Review by Woodrow Phoenix
In Pluto Vol. 5, detective Gesicht followed his hunches and tracked down King Darius XIV, former despotic ruler of the Persian Kingdom, to his jail cell where he awaits trial. Was he the mastermind behind the deaths and destruction of all those associated with the Bora Survey Group? “They were liars,” Darius tells him. “They took my country and turned it back into a barren wasteland. They needed us to be the have nots again. They took our glorious robot culture from us!! And the filthy, barbaric machines of the west turned my country into a blasted, charred desert!!” The motivation behind the destruction of the world’s seven most advanced robots is revenge, a murky and very human emotion. Understandable, because the 39th Central Asian Conflict was an illegal war crime. But now those responsible are paying for their transgressions with blood while King Darius XIV is behind bars, isolated and monitored 24 hours a day. So who is carrying out his wishes?
Gesicht believes he is on the verge of discovering the truth about the case, but his visit to Persia evokes complicated feelings as we see his response to child robots being abused. One of both Osamu Tezuka and Urasawa’s themes is the treatment of sentient beings as disposable and worse, ironically dehumaning the people who abuse them as well. In Pluto robots behave with far more compassion and empathy than most of the humans they interact with, and they accept that this is just how things are. That morally compromised condition bleeds through all the situations here, adding a certain amount of sympathy to the hunger for payback that motivates King Darius XIV, and his top scientist Dr Abra. We already know what Abra is capable of, but Gesicht doesn’t and in an excellently staged scene the two play cat-and-mouse with each other as the detective tries to find out how a photo of a man standing in a field of flowers can link to an unstoppable killing machine.
The various threads of this web woven by Naoki Urasawa, and co-writer Takashi Nagasaki from Tezuka’s original story finally converge in this volume to reveal who and what the terrifying menace of Pluto is. Superbly designed images from Urasawa create intrigue and excitement from his finely-judged artwork. There’s no kind of scene that he can’t draw wonderfully and there are countless images here that will halt your rush onwards for a moment. But there’s a lot more to solving this mystery than uncovering one hidden element, however massive. A great many other secrets are revealed in this volume, leading to an ending so painful there seems to be no hope left. What can anyone do to protect the devastated survivors related to the Bora Survey Group in Vol. 7?
