I was more thrown off by its Freddy Krueger sweater to be honest.
I didn't even draw the connection with that!
That's
another group of fans they're seeking to please, I guess!
###
Episode 10, then?
Serial Experiments Lain
Layer 10:
Love
"Dad...?"
"This is goodbye, Miss Lain."
This is the first time that I've clocked this, but Eiri's body and clothes are actually taped/bandaged where they are because they must've been mangled or even severed during his death, aren't they? I'm guessing he must've lain perpendicular across the railway track.
I realised it right at the start of the episode.
When I first watched this, I had naturally thought that Eiri was just tracing over Lain's thoughts when he first speaks, but no: their relative consciousnesses have actually swapped locations. What's not at all brought across by the subtitles, though, is that Eiri is talking in Lain's more forceful mode of speech that we've seen her use in the Wired — the same thing we immediately hear when she regains her own persona at the end of the conversation. (I can't comment on how it's handled in the dub, of course.)
She has now lost her place in the world, though. She goes to homeroom at school as normal, but her friends do not acknowledge her. She goes to her desk, but it's not there anymore. She isn't needed in the real world.
She goes back to the place she once knew as home. It's deserted — a sad scene of discarded possessions and withered houseplants, dying of neglect. She makes a move to maybe tidy the old place up a bit, but spots her former father standing in the doorway of the room that her sist— sorry, that Mika used to use. Eyes down, he speaks to Lain in the same polite terms that he would address a stranger and bids her farewell, even though he wasn't actually given official clearance to do so. She does not need him anymore, it has been decided. All that is left now is to dole out the stock pleasantries and take his leave. He assures Lain that he did love her, though, while at the same time admitting that he may have been just a touch jealous of a being like her.
Lain pleads him not to leave; she's scared of being alone. Without turning to look back, he assures her that she most certainly is
not: if she were to connect to the Wired, everyone will come to greet her. That's the kind of being she is. And with the click of the front door closing echoing in Lain's ears, he is gone.
Under crackling circuit board skies, a Lain is furious. She is furious at the people who created her fake self, (and) furious at the Knights.
At the same time, someone has leaked a complete list of Knights members onto a site called Net News. The business exec's name is on it, and the two agents immediately arrive and subdue him before he can flee. His secretary is the one who finds the body. The fat computer otaku from an earlier episode is another victim, as is the single mother, her coffee apparently poisoned. The deaths are reported online as suicides.
The agents pay Lain a visit next, in her room. She cuts a pitiful figure, draped in cables and connected directly to the Wired by a clip attached to her bottom lip. They inform her that her list was most useful in allowing their comrades to eliminate the Knights' global network. The leave her be with the admission that they have no idea exactly what kind of existence she is.
Lost and confused, outside in the bracing wind and harsh daylight, a dazed Lain finally hears the awful truth, imparted directly by the God of the Wired Himself, Masami Eiri: Lain originally came into being in the Wired, and the Lain we know,
our Lain, is no more than a genetically engineered construct to bring that consciousness out of the Wired and into the real world. Eiri was the mastermind behind this. At that revelation, Lain brings the power lines crashing down all around her. Hell hath no fury like a human born.
