Hello and welcome, Ultraman Connection readers! This week, we’re back to the action with the newly formed KSCT unit, featuring an all-star crew of Kaiju specialists! You have Ayumu, the Kaiju Biologist, Kosei, the Kaiju Monster Rancher- er, Tamer might be a better moniker. And then there’s Sorato, the so-called “Kaiju Professor” with his eccentric and seemingly spontaneous intuition regarding the monsters the team encounters.
Of course, the rest of the National Defense Force (NDF) doesn’t know that Sorato is the titular Ultraman Omega himself. Although it seems that the name “Ultraman” only was given to him in the previous episode. How long has Sorato had the name “Omega” though? No one seems to know, least of all Sorato himself, considering his continued amnesia regarding his full history. After the climactic mid-season battle against Zovaras, Omega seemed to recall his original mission – or at least, the most relevant part of it, explaining how he came to Earth.
Many other mysteries still surround him, his identity, as well as the reason for the continued appearance of more Kaiju on this version of Earth. Some of them have been reawakened from hibernation, or moved into unfavorable habitats due to human activity. Some of them were hunters, drawn by sources of power like the arrival of Omega himself and the Meteokaiju. Some, like Zovaras, were invaders seeking to conquer the planet. This is typical of most Ultraman series, which usually have a wide variety of different Kaiju and aliens, and an equally wide variety of plots dealing with each conflict or crisis in different ways.
In Ultraman Omega, the pattern of many terrestrial-based Kaiju with specific environmental niches suggest that Kaiju were once much more common on this version of Earth, and that many of them might still hibernate below the Earth’s surface. Unfortunately for the human beings populating the Earth’s surface now, the next threat which wakes up is far more dangerous than anyone was expecting.
No, not Pagos. Don’t get me wrong, I love the little subterranean dinosaur! It’s appeared frequently in other Ultraman series, even going all the way back to Ultra Q. However, many of its modern appearances have only been preludes to other arrivals, monsters which quickly dwarf it in scale – literally, or metaphorically given the truly terrifying danger posed by Edomaphila this week.
It’s been awhile since we’ve had a genuinely gross Kaiju in one of these shows, and a gooey, parasitic slime mold is a good way to get any viewer’s attention! The puzzle to uncover its origins, and how to find its weakness to defeat the organism for good, made for a thoroughly engaging and fun episode this week. I loved watching how Professor Sayuki directs her haphazard team, and how Sorato, Kosei and Ayumu all function in their more “official” roles in the KSCT. It makes me wish we had another two dozen episodes with these characters to look forward to!
There’s just something about this episode, however, just like with Sorato’s gut feeling this week, that makes me fear that the good times and celebrations are only leading into a larger crisis…
There are many plots in Ultraman featuring an ancient Kaiju reawakened to rampage on Earth in the modern day. Whether intentionally roused or not, many series deal with the ramifications of primordial threats once again bringing death and destruction against human civilization, destruction that may even pre-date humanity’s histories. Oftentimes the most deadly, and the most insidious of these threats don’t look like we’d expect. This week, it was a scummy amoeba-like slime mold which accidentally hitched a ride on a Kaiju fossil. However, “Edomaphila” was implied to be so catastrophically deadly that it might have caused the extinction of many other Kaiju before the oncoming ice age wiped it out in turn.
In the world of Ultraman Tiga, a different apocalypse had already taken place millions of years before Daigo Madoka was given the powers of the titular Ultraman, in order to save it from the same apocalypse arriving again. The darkness brought on by Gatanozoa in the finale of the show was indeed apocalyptic and terrifying – and was defeated by Tiga’s light, of course. Shockingly, Daigo and others discovered that it was only the capstone of a different apocalypse which started beforehand.
An apocalypse, in fact, that the ancient human civilization chose for itself.
I mean, when faced with numerous Kaiju attacks, wars, invasions, pestilence and famine, and now with the omens of inescapable darkness closing in on humanity 30 million years ago? It seemed like an easy choice for that civilization to give itself over to the euphoric and hallucinatory effects of the Gijiera flower. It’s understandable, in a tragic way, that so many people would succumb to the allure of a happy, painless oblivion of their own choosing, rather than the terror of Gatanozoa’s darkness.
Even more shockingly, it was a choice that the Giants of Light on Earth at the time honored, and they left humanity behind to face its own self-determined fate.
In the present day however, the power of Ultraman Tiga is wielded by Daigo – a human being, if you didn’t notice – and he makes a different decision, to wield his courage as a human being to face Gatanozoa instead. Using Tiga’s light, he destroyed the Gijiera flower, and made it possible for humanity to stand with him in that light to defeat the true threat of darkness when it finally arrived. But that’s a story for another day.
Like Gijiera, the arrival of Edomaphila in this week’s episode of Omega is also somewhat the result of choices made by humanity. The NDF decided to hoist a Kaiju fossil, repurpose it into a missile (and apparently ignored all biohazard handling precautions) and test it in the field against Pagos, which kicked everything off. More than that, Sorato and Sayuki’s conversation suggest that climate changes brought on by human activity could wake up more threats from melting permafrost and other ancient habitats.
Of course, the impulse of the NDF, to try and engineer a way to protect the Earth by humanity’s own means, without relying on Ultraman, is an admirable idea. The line Professor Sayuki delivers, about how “Earth must be protected by Earthlings”, has a long pedigree in the franchise, and has represented some of the most powerful moments for the various defense teams who have stood alongside Ultraman. But the ancient human civilization in Ultraman Tiga also had a sympathetic goal, to alleviate suffering and hardship by using Gijiera’s pollen. And we’ve seen numerous other occasions in different Ultraman series where the NDF’s ideals can be easily twisted into terrifying weapons of war – weapons which can easily destroy their creators.
Not to mention, we still don’t know everything about Omega’s story, or his past. How long has he been observing the planet? How much does he know about its history, or humanity’s? Is there another reason why he was sent here, aside from fighting the Geness and preventing them from invading the planet? Sorato may know a lot about Kaiju, and Professor Sayuki seems to always know more than what she lets on to the rest of her team, but neither of them can see the future – and neither can we here at Ultraman Connection. You’ll just have to stay tuned for more to find out!
