Somehow this episode was worse than last week’s. I don’t know how, but it succeeded. There was even more Talk no Jutsu, followed by Kirito and Sinon making even more hilarious assumptions about who Death Gun is. By the way, some of the stuff Kirito finally surmised was pretty obvious, the first part being the fact that their Space Game Helmets can’t stop their hearts, given they’re not even connected to one’s heart in the first place. That doesn’t rule out brain damage and such from electrical shock, but again, a safer assumption is that manufacturers made sure these things were pretty damn safe. So if Death Gun can’t magically kill people from afar via computer code, then he’s somehow arranging their deaths in the real world. Makes sense.

Beyond that, though, everything Kirito and Sinon “figured out” about Death Gun while they were talking for twenty more minutes in slightly varied camera angles was the most contrived scenario I’ve seen in a while. His entire MO relies on this MMORPG requiring people to publicly display their personal information. That’s awfully convenient, you know. Why would any popular MMO do this? If it did, it certainly wouldn’t be popular.

Anyway, so Death Gun has an accomplice, right? The theory is that this accomplice incapacitates someone’s physical body while the in-game Death Gun gets ready to shoot them on screen and time their actions perfectly to create the illusion he has the power to execute people in-game. Right…so…first off, why isn’t there a way to temporarily disable the visual immersion of the Space Game Helmet so you can check your immediate surroundings? This seems like what any manufacturer of a VR device would do: make sure your connection to the real world is not so easily severed. Ignoring how people would demand this simple convenience, this sort of scenario with Death Gun would be the most obvious danger to the user. At the very least you should be able to access things like email and texting so you can keep in contact with people, right? Second, why does Kirito somehow think waking one’s self up to fight this accomplice is a bad idea? How do you even know he’s there at the time? Assuming they have a limited amount of whatever combinations of drugs that let them incapacitate people and cause cardiac arrest, they’re probably going to save this ritual until the very moment they’re sure they can pull it off. So the idea that Sinon is incapacitated in the real world at this very moment is absurd. Third, why does Kirito think the accomplice is injecting some sort of chemical into a person in order to incapacitate them when no medical evidence suggests this is the case? Even though bodies decompose, lacerations and injuries do not heal after people die. (Duh.) They’re pretty easy for coroners to find. Fourth, why doesn’t Kirito log-out or contact the fucking police so they get to Sinon’s address? Or the hospital where he’s at? In other words, why aren’t these people using their brains? Even if Sinon dies, they can still catch Death Gun’s accomplice with ease.

By the way, I wonder what “Sterben” means. Apparently Google doesn’t exist in the future, considering it took me three seconds to answer this question. What, does GGO not have an in-game browser at the very least? How lame is this “hardcore” MMO? It makes you put in your personally identifiable information in public, but it doesn’t have an in-game browser. Fucking EVE has that.

Maybe something will happen next week. Maybe they’ll all die.