s mindset and why he’d suddenly want to tell the truth.
Elsewhere, the show doubles down on its detective work as both Kenji and Kyoko both find different inroads to discovering who the Human Vapor might target next thanks to various clues left by their cloudy quarry. However, while discovering that the Yakuza is involved adds an interesting criminal wrinkle to things, it’s the gradual uncovering of the business of The White Centre that gathers the most steam. Thanks to the meteorite hitting in the same area within the same year as the 1999 Children Of The World Expo, all attempts to expose the shady dealings of the Centre has been killed unless it brings shame to the prestigious event. What we’ve been able to piece together so far is that Sano (the professor murdered in the first episode) was in charge of the safety committee and deemed it safe for the White Centre’s slave labour to go in and clear up the space debris. The result was a lot of dead people coated in radiation burns who were disposed of by the Yakuza and one of these missing souls ultimately became the Human Vapor.
I have to say, the conspiracy plot birthing a vengence obsessed superbeing feels nicely reminiscent the origins of V from V For Vendetta, but ensures still carries its own identity, despite not sticking super closely to the original, 1960s movie. Still, with the inclusion of the Yakuza, we get a slick, climactic action sequence that sees the criminals make a grab for Kyoko only to get thwarted by Kenji; and to close us out, we get a shock death as the repentant Obata is murdered by a hitman while on his way to spill the beans. There may be precious little Human Vapor in this episode, but the makers make sure they still include a lot of smoke.
A shift to solid detective work may annoy those hoping for a Vapor kill-fest, but co-writer Yeon Sang-ho and director, Shinzo Katayama ensure that the shift into full conspiracy continues to grip. With the inclusion of eyepatched hitmen and tattooed crooks, it looks like the Vapor isn’t the only threat in town…
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 