Issue #306: The Long and Short of the End of Pluto
The Pluto era is over! Kind of. I’m sure I’ll write about it again. But this ends my series of recaps, in my own fashion, of the Netflix series. If you are a longtime reader, you know how much I enjoy having something consistent to write about week over week. I’ve let a couple topics get away from me, so I’ve been banking them. There are big things coming for the newsletter this year, so keep your eyes open. There’s also never a better time than now to cop a paid subscription and read some of my backlog. Use some of that Christmas money you know you’ll be getting.
Pluto’s “Episode 8”: Everything According to Plan
“Atom, take care of this beautiful world”
Pluto ends as the ultimate veneration of hope over hatred and remembering over forgetting. But the show isn't without contradiction. Even as supposedly nothing can be born of hate, it gave Atom the power he needed to triumph in battle. It may have even birthed Goji — although it seems clear, in the end, that it was Gesicht's love, not his hate, that returned Atom to life. At just about every turn, the show opposes the Nietzschean view of forgetting as a gift to humanity. In "Episode 8," Gesicht's memory of the finding — proverbial birth — of his son is twisted into something traumatic because of all the memories forcefully erased from his computerized brain. At the same time, Atom ultimately lies to Helena and decided not to tell her about the child she and Gesicht forgot.
These tensions are one of the show's strengths. Urasawa comes down hard on one side. Seinin manga is still manga. With all of its political critique, mass media is almost always going to promote social cohesion when all is said and done. Urasawa is no Hitchcock, either. The structure of Pluto isn't a simple concession to censors or convention to cover over something deeply subversive. Pluto is an optimistic and ideological work.
Still, it is a triumph. And it demonstrates the memetic quality of the way dominant ideology structures life. Robots aren't immune to it. They don't simply follow the pattern of human life because humans do it, the same forces that act on humans act on all kinds of life. Pluto's hatred may have been "borrowed" from his father, but all human emotions are borrowed. They are a discursive inheritance. They represent an accumulation of all the things that guarantee social cohesion, social Darwinism in the most literal sense. That’s the underside of Pluto, reading it mostly against its grain. It’s not that Dr. Roosevelt was right, but that the entire human embodiment for robotic intelligence and artificial life is a mistake. A mistake that results from the unavoidable hubris of men like Tenma, Abullah, and the other robot creators.
“I thought you’d come to realize that you’re a god among ants”
Speaking of Dr. Roosevelt, you may be asking: “who the hell is that?” Without paying close attention to the credits, you wouldn’t know. Dr. Roosevelt is the teddy bear (get it?) who turns out to be a large sentient supercomputer working for the United States of Thracia.
As the mastermind behind Thracia’s foreign policy and the “puppet master” of President Alexander, Roosevelt is the mastermind behind the majority of Pluto’s plot. He is, in part, responsible for starting the 39th Central Asian War by goading Thracia into their aggressive posture toward Persia. He also ostensibly anticipates the revenge tour by Darius XIV and the outcome that all the greatest robots on Earth will be destroyed.
Frankly, it’s all a little hokey and leaves no shortage of questions regarding certain minute details about the plot. However, hokey or not, plot coherence is not the point here. In this final revelation, Pluto returns to the critique of the U.S. as attempting to assert global hegemony through the use of explicit and implicit violence. Beyond that, there’s also the question of the value of plot itself. As elaborate as the plot of Pluto is, this final ridiculous twist is a thumbing of the nose at judicious plot coherence. This, too, is in the tradition of some of Pluto’s influences, such as film noir.
This is not simply apologia for an unfinished plot outline, either. “Episode 8” spends ample time expositing details of the upcoming calamity that Atom averts. Atom himself gives a point by point account of what Gesicht discovered in the course of his investigation, both to recap for those who may have missed something and to reveal the final (clearly foreshadowed) twist that Abullah and Goji are one and the same — one robot created by Tenma that has duplicated his artificial intelligence. It would have been easy enough to provide the details about Dr. Roosevelt and Thracia in the same manner. Instead, Urasawa opts to leave one knot within his plot that is unresolved and only partially explained to remind the audience where their focus should be: not on the sequence of events.
“That’s a how-to guide for the end of the world”
“Episode 8” introduces another outrageous MacGuffin to compliment the well-earned reveal of Bora: the anti-proton bomb. The atomic analogy here is only sightly less obvious than the one to the Iraq War. Atom becomes a futuristic Oppenheimer. While Atom does not invent this formula, he rediscovers and broadly displays the underlying logic between an apocalyptic weapon. Atom describes it as, “all the hatred in the world … pressing in on me.”
Like Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), Pluto personalizes the weapon of mass destruction. Anxiety between the havoc a bullet might wreak after it leaves the chamber barely fits in the time before the bullet hits its intended or unintended target. But Atom can reflect on the bad outcome that might come from the misuse of the formula. He, like Goji, becomes a father to something annihilative that seemed beyond the horizon of robotic possibility. Nolan’s depiction of Oppenheimer also spends a significant portion of the movie reflecting on the destruction his creation caused — and could cause beyond his lifetime.
This anxiety is parental, in part. Think, too, to Urasawa’s other famous work, Monster (1994). In it, a surgeon spends his life trying to undo the choice of saving a child’s life who turns out to be a serial killer. One wonders whether birthing a serial killer or the atomic bomb is a more perfect cathexis of worrying about what one’s child will go on to become.
In reproducing this equation, Atom joins the tapestry of “great men of science” like Tenma who create something that causes unforeseen consequences.
“How come my eyes are welling up with tears? What’s setting them free?”
Not content to simply restrict his critique to the Iraq War or World War II, Urasawa also briefly reflects on U.S. settler colonialism and the displacement of Native people. There are at least two important reasons, beyond the wide ranging anti-U.S. imperialist critique, to evoke this history at the eleventh hour. The first is, in my view, slightly ill-advised: a structural analogy between the oppression of Native people and the oppression of robots. The Nanabu, in this story, are divested of what they value in exchange for something worthless. Following this analogy, the question for robots is whether or not they have been divested of something that is crucial for giving life value: extreme emotions.
Considering these extreme emotions leads to yet another point about authenticity. President Alexander wants to protect the citizens of his supposedly grand nation, but what is the substance of such a nation found on displacement and violence? The U.S. doesn’t belong to its citizens and President Alexander has no claim to the land (in this case, Thracia… but let’s not split hairs) he supposedly presides over. Thracians are, following this logic, alien to the space they claim as their authentic home.
So too might this account for the “borrowed hatred” I mentioned earlier. Is any emotion or idea of what constitutes human life truly inextricable from life itself? Or are all these elements bizarre impositions through an ideological structure? If the answer to this question is yes, humans have no more right to their artificial emotions than robots would.
“I can tell you everything his investigation brought to light”
The hatred that is borrowed, inherited, or inherent, is that which Atom wishes for an end of. But is such a thing truly possible?
This is the naive posture that Pluto takes. It seems to me that hatred is no more possible to “end” than the love that commits Gesicht to his child.
But even Brau comes around to ideas of love. By the end of the show, he is set free and seemingly rehabilitated. Though he has some murderous urges, he values humanity’s “heart” and kills Dr. Roosevelt, ending the ongoing plot aiming to human extinction.
There are two more important symbols I would like to quickly note, perhaps to pick up again at a later date. In “Episode 7” there was a focus on the individual parts of the body, including the face of what “Episode 8” reveals to be the robot Goji, who becomes the faux Abullah.
“Episode 8” shows the unpleasant cycling through personalities that Tenma told the real Abullah he wouldn’t want to see. More than just the eyes, in this case the face itself becomes a window to the soul. And Goji is soulless, more a robot than any other, but capable of the deception other robots can’t perpetrate.
Goji, as a robotic creation of Tenma, does occupy the vexed sibling/father status to Pluto I referred to last week. While the real Abullah created Sahad, “Abullah” creates Pluto, making their symbolic relationship fascinatingly murky.
There’s also a moment I can’t ignore — Atom looking at himself in the mirror and saying “I wouldn’t even think about pissing me off.”
Though the cut suggests that comment is partially addressed to Dr. Roosevelt, it also captures part of Lacan’s mirror stage and the aggressive posture one might assume to their specular image. Atom, re-assembling himself, sees that mirror image as more complete or in control. For once I’ll spare the details, but the moment is exemplary of Lacan’s formulation.
“Even a robot with only 100,000 horsepower can be the greatest robot in the world”
Pluto has a lot to say about a lot of things, but one of its most consistent topics is gaging and obsolescence. Gesicht discovering Robita is yet another example that emphasizes the value of each individual robot regardless of how recently they were made. Without a doubt, Pluto suggests you can teach an old dog new tricks.
There’s a long tradition of this idea in Japanese science fiction, including the original Tetsuwan Atom and Roujin Z (1991).
Pluto ends with plenty of twists and turns, but ultimately sticking to the theses that animated the earliest episodes. I love this series. I’ll be rewatching, rereading, and writing about it again soon.
Weekly Reading List
https://ww7.mangakakalot.tv/chapter/manga-an956570/chapter-7 — So now, maybe you’ve finished Pluto. Maybe you want to read the source material. Here it is. I hadn’t read this until today, despite being such a fan of Urasawa’s adaptation. I was blown away by how good and funny it is. You can see the threads Urasawa picked up. Tezuka’s version of some of Pluto’s most striking moments are sights to be hold, especially Epsilon’s fight with Pluto. I shouldn’t be surprised.
For your seasonal viewing pleasure.
Until next time.