The Pitch Dark Sisters

The Pitch Dark Sisters

Manga Chapters 3-6 and 3-7

TV Episode 63

Manga Chapter Summary:

As Tetsuro consumes a fine meal, Maetel tells him eating properly is the most important thing when you travel. The Conductor drops off some wine for them, then announces their next stop is the planet Twin Darkness. The planet is so dark that its shape can only be seen by the stars that create an outline from behind it. The 999 descends down to the planet and suddenly stops. Maetel tells Tetsuro they have arrived, even though he can’t see anything. The Conductor announces their layover time as 2 hours. 

 

Maetel claims that even if they shined light here, it would be absorbed instantly so they couldn’t see it. Tetsuro asks if they should simply stay on the train then since it would be so boring. Maetel claims she has some business to do and must be alone. Tetsuro wonders what to do while Maetel is gone. He suddenly hears some tapping on the window and sees two eyes outside. A voice tells him to leave the train and follow her. Tetsuro gets off the train and is told by the woman that he is stepping on flowers, even though he can’t see any of them. Tetsuro wants to use a flashlight, but is reminded it won’t work.

Eventually the woman stops and she tells Tetsuro she’s opened his door and he can come in. He heads into a room with a lot of shining control panels and computer mechanisms above them. The woman tells Tetsuro that her big sister created this. Suddenly another pair of eyes appears, this time from a man, and requests Tetsuro kill the woman’s older sister. He explains that the woman who brought him here is named Miru and her older sister is Lelan. He is their father.

Lelan is gifted and has built many strange machines like this one. She wants to bring light to their planet by producing an artificial sun. He asked her to reconsider since the planet has never had light in its entire history. People have been happy here only being able to view each other’s eyes. He doesn’t think any of their people could bear being fully exposed to more than the eyes of others and that many would commit suicide. He’s even willing to have Tetsuro kill her to stop her. He tells Tetsuro he can marry Miru if he does it and she’ll be his slave until death. 

 

Miru tells Tetsuro to head to a hill around 10 kilometers away. The 999 will have an accident, which will provide Tetsuro the time to do it. If he refuses, he won’t be able to make it back to the train anyway as she’ll close her eyes and turn off the machines, making it impossible for him to see anything. Tetsuro tells her she’ll need to take him back to the train as he doesn’t have his gun with him and she does so. Tetsuro grabs his cosmo gun on the train, and the Conductor provides him a radar device to use. The 999 will be departing in 30 minutes, but Maetel hasn’t returned yet. The Conductor claims Maetel is a special patron of the Galaxy Express and they won’t leave until she returns.

Tetsuro heads outside and is unable to find Miru. In looking at his radar device he senses a figure behind him, who tells him not to try anything funny. She says she is Lelan and leads him into a chamber that has light inside it. Tetsuro finds Maetel inside, passed out and on an operating table. Lelan claims she will use Maetel’s brain to launch her artificial sun. Nobody in space possesses abilities quite like hers. Tetsuro keeps staring at Lelan and when she asks why he claims it’s because she’s really pretty. She thinks he is trying to deceive her and jolts him with a device she’s carrying.

 

Lelan proclaims it’s time to launch her artificial sun and goes ahead with it. Lelan is successful and the sun starts lighting up the planet. Miru arrives from outside and Lelan sees for the first time what her sister looks like. Tetsuro says he’s surprised and he thought they’d have scarier faces. Lelan says her sister didn’t look right at her and creating the artificial sun was a mistake. Lelan considers herself ugly and Miru repulsive. 

 

Miru tells Lelan she’s to blame and will now die; blasting her in the face with the device Lelan used earlier on Tetsuro. Miru is angry at Tetsuro and says she told him she’d kill him if he betrayed her. Maetel has gotten up behind her, but Miru decides on her own to not shoot and goes outside. Maetel tells Tetsuro not to follow her, and they soon hear a blast; Miru has killed herself. Maetel tells Tetsuro 99.9% of the planet’s population will likely do the same, being shocked by the appearances uncovered by the sun.

Tetsuro claims neither of the sisters were ugly, they were actually true beauties. Maetel says the aesthetic criteria is different here. The most stunning women on Earth would be monsters here. They return to the 999, which takes off. The Conductor, reading a newspaper, claims the suicide rate is quickly reaching 99.9% on the planet like Maetel predicted. Tetsuro wonders what a perfect face would be considered on this planet and Maetel says perhaps him. After she raised her weapon, Miru could only stare at Tetsuro in awe. Tetsuro looks sorrowful at first but then breaks out with a big smile.

TV Episode Summary:

The TV episode makes major changes to both the plot of the episode as well as its portrayal. Most notably, while in the manga everything truly is pitch dark and until we meet Lelan all we can see is the eyes of the planet’s inhabitants, there is a small amount of light in the episode. It comes off as if it was nighttime on Earth rather than the pure pitch darkness that we have in the manga chapter. As such we are able to see the entire body of Miru earlier, as well as her father (for whom we only see his eyes in the manga). We see a scene where Miru leads Tetsuro through a park and we see many of the planet’s inhabitants.

 

Early in the episode we see Maetel head to Lelan’s home and ask to use her transmitter, which explains how she originally got there. Maetel contacts the mysterious voice she has conversed within the past, saying she doesn’t have faith in herself to continue this journey with Tetsuro. Lelan overhears her and starts thinking about how she can use Maetel for her plans. Dialogue about the 999 having an accident is cut and rather than offer Tetsuro Miru as a wife and slave, Miru’s father simply just reveals to Tetsuro that Lelan has captured her.

A big part of the manga chapter was the perception of beauty and ugliness; the issue with the artificial sun was that everyone could see what each other looked like and they considered themselves so ugly that 99.9% of the planet killed themselves. In the TV episode this aspect is removed. Tetsuro never tells Lelan he finds her pretty nor do we have Lelan and Miru calling themselves ugly when they see each other. 99.9% of the planet dies, but it is because the artificial sun Lelan created is too strong and the planet’s inhabitants, having never lived in light before suffer severe burns and die. 

 

In the manga chapter, Miru kills Lelan, then kills herself. This is changed up in the TV episode such that Lelan shoots Miru in the back when she tries to turn off the artificial sun. Lelan then heads outside and is killed by the artificial sun. After the 999 takes off, we see Miru and Lelan’s father find Lelan and he collapses and dies over her. Rather than talk about perceptions of beauty as the episode ends, Tetsuro and Maetel instead talk about how Lelan should have thought things out more.

 

In another minor change, the Conductor’s line about Maetel being a special patron whom they will hold the train is cut.

TV Episode Cast:

Tetsuro Hoshino – Masako Nozawa

Maetel – Masako Ikeda

Conductor – Kaneta Kimotsuki

Lelan – Kazuko Yanaga

Miru - Keiko Han

Mysterious Voice – Banjou Ginga

Father – Kouhei Miyauchi

Narrator – Hitoshi Takagi

Non-Spoiler Analysis:

This chapter features the 999 arriving on a planet of total darkness. I was reminded at first of chapter 1-8, “Mephisto’s Dark Knight”, which also featured a very dark planet and Tetsuro seeing eyes by the window which lured him outside. This planet appears even darker than that in the Dark Knight chapter. The only thing that can be seen is the eyes of the planet’s inhabitants. As a result, no one here knows what each other looks like beyond that. One would wonder how people get around with the planet being fully dark. It’s not even a case of the planet being darker than what we’re used to and the inhabitants’ eyes being used to it enough where they can make things out. We are specifically told no one can tell what each other looks like. 

 

Tetsuro is recruited by a young woman named Miru to stop her elder sister, Lelan, who is creating an artificial sun on the planet. Somehow Lelan’s artificial sun is connected to Maetel, who purposely left on business without Tetsuro but appears in Lelan’s home. Did Maetel know what Lelan was doing in the first place? Or did her plans get interrupted somehow? You’ve got to think Maetel was involved in some way, as how would Lelan even know she was arriving here? Additional scenes in the TV episode make it come off as if it is just a coincidence that Maetel and Lelan encounter each other. Also, Maetel must have a lot of power, maybe even more than we’ve thought, if Lelan can power her artificial sun by using her. The Conductor has a line about how the train wouldn’t leave without her, given her special patron status. This is the first time I can recall this coming up (and I don’t believe it comes up again), which is rather frustrating. We many times see Tetsuro and Maetel rushing their way back to the 999, but if this is the case then there’s never a need to do so. I was happy to see this line cut from the TV episode.

Anyway, Lelan successfully launches her sun and it ends up causing total disaster. Lelan is beautiful, her sister Miru even more so, yet they consider themselves horrifically ugly, enough so that Miru kills her sister, then kills herself. We are told that 99.9% of the planet’s population ends up killing themselves! All because they found their physical appearances repulsive. At first this seems like a rather foolhardy premise when you think about it; being beautiful is tied into reproduction and being attracted to the opposite sex, nature wouldn’t be apt to create a situation where a species found each other so repulsive on a wide scale. Although I suppose this is looking at with the view of an Earthling and a human, maybe such things would be different on an alien planet. It brings up the fact that what one species considers beautiful, another could consider repulsive. Lelan and Miru are beautiful to human beings. But they are the exact opposite for those that live on this planet. I found it pretty funny that at the end Maetel speculates that Tetsuro, who often gets proclaimed ugly (just think back to a couple of chapters ago in “The Planet Called Curiosity” for example), may be considered this planet’s physical ideal. It was a rather dark and dreary chapter, but at least you get a big from Tetsuro about that to finish it off.

 

This chapter is one of those most changed in the TV series adaption thus far. The fact that things truly aren’t pitch dark as they were in the manga chapter was rather disappointing, although I suppose the thought process was that just showing the eyes of the planet’s inhabitants and nothing else wouldn’t be of much interest to the viewers (although it would have been very easy to animate!). It is a rare instance in the TV show where the core message Matsumoto is trying to get across gets completely changed. The entire part of the storyline about perceptions of beauty and ugliness is removed. My assumption for why this was cut was that they didn’t want to portray a planet where 99.9% of its population killed themselves over their physical appearance. Although if it was done for content reasons, the fact remains that the episode still ends with 99.9% of the planet’s populace dying. Galaxy Express 999 often goes down some dark paths with its storylines. And we have seen suicide before in “Nuruba, Planet Without Form” (it also occurs in “The Planet Named Curiosity” but that episode didn’t air until after this one). Perhaps in this instance the mass amount of suicide was considered going too far. One notable complaint with the episode is that Maetel and Tetsuro pass up the chance to turn off the artificial sun at the end of the episode. Perhaps it was too late at that point, but they had an opportunity to save the planet’s residents by doing that.

Overall this was a fairly enjoyable manga chapter, less so for the TV episode. At this point in the manga Matsumoto seems to be going really over the top with his storylines; it doesn’t always work, such as in “Queen of the Primitive Planet”, but when it does it makes for quite an entertaining, albeit depressing at times, experience.