Sion’s life has meandered on since his encounter with Rat and now it’s going to get a lot worse, and quickly.

What They Say:
Four years have passed since Sion’s encounter with Rat. After losing his special privileges, including the right to live in Chronos, Sion now lives in Losttown with his mother, Karan. One day, Sion is working as a supervisor at a park, when he discovers the body of a dead man. The corpse appears to be of an elderly man, but Sion soon learns that the body belongs to a man who was in his thirties, and this fact is being concealed by the city authorities. The next day, Sion’s co-worker, Yamase, is also transformed into an old man instantaneously before dying. Immediately after this happens, Sion witnesses a bee clawing its way out of Yamase’s neck.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a quiet but engaging first episode, where things were more or less given some basic reveals while still holding back a lot, No. 6 comes back with an even more interesting second episode that advance the story by four years and shows us where Sion is at this point in time. But before it does that, it has to show us that things are not all that good in the world as some park rangers come across a dead body with something eating through it, which is definitely something that comes across as not the norm in the slightest in this world. The shift of the storyline forward, changing things up with where Sion and his mother are at, can be a bit off-putting at first, but changing the story so that events aren’t happening with a twelve year old definitely helps to smooth out some of the problems it might have had in dealing with such young characters.

Sion’s life hasn’t exactly gone for the better since we last saw him as events caused him to lose all his privileges in No. 6 by not turning in Rat. So much so that he lost his chance to enroll in the gifted course and he and his mother had to move to Lost Town instead. While it hasn’t been pleasant, he’s made the best of his life and works as a park ranger now and comes across as a happy young man all told, though you have that sense of lost potential there about him as well. One positive in his life is that he’s still friends with Safu and the two have been pretty good friends since all of it went down, but she sees that lost potential as well and is now at a point in her life where she has to move on as well because of her education and work which is taking her to No. 5 in order to grow and learn more.

While the show spends some time on the small drama caused by Sion learning that Safu is leaving shortly, when it gets back to the story of the old man that was killed, it turns far more sinister. It’s revealed that he was actually in his thirties, and whatever killed him ended up aging him radically. Even worse, he has to go through a similar process to four years ago when the police come to investigate his coworker who has been killed in the same way and died in front of him in the park ranger office. What he sees is quite disturbing and it puts him into a path that makes his situation even worse as he’s accused of being a malcontent. Every time that Sion tries to do the right thing, it invariably ends up making things worse for him. What ends up saving him is the arrival of Rat, which certainly isn’t a surprise, but it has a feeling of harmony about it as the pair end up making good Sion’s escape and setting into motion the next wave of events.

In Summary:
No. 6 makes good on the leap ahead by four years by giving us a world that’s a bit more explored and a lead character that is similar but different in a lot of ways because of what happened. We’d gotten some hints about what’s going on before, but the ending to this episode explores it in stark colors while making it clearer about what the truth of the reality. Sion comes across as quite a likable character from start to finish so watching him go through events here that ring familiar to his past makes you cringe to see him repeating history in a sense, but this time it pushes him even further and with a greater deal of pain as it all happens sharply and at once. The path of the series is still largely unclear, but it offers a lot of very intriguing ideas and elements, especially at the end here, and that’s more than enough alone to get me back, never mind all the other good material here.

Grade: B+

Simulcast By: Crunchyroll

Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.