Kado: The Right Answer With a Terrible Conclusion
By Naren Varadarajan
Kado is perhaps one of the most disappointing anime out there. In its first nine or so episodes, it lays out a tale of alien contact and mutually beneficial exchange the likes of which are fairly uncommon in the invasion-ridden hellscape that characterizes sci-fi. Its last three episodes somehow manage to destroy almost all the goodwill it had built up thus far, as the show crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. But, what makes its ending so terrible anyway, and what even is Kado?
Kado begins with a large, mysterious cube falling from the sky onto a plane full of passengers, as it traps them there and the outside world scrambles to mount a rescue operation. Among the passengers on the plane is Kojirou Shindou, a government official, who encounters within the cube an otherworldly being called Yaha-kui zaShunina. zaShu reveals that the plane being trapped was an accident, and that he intends to provide humanity with advanced technology to speed up their growth.
Eventually, the passengers are freed and so begins a series of tense negotiations, in which several world leaders express their suspicions of zaShu and the gifts that he seeks to bestow upon them, starting with Japan. These first few episodes, in which a genuinely good-hearted alien navigates through this suspicion with Kojirou’s help, are incredibly inspiring. Rather than follow the same tired old narratives of aliens desiring only to invade Earth or ‘steal its resources’, Kado asks the far more interesting question of how humanity might respond to a benevolent being from space, and whether they would even accept the help given to them.
That is of course, until it is revealed that zaShu really is evil and his ‘gifts’ were just a way to win people over and enact his grand scheme of…extracting humanity’s ‘information cocoon’ because that’s apparently what 37-dimensional beings like? So, yes, it is a trainwreck of an ending, but I think while it is jarring and comes out of nowhere, it also just makes the show’s messaging horribly confused.
The first half would have us believe that first contact might very well be a peaceful exchange rather than a violent one. It posits that the xenophobia that comes with first contact is a kind of projection of humanity’s fears onto the unknown, and is the only thing hindering conversation. We see time and time again that government officials in Japan harbor deep suspicions, but it is Kojirou’s trust in zaShu that ultimately wins them over.
With zaShu being revealed to be secretly evil, all of this foundational messaging leading up to something potentially profound is all left by the wayside. It makes it so that humanity was right to be suspicious, that their xenophobia was justified, and Kojirou was the one in the wrong. It ends with the implication seemingly being that humanity should not need to rely on anyone or anything else but themselves, as opposed to saying that trade and communication are how we grow as a species, or even across different species. Early on, the series sets up the question of how another barrier to communication is that zaShu is simply unable to grasp certain concepts. For instance, he doesn’t see how his first gift, essentially a cube that generates an infinite amount of energy, would completely change the way the world works and humanity structures itself because to him, such a thing is commonplace.
We never even see a proper resolution to this dilemma, because with zaShu being evil, how does it matter what he does or doesn’t understand? It’s almost tragic, with the way in which the series contrives itself to fit the mold. This tendency, for shows to start off by trashing genre conventions before slowly turning into yet another mediocre mishmash of tropes, is not uncommon. Kado isn’t the first show to do this and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s just frustrating, that it could have been so much more, but chose instead to settle for the safe ending, that requires little forethought to pull off.
