The Apocalypse Files #1

As I mentioned in my Fall 2025 Mid-Season Report, I deeply regret not doing episode reviews for Touring After the Apocalypse. Rather than do those fully, I’ve decided to take an alternate approach and explore all the little visual details which provide clues in each episode about how the apocalypse happened. This installment focuses on episode 7: “Tsukuba.”

The first shot comes near the episode’s beginning, which appears to show National Route 16 as it crosses the Ohori River near Kashiwa. That’s by far the most abandoned cars we’ve seen yet, which raises the question of what happened to suddenly that the cars would all be stopped like that but not catastrophically damaged.:

The next curious shot, from around the 4 minute mark, shows a jeliner crashed (and still partly submerged) in the river, though it looks to be largely intact. That’s particularly odd:

Just a few seconds later, at the 4:!8 mark, we have some trashed robots. The remains of a humanoid one can be seen partly under the car at the left, while on the right are what look like the remains of doglike robots. (More of those can be seen in another shot a few seconds later as Yoko and Airi pass through the area.)

At 7:28 we have a big hole in the ground that’s filled in with water mostly covering ruined buildings. A severed pipe in one shot suggests some kind of catastrophic calamity, but it happened enough ahead of the overall calamity that it was able to be fenced off. So what is it vaguely familiar to Yoko?

The next oddity comes at the 8:13 mark. That sure looks like a defunct tank on the left side of the screenshot partly under the greenery.

At the 8:39 mark is this Robot Zone sign flanked by remnants of a humanoid robot. The text informs the reader that they’re entering an experimental area where robots are active and cautions the reader not to approach the robots. The damage around here suggests that either someone didn’t listen or the robots went amuck for other reasons:

Just a few seconds later, at the 8:57 mark, we see what appears to be the arm and legs of a Gundam-sized bipedal robot sticking out of a pond. (A nighttime view of this comes at 18:40.) Apparently they had gotten pretty far along in robot development:

The nature of the facility, and why it was set up to be accessible only by a phone booth elevator, feels more like a nod to spy movies, but the most important detail in this sequence of scenes is Yoko’s health scan. There’s been speculation that Yoko isn’t human, but in this shot of the monitor at the 13:50 mark, those numbers sure look pretty standard for a healthy teenager. (The top number is probably heart rate, then below it oxygen saturation and blood pressure, then below that probably CO2 output and respiration rate.) Not sure about the part below the graph with the “L” (presumably Left) and “R” (presumably right) bars.

And what’s up with all these weirdly-colored guinea pigs at the 14:09 mark? I feel like we’ve seen them before:

At the 15:52 mark we have an oddly specific formation of light in the sky, with faint suggestions that they may be connected. Something like this was visible in an earlier episode, too:

Starting at the 20:20 mark we have the moving light in the sky. Yoko assumes it’s a satellite, and she could be right. That it appears just as Yoko is wondering about where “Big Sis” is seems much too suspicious on timing to be a coincidence:

Right after that, Airi explains that a space colony and lunar base were built before the catastrophe happened and work had at least begun on an orbital elevator:

Did those have something to do with the catastrophe? There was a scar visible on the moon a couple of episodes back, so the possibility that the scar was where the lunar base was, and some kind of apocalyptic event happened there, can’t be ruled out.

What does this all add up to? That’s still unclear, and teasing us with details that suggest something but don’t fully add up is par the course. That the research facility remains intact and functional (but still apparently abandoned) when nothing else does is a head-scratcher, though, and that it reminds both Yoko and Airi of their shelter probably isn’t a trivial detail.

Episode 7 was maybe the most loaded episode since the first one with little visual clues, so I felt it warranted special attention. Going forward, I’ll do a full report like this for each episode if there’s a lot to look at and every 2-3 episode when the pickings are thinner.