BEM Episode 7 Review: Chimera

The plot of BEM has gone straight to hell at this point. It was tolerable to have Sonia be the retarded, dysfunctional character but now everyone has gone rogue and none of the things they say has any impact on the anime. This is honestly getting hard to watch.

Plot

There is this new trend going around town where animals are genetically modified to become hybrids and kept as pets for collectors. Belo seems to have been feeding and taking care of some stray dogs, but his friends from the arcade, that are desperate for his attention, decide to stick with him and help him so they can spend more time together. The following evening, when Dave stayed longer than the rest to feed the dogs, he was abducted by a crazy man who gathers ‘materials’, aka humans and animals, during the night, so he can modify them and sell them. Belo gets to the bottom of things pretty fast and manages to track him down, free the animals and the kids as well as let the animals get their revenge on him.

Episode Highlights

Excuse me, WHAT? I don’t know if you noticed but there was a major drop of domestic abuse that was done so casually during a dialogue in this episode. How in the world did the writers thought that this is a good way to reveal this fact for one of the characters? And even worse, Dave replies to Maaya, all nonchalantly again, with the awesome line of: ‘As usual, sounds pretty tough!’ I think this is a good point to sit down and think: why the hell are we still watching this show?

‘This is revenge for killing my father’: The part of the episode that was devoted to that kid (whose name I don’t remember) tracking down Belo and taking revenge for his father was so badly executed. I mean it was kind of foreshadowed from the previous episode where we saw him a few times trying to find Belo’s whereabouts. He is shown to us like he has been looking for so long to find him and he hasn’t even looked at the arcade or the nearby area that he usually hangs around? What kind of stupid logic is this? And then he tracks him down, gets his gun, goes to the location, sees two monsters fighting, one of them saves his ass and then transforms into Belo and even though he clearly understands that things didn’t go down as he initially thought the night his father was killed, he still decides to shoot him and go all anime cliché while yelling: ‘DIE, DIE, DIE’ a couple of times. And when he runs out of bullets, Belo just leaves him there, without even explaining anything to him. And don’t even try to give me the: ‘Oh, but he was running to catch the bad guy’ bullshit, because it’s pretty obvious that Belo has exceptional hearing abilities (hence the fact that he wears headphones all the time) and clearly knew the evil guy of the week’s location. Jeez, everything is just so bad.

Bem, what are you talking about? So, for the hundredth time by now, Bem tells Belo that he shouldn’t kill humans, because if he does he won’t be able to become one himself. What Bem preaches is very contradicting with his actions, because, well, he does kill humans every week if you think about it. Yes they might be guys like cyborg bowling Elvis, but they still count as humans, so I think that Bem is just digging through this plot hole deeper and deeper with every weekly’s villain that he kills.

Themes & Trivia

Chimera: A genetic chimerism or chimera is a single organism composed of cells with distinct genotypes. In animals, this means an individual derived from two or more zygotes, which can include possessing blood cells of different blood types, subtle variations in form (phenotype) and, if the zygotes were of differing sexes, then even the possession of both female and male sex organs. Animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs. In plant chimeras, however, the distinct types of tissue may originate from the same zygote, and the difference is often due to mutation during ordinary cell division.

Comments

I don’t know where to start… The animation and art were horrible in this episode. Belo seems like he was feeding colored paper to the dogs, not actual treats; the dogs hardly move during their shots; and the whole episode was just really bad. On another note, do Bem, Bela, and Belo live on top of that bridge or what?

Fullmetal Alchemist did the chimera-thing much better.

I am not going to lie, I am at a point where I struggle to watch BEM every week. I have no anticipation or any excitement for the things that will come in this show and I am sorry to say this but this has been the greatest disappointment of the season.