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The Mysterious Serial Experiments Lain PS1 Game — Transcript

by Dungeon Chill · 30,290 words · 2,406 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:10When you begin Serial Experiments Lain for the PS1, after the familiar Sony Computer
0:16Entertainment and PlayStation logo start up animations, you’re greeted not by an
0:20opening cinematic or a title menu, but by this operating system boot screen.
0:26You’re then prompted to choose either to authorize a user or load data.
0:30Since this was my first time playing, I authorized a user. On the name entry screen,
0:35I chose the name “ダンジョン” for obvious reasons,
0:38but we’ll look at how this came back to bite me much later on in this video.
0:42Anyway, after inputting a name, you’re thrown into the game. The titular Lain is your avatar,
0:46rendered as a 2D sprite, trapped inside a cylinder of data amongst
0:50a black void with colored lines streaking through the background.
0:54Occasionally an orb of yellow light will float by.
0:57The whole thing looks more like a Windows 95 screen saver than a setting for a video game.
1:02Around the outside of each level of the cylinder are nodes, labeled with
1:06abbreviations and numbers. What these letters and numbers signify, you’ll have no idea at first.
1:11Lain can open some of the nodes,
1:13unwrapping them like Christmas presents and throwing them toward the screen.
1:17Others she can’t open.
1:19Sometimes she takes a swing at them and misses. Sometimes the
1:22nodes have their own defences and will zap Lain with a shock of electricity.
1:27The ones that open transition to a new screen with several
1:31keywords and a choice between Play and Exit in the bottom left corner.
1:35Hitting play within these node screens will
1:37start audio recordings of either conversations or diary entries.
1:56And so you proceed, up the cylinder, down the cylinder, selecting nodes,
2:00hoping for them to open, scratching your head at the ones that don’t, and slowly,
2:05by listening to the scattered conversations and diary entries,
2:08as well as watching short snippets of animated sequences, a story begins to form.
2:13But what does it all mean?
2:15Where is the actual game?
2:17What are we meant to be doing here?
2:18And what does any of this have to do with the groundbreaking
2:221998 anime series Serial Experiments Lain?
2:26To explain all of that is going to take... well, about the length of this video.
2:31Welcome to the mysterious Serial Experiments Lain PlayStation 1 game.
2:56Serial Experiments Lain is a... game? Audio drama? Mixed media experiment? developed and published by
3:04Pioneer LDC and released for the PlayStation 1 on November 26, 1998 exclusively in Japan.
3:11I’m sure that most Western fans are familiar with the Serial Experiments Lain anime,
3:15which is a 13-episode television series that aired from July 6 to September 28, 1998 in Japan.
3:22Serial Experiments Lain is about a 14-year old girl named Lain Iwakura who gets a mysterious
3:27email from a dead classmate, telling her to meet her in the Wired, the series’ equivalent to the
3:33internet, because there you can leave behind your physical form and meet God.
3:37Lain initially is uninterested in computers,
3:40but gradually becomes more and more obsessed with technology and the Wired.
3:45It turns out, she has a preternatural gift for
3:47hacking and finds herself entangled in a conflict between several shadowy groups.
3:52That’s a very straightforward summary of the series.
3:55Anyone who’s ever sat down and watched Serial Experiments Lain will tell you
3:59the story and presentation are anything but straightforward.
4:02Furthermore, what some Western fans may not be aware of is the fact that Serial
4:06Experiments Lain was envisioned by its creators as a media franchise.
4:11This franchise includes the television series, Serial Experiments Lain,
4:15and the PlayStation 1 video game, Serial Experiments Lain.
4:18To go along with the two main entries in the franchise are several supplemental materials:
4:23The collected and annotated screenplays, Scenario Experiments Lain; the collage-style episodic
4:29breakdown manual, Visual Experiments Lain; and the design and conceptual artworks collection,
4:34An Omnipresence in Wired, which also includes a short manga that acts as a bridge between
4:39the stories of the video game and the anime series, titled The Nightmare of Fabrication.
4:44Not to mention the various soundtracks, singles, and remix albums. An interactive CD-ROM with a
4:49bunch of artwork and other goofy stuff on it. As well as various other illustrations
4:53and design documents that you can dig up online if you’re really determined.
4:57And I was really determined. Thanks, Internet Archive.
5:01Of course, it’s not uncommon for anime series to feature video games,
5:05supplemental materials, artbooks, as well as soundtracks to accompany their release,
5:09and it’s not uncommon for most of that miscellanea to remain exclusive to Japan, especially in 1998.
5:16The game and the TV series both entered production at the same time,
5:20though the game appeared two months after the series had finished airing,
5:24and it concerns events that take place when Lain was younger than she is in the TV series.
5:30I carefully worded that last statement for reasons that will become clearer much later on.
5:35If you really want to get technical, The Nightmare of Fabrication was the first Lain
5:39thing ever unleashed onto the world, having been published in the March 1998 issue of AX Magazine.
5:46I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if that was my first exposure to Lain.
5:49But anyway, to unpack everything about this game,
5:52we need to look at the TV series as well, since their creations were so intertwined.
5:57I had seen Lain several times when I was younger,
5:59but it had been a few years, more like a decade, since I had last watched it.
6:04So before I played the game, I rewatched Serial Experiments Lain, the TV series,
6:09twice. Once in Japanese with no subtitles and once in Japanese with subtitles.
6:14People familiar with this channel will know that I live in Japan and speak and read Japanese,
6:18so the whole watching it with and without subtitles was just my own personal experiment.
6:23As you become more proficient in any language, translation subtitles just start to become
6:27distracting more than helpful, but I was still interested in seeing how things were translated.
6:31I then played through the Serial Experiments Lain PlayStation 1 game through a browser
6:36reimplementation of the game developed by the team at 3d.laingame.net who went to great pains
6:41to rebuild the game so it could run, most effectively, on chromium-based browsers.
6:46I played this version of the game because it features English subtitles,
6:49whereas there is no fan translation for the PS1 iso.
6:53As we’ll come to see, Serial Experiments Lain is
6:55made up almost exclusively of audio conversations between characters,
6:59so having those subtitles on screen to use for footage in this video is going to be helpful.
7:04By the way, through the web implementation, you can play the game in French, German, Japanese,
7:09Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, or Russian, not just English.
7:12The team is open to translating it into other languages too,
7:16so you can contact them on their github page if you can provide that kind of support.
7:20A link to the website that hosts the game is in the description of this video.
7:23It’s impressive that they’ve managed to reproduce it for
7:26browsers. You can save your progress and everything, which is great, because
7:29100%-ing Serial Experiments Lain took me about 17 hours in total.
7:34After completing the game, I also read through the game manual as well as the official game guide,
7:39which for some reason was only in Chinese in the bundle I found on Internet Archive,
7:44so I had to use Google Translate for that.
7:45I was hunting for any other information or clues that would help me unravel this thing’s mysteries.
7:51The number one thing I was interested in was finding any
7:54solid connections between the anime series story and the game’s story.
7:58I also captured a bit of the actual PS1 game
8:00to get some clean footage for certain parts of this video.
8:03After that, I catalogued my recorded footage.
8:06As we’ll discuss later, the game is presented in a non-linear fashion,
8:10so I was attempting to piece together the story chronologically as best I could.
8:14Next, I read through Scenario Experiments Lain,
8:17the collected and annotated TV series screenplays by series composer and scriptwriter Chiaki Konaka.
8:23And when I say annotated, I mean that there are tons and tons of footnotes
8:26written by Konaka himself concerning the creation
8:29of the show and expanding upon ideas that the creators were interested in exploring.
8:34As with most creators who write non-linear, surreal,
8:37difficult to understand stories, Konaka isn’t so keen on providing
8:40direct explanations to some of the more mysterious aspects of the narrative,
8:44but there’s some interesting information and funny stories about the production in here.
8:48Then, I read Visual Experiments Lain, which functions as a sort of artbook,
8:52but also contains breakdowns of key points for each episode of the TV series.
8:56There’s more information here that gives clearer answers to
8:59some of the mysteries of the show, but it still doesn’t illuminate everything.
9:03As is stated several times throughout this book specifically, the creators meant for many aspects
9:08of the story to remain ambiguous and even they don’t have concrete answers for certain things.
9:14I then read An Omnipresence in Wired, more of a traditional artbook with notes from original
9:19character designer and key animator Yoshitoshi ABe about the creation of various characters,
9:24devices, and locations throughout the series.
9:26An Omnipresence in Wired also contains a 19-page one-shot
9:30manga written and illustrated by ABe titled The Nightmare of Fabrication.
9:35Also, serendipitously, while I was in the midst of my research for this video, Japanese entertainment
9:41magazine CONTINUE Motion Graphics’ January 2025 issue hit newsstands on December 18, 2024.
9:48And in this issue, number 85, is a 50-page retrospective on
9:52the entire Serial Experiments Lain franchise,
9:55including interviews with producer Yasuyuki Ueda and original character designer Yoshitoshi ABe.
10:01I had no idea this was going to come out when it did. I’d never even heard of this magazine before.
10:06I happened upon it when I was walking by my local Kinokuniya book store. Talk about fate.
10:10While reading through these supplemental materials, I watched several live action
10:14and animated series connected to the main creators of Serial Experiments Lain.
10:19I also played through a few other PS1 games that were designed or written by
10:23some of Lain’s creators. And I’ll talk about all of these things when they become relevant.
10:27When I finally sat down to start writing the script for this video,
10:30I watched Serial Experiments Lain again to capture
10:33clean footage from the 2010 Japanese Blu-ray re-release of the series.
10:37As I continued to write the script, I ended up watching
10:39Serial Experiments Lain again. This time with the English dub, which is
10:43surprisingly included on the 2010 Japanese Blu-ray re-release of the series.
10:48Funny thing, this Blu-ray collection features no subtitles or captions in
10:52either Japanese or English, which is pretty annoying but
10:55is actually par for the course for a lot of Japanese anime releases.
10:58Even now, most of the more popular late night anime series don't receive closed captioning,
11:04neither when they air on Japanese television nor when they get released in overpriced Blu-ray sets.
11:09It’s downright insensitive.
11:11The pricing and the lack of consideration for the hearing impaired.
11:14The Lain Blu-ray set’s pretty affordable, though.
11:16As of this writing, you can get it for 9,590 yen which is
11:20about 60 US dollars, again at the current exchange rate at the time I’m writing this.
11:25It’s available on Amazon Japan, and I’m pretty sure they deliver it internationally,
11:28so you know, if you want a high-quality Blu-ray set and don’t mind the lack
11:32of subtitles but the inclusion of the English dub, then you should look into it.
11:36It’s a better package than the Funimation Complete
11:38Series Classic DVD and Blu-ray combo set that I also own.
11:42Oh yeah, I watched the series again while I was editing this video too,
11:45just because, I don’t know, just because I wanted to watch it again.
11:49So I watched the series 5 times over the course of making this video, so yeah.
11:52But, all of this to say that I did my homework. And took
11:56a practically 6-week intensive course on everything Serial Experiments Lain
12:01and related that I could get my hands on to bring you this video.
12:04So, I hope even the most hardcore of series fans learn at least one new thing during the
12:10length of this... retrospective. I don’t know. Whatever you want to call this.
12:14But now, let’s actually talk about Serial Experiments Lain,
12:18where it came from and who created it.
12:42The creation of Serial Experiments Lain involves several key people,
12:45but the seed of the idea was an observation by producer Yasuyuki Ueda concerning the
12:50relationship between individuals and the faceless mass of humanity that surrounds us.
12:55There was no significance to focusing the story around the
12:59internet and technology. Ueda only saw these as tools that had become part of daily life,
13:04so to tell a modern story, it made sense to use them.
13:08The members of the production team he eventually assembled also happened to
13:11be techno-obsessed freaks as well. So that helped.
13:15The 90s saw the rise of the commercial internet,
13:18and it changed the way people could interact with each other on a global scale.
13:22Even though sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were still
13:25quite a ways off--even Myspace wouldn’t come into existence until 5 years after the series
13:30first premiered--the idea of social media was already proliferating in less centralized ways:
13:35message boards, chat rooms, peer to peer servers.
13:38In fact, the phrase “social media” was coined in 1994 by a developer
13:43named Darrel Berry as he was working on Matisse,
13:46a proto social media environment that was meant to combine VR with text-based communication,
13:51in much the same way that the Wired functions in Serial Experiments Lain, and in much the same way
13:56that many science fiction authors envisioned the internet to function some time in the near future.
14:01Yet here we are, in the year 2025, still smacking our meat paws against keyboards and touch screens.
14:07But the ways in which the internet changed a persons’ perception of not only their own
14:12self but of others as well were the origins of what would become Lain,
14:17so Ueda wrote up a project document sometime in 1996.
14:21Looking through interviews both online and in those supplemental books that I mentioned earlier,
14:26it’s clear that Serial Experiments Lain was a hugely collaborative effort.
14:30But who were these other weirdos involved in its creation?
14:32On the writing side of things, there was Chiaki Konaka, sometimes credited as Chiaki J. Konaka.
14:38The “J” comes from the biblical name “John,” a nod to his parents’ affiliation with the
14:42Christian church, though Konaka himself has stated he doesn’t identify as a Christian.
14:47Producer Yasuyuki Ueda stated in an interview for the magazine FRUiTS,
14:51in the October 1st, 1998 issue, that he and Konaka had crossed paths earlier on
14:56in their careers, and Konaka was a well known writer at the time.
15:00As a scenario and scriptwriter, Konaka had previously worked on several Ultraman series
15:05in the 90s, including Ultraman Tiga, which I mentioned in my video Goichi Suda Syndrome,
15:10since there’s a lengthy reference to Ultraman Tiga in Moonlight Syndrome.
15:14Konaka would go on to write the original video animation, or OVA, series Armitage the Third.
15:20The movie adaptation, Armitage the Third: Poly-Matrix,
15:23was a staple of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime rotation in the late 90s.
15:27I rewatched Armitage the Third as part of my research for this video. It’d probably
15:32been about 25 years since I’d last seen it, and I had fond, yet vague memories of it.
15:37Turns out, it’s not great.
15:39Its ideas and themes regarding the advancement of AI and robotic
15:43lifeforms are interesting. The art direction and visuals are fantastic.
15:48But the actual plot is pretty weak.
15:50I mean... Robots? Getting pregnant?
15:52In this economy?
15:53Also in 1995, Konaka wrote the live-action television series Alice 6,
15:58which was directed by his younger brother Kazuya Konaka.
16:01It concerns six models who are hired by a mysterious crew to pose for a photo shoot
16:06in the forest. The crew vanish during the shoot and the girls find themselves pursued by a man
16:11in a white rabbit costume and each episode sees them falling through several dreamlike scenarios.
16:17The series was part of a trend in Japan in the 80s and 90s called “area code
16:21programming” wherein short series were created on shoe-string budgets for local networks.
16:26Alice 6 was shot on location in Shizuoka prefecture and aired only
16:30on local Shizuoka channels and some other local networks in surrounding prefectures.
16:35For a long time, it was considered lost media, but shout out to Dozzyrok on YouTube who managed
16:40to dig it up and 11 of the 12 episodes have received an English fan translation.
16:45The last episode is just a bonus recap and cast interview segment,
16:48so I guess that’s why there’s no translation for it. Episode 11 is the end of the story.
16:52There’s a link to the playlist of the English subtitled episodes in
16:55this video description, if you want to check it out.
16:58It may or may not still be there depending on when you’re watching this.
17:01I watched all 12 episodes of Alice 6 as part of my research for this video.
17:06Turns out, it’s not great.
17:08It’s low budget, nonsensical, and way too on the nose with its references to
17:12Lewis Carrol’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
17:15Just because I said it’s not great, though, doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.
17:19Get ready for many extended photo shoot montages set to C-tier mid-90s Japanese pop tracks.
17:25And one episode consists almost entirely of an amateurish
17:29magic show performed for a group of younger kids, and everybody looks like they didn’t rehearse
17:34the scene and are just a goofing around during a school talent show or something.
17:37It’s actually really charming.
17:50Konaka also had some experience in video games, having written the visual novel/rock-paper-scissor
17:56style turn-based fighting game Alice in Cyberland released on December 20, 1996 for PlayStation 1.
18:03I played Alice in Cyberland as part of my research for this video.
18:07Turns out, it’s not great.
18:09Its plot and world aren’t very interesting,
18:11and the combat system is frustratingly slow and boring.
18:15I don’t really have anything else to say about it. It’s not great, and I didn’t enjoy playing it.
18:19There’s also a 2-episode OVA series based on the game,
18:22but it didn’t involve Konaka, so I didn’t bother with it.
18:26One thing that’s interesting about Armitage the Third, Alice 6, and Alice in Cyberland
18:31is that they all carry concepts that are reused frequently throughout Konaka’s work.
18:35Chiefly, the obsession with technology and how it affects our identity and sense of self,
18:40fragmenting us into different personas.
18:43There are also other superficial connections that Konaka himself points out in the footnotes
18:47of the first episode screenplay of Serial Experiments Lain in Scenario Experiments Lain.
18:53A version of the NAVI computer system that’s so
18:55prominently used in Lain was first introduced in Armitage the Third.
18:59I don’t know if any of the characters in Armitage ever actually utter the phrase NAVI,
19:03but according to Konaka, he used that name for the devices in his screenplays.
19:08The name Arisu, the phonetic pronunciation of Alice in Japanese and one of Lain’s classmates
19:13in the TV series, appears to be a favorite of Konaka’s.
19:17You think there’s enough Alice in Wonderland references in his mid-90s work?
19:20According to another footnote from Scenario Experiments Lain,
19:23he first used the name, Arisu, in an episode he wrote for the 1994 live-action
19:29anthology horror series “Gakkou no Kaidan” or “School Ghost Stories.”
19:33His episode was titled “Zekkyou High School” or “Screaming High School.”
19:38I did not watch this episode during my research, because I couldn’t find it.
19:42I found several of the films that spun off from this television series and an anime adaptation,
19:47but none of these involved Konaka, so I didn’t bother.
19:50I did manage to find a scan of the episode screenplay on what I can
19:54only assume is Konaka’s personal website, Konaka.com, that was last updated in 2010.
20:00And yeah, you can tell this site was built in 1997 and just left that way. What a trip.
20:04There are screenplays for 2 more Gakkou no Kaidan episodes that Konaka wrote,
20:09as well as various other screenplays, including one he wrote for a The Big O audio drama CD.
20:15He even wrote a scenario for an Alice in Cyberland 2 game, which was never made.
20:20Part 2 of this scenario is subtitled “The 7th Protocol.”
20:23Those who’ve seen the Serial Experiments Lain
20:25anime will recognize this as the series’ main macguffin.
20:28And I refer to it as a macguffin, because that’s how Konaka himself describes it in
20:32his footnote when the 7th protocol is introduced in the episode 8 screenplay.
20:37The names Juri, Chisa Yomoda, and Reika, other classmates in Serial Experiments Lain,
20:42were first used in the Alice 6 series.
20:45Arisu, Juri, and Reika were then used as the names of the three
20:49protagonists in the Alice in Cyberland PS1 game.
20:52After watching and reading some of the different incarnations of these characters,
20:56I can say that there are some similar traits that Konaka gives to each version,
21:00but they’re not meant to be the same character or create any kind of metaverse between his works.
21:05Thank god.
21:06Instead, I think it’s simply that he likes using the same names over and over. Fair enough.
21:12For Lain’s artwork and design,
21:13Ueda found Yoshitoshi ABe who was a university student at the time.
21:18Ueda found his homepage while just browsing the internet one day, so the story goes, and contacted
21:23him to see if he’d be interested in becoming the lead artist on this new project Ueda was creating.
21:29ABe didn’t hesitate to take the job, even though he had hardly any experience drawing
21:33manga at the time, let alone drawing the same character over and over again. And it
21:37goes without saying that he’d never worked on a game or TV series production before.
21:42It turned out to be a perfect fit though, and ABe not only designed almost all aspects of the
21:46visual presentation in Lain, from the characters to the machines and devices to the environments
21:51that the story would take place in, but also gave his own ideas for character arcs and story beats.
21:57Though a novice in every sense of the word, he became an integral part of the production team,
22:01even taking on the role of key animator on several episodes.
22:05Serial Experiments Lain would launch ABe to a successful career throughout the early 2000s,
22:10where he would go on to create the series NieA_7, Haibane Renmei, and Texhnolyze.
22:16That last one would reunite him with writer Chiaki Konaka.
22:20All of these series were produced by Yasuyuki Ueda as well.
22:23Junji Nakahara was chosen as director for the Serial Experiments Lain game,
22:28having worked on a previous Pioneer LDC game, NOeL: Not Digital.
22:32NOeL: Not Digital is another strange, Operating System based,
22:36mixed media product released for the PlayStation 1 in 1996.
22:40It had two sequels, NOeL: La Neige, which is French for “snow,”--and wouldn’t ya know it?
22:45the game takes place in winter--released on PlayStation 1 and NOeL 3 on Saturn with
22:50an enhanced port, NOel 3: Mission on the Line, released later on for the PlayStation 1 as well.
22:55The first two games, Not Digital and La Neige, are dating sims.
23:00However, unlike most Japanese dating sims where you interact with your digital love interests in
23:04person (inside the game world anyway), in NOeL you make video calls to 3 girls that you met
23:10during summer break, with the hope of having one of them confess to you by the end of the year.
23:14So it’s like a long distance dating simulation.
23:17It’s a pretty complex game.
23:18By receiving messages and progressing through conversations with the girls,
23:22you learn their interests and their schedules.
23:25NOeL features an in-game clock that can be advanced at will,
23:29but you can’t go backwards in time.
23:31You need to call at the girls at the right time of day, otherwise you’ll
23:34get their answering machines. They have their own busy personal lives, after all.
23:38Sometimes you need to wait for them to call you.
23:41While talking to them, keywords will scroll by and need to be caught in
23:45order to further different conversation branches.
23:47Since everything is happening in real time, you have to catch the topics and
23:51then click on them to advance the conversation at the right moment.
23:54Just like in an actual conversation with someone, if you bring up something she
23:59doesn’t want to talk about, broach a topic at the wrong time, or just don’t respond
24:03with anything as she’s talking, she may get irritated and even hang up on you.
24:07Relive the highlights of your own miserable love
24:09life by messing up phone conversations and crying in shame after hanging up.
24:14It’s a strange, yet surprisingly engaging experience, once you get the hang of it.
24:14The game. Not, uh, not real life. You’ll never get the hang of that.
24:14Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, given the amount of dialogue and the unique interface,
24:19it’s never received a fan translation of any kind.
24:22NOeL 3 abandons the dating sim format and instead has you hacking different security
24:27cameras inside your school, which has been taken over by a group of techno-terrorists,
24:32and you need to guide the other students to safety.
24:34Interesting note, Ryutaro Nakamura, director of the Serial Experiments
24:38Lain anime, directed the movie portions of NoEL 3.
24:42Anyway, Junji Nakahara is credited as the planner and gameplay director on
24:46the first game, and after messing around with this thing, it’s easy
24:49to see how the Serial Experiments Lain game came out the way it did.
24:53There are a few other key members of the creative team that were more heavily involved in the Serial
24:57Experiments Lain anime, so I’ll talk about them when I get around to talking about the series.
25:01As I said earlier, Serial Experiments Lain was originally conceived as a video game.
25:06Yet even from the outset, the creators knew they were using the term “game” only loosely.
25:12Very, very loosely.
25:28What you see is what you get. There is nothing more to the Serial Experiments
25:32Lain game beyond navigating this large Lain avatar up and down this cylinder of data and
25:37selecting nodes, hoping that they’ll open up and reveal something to you.
25:41Gameplay consists of pressing left or right to highlight different nodes,
25:45turning the cylinder, and ascending or descending to different levels to try to access more nodes.
25:51All the while, the only music track you’ll hear is the same,
25:54music box style tune, over and over and over.
25:59My God.
26:00It’s maddening.
26:07This song starts out as an eerie backdrop and sets a particular mood,
26:12but very quickly wears out its welcome.
26:14It’s only about 2 minutes long, and because you’ll be popping in and out of the node screens,
26:18which have no music by the way, it always restarts when you come back to the main area.
26:23I thought about looping it in the background for the entire length
26:26of this video to simulate a play session, but I’m not that cruel.
26:37No, really, I’m not.
26:38When you start a new game, the node Cou001 is highlighted.
26:43Selecting this node transitions to a screen with three keywords listed.
26:47There’s a Play button that’s currently highlighted in the bottom left corner,
26:51so selecting play begins a conversation between a woman and Lain.
26:55It appears to be their first meeting,
26:57and the woman tries to break the ice by offering Lain a beverage.
27:01They discuss the qualities of Earl Grey tea, and that’s about it for this conversation.
27:06After the recording ends, you have a few choices.
27:08You can try selecting one of the other keywords. These will transport you to different connected
27:13nodes that could be on any level of the cylinder and concern similar topics of conversation.
27:19But these nodes may or may not be accessible to you at this time.
27:23In fact, a lot of them just throw an error, especially early on.
27:27Or you can exit the node and continue exploring the current level you’re on. After a node has been
27:33completed it will turn gray, and this is how you keep track of your progress throughout the game.
27:37One thing to note, the PS1 version of the game had an autosave feature
27:41that would save after every completed node. The browser version does not,
27:45and you’ll need to manually save your progress from the menu.
27:49If you decide to try out the browser version of the game,
27:51don’t forget to save your progress often.
27:53In any case, the goal of gameplay is simple. Turn all the nodes gray.
27:58There are several other things you’re going to need to do to make that happen though.
28:02As I mentioned near the beginning, there are different types of nodes,
28:05all denoted by different abbreviations and numbers.
28:08The Cou nodes are counseling recordings.
28:11The story of Serial Experiments Lain the game hinges on the monthly
28:15therapy sessions between Lain and her counselor, 27-year old Touko Yonera.
28:20Dia nodes are diagnosis recordings. These are Touko’s summaries of the counseling sessions,
28:25which reveal a colder and more clinical attitude toward Lain as a patient,
28:30or client, as Touko calls her.
28:32And, I mean, I guess that’s only natural. The diagnosis recordings are meant to be
28:36sent to her supervisor, and this is her job, after all.
28:39But it’s interesting to hear the illusion of friendliness and camaraderie that Touko tries to
28:44project toward Lain in the counseling sessions shattered by these professional observations.
28:49There are also Tda nodes. These are Touko’s diary where we learn
28:53more about her personal life and her own feelings about Lain and her work.
28:57Naturally, the diary entries are more confessional and reveal another side to
29:01Touko’s character. They also detail several subplots that aren’t related to Lain at all.
29:06Lain also begins keeping a diary at the behest of Touko. And these are labeled as Lda nodes.
29:12Lain’s diaries detail her home and school life,
29:15as well as reflect on some of the counseling sessions. Much like with Touko’s diary,
29:20there are entire subplots here that have no connection with the counseling.
29:24Then there are Dc or digital camera nodes. These are animated cinematics,
29:29produced by Triangle Staff, the same studio that would go on to produce the anime.
29:33Here the character designs look slightly different. This is
29:36because they were created based off of ABe’s original designs by Hitoshi Haga,
29:41while the anime series character designs were handled by Takahiro Kishida.
29:45These animated sequences connect to some of the counseling and diary entries at times,
29:51but mostly end up telling a separate story that becomes important toward the very end of the game.
29:56Chiaka Konaka, who originally worked on the overall composition of the game’s story and
30:01wrote the screenplay for the animated segments,
30:03moved on to writing the screenplays for the anime when the game entered full production.
30:08So the writing of all the dialogue in the game was done by Hideko Shimizu. And I have to say,
30:12with the game’s more intense focus on characters and conversation, Shimizu’s
30:17more naturalistic writing style works far better than Konaka’s minimalistic approach to dialogue.
30:22Conversations in the game are rich with nuance and character’s hiding
30:26their true intentions, especially in the conversations between Lain and Touko.
30:30Hearing their talks and then hearing Touko’s diagnosis,
30:34then hearing her personal thoughts in her diary entries,
30:37then hearing Lain’s thoughts in her own diary, it weaves a complex web of a relationship.
30:42Far greater in depth than anything done in the anime. Though to be fair,
30:46the anime had different aims, and I think Konaka’s
30:48writing there is brilliant and fits what they were going for perfectly.
30:52Continuing on with the nodes, though, there are a few that don’t divulge more of the story,
30:56but are essential for making progress in the game.
30:59The first of these are the Sskn nodes, which stand for Saisei-kun. Saisei has several different
31:05meanings in Japanese: “restoration, regeneration, reclamation, recall.”
31:10Any one of these translations could be a good fit for these nodes,
31:13because they’re upgrades, which allow Lain to access more nodes.
31:17Remember how some nodes wouldn’t open or would actively attack Lain?
31:20These upgrades allow you to bypass their locks and defense mechanisms.
31:24Along with that, there are GaTE nodes,
31:26which are Gate Passes. You’ll need to collect four of these to access the next cylinder.
31:31That’s right. The current cylinder where the game
31:32starts is labelled as Site A, and there are 22 levels.
31:36There’s also a Site B, but you need to collect all 4 Gate Passes in order to
31:41access it. Site B contains a few more Sskn nodes and only has 13 levels.
31:46On the PS1 version of the game, Site A was on Disc 1 and Site B was on Disc 2. You swap
31:52between them by opening the menu and selecting “Change” once you’ve collected all 4 Gate passes.
31:58In the browser version, this swap happens automatically after a short loading screen.
32:02There are also P2 nodes, each corresponding to a different body part of the Poly-tan doll, a 3D
32:08render that may or may not hold any significance to the overall story, but completing the doll
32:13unlocks more nodes, so collecting all of its parts is essential to completing the game.
32:18If all of this doesn’t already sound complicated enough, even after you’ve
32:23collected all of the upgrades, gate passes, and Polytan parts, certain nodes will not unlock.
32:29And not all of the nodes that do unlock are visible at first glance. Some only appear
32:35after listening to other nodes, and the ones that then appear may not unlock right away.
32:40There are also bonus scenes that play if you stay idle on each level of the cylinders.
32:45Some of these will play conversations that you’ll gain access to later,
32:48but others will play more animated cutscenes outside of the Dc nodes that show different
32:53parts of the story that were hinted at in diary entries or just other bizarre moments.
33:04And so, this is how the game goes, traversing the cylinders,
33:08attempting to open nodes, listening to conversations and diary entries,
33:12watching short movies, collecting upgrades, trying to move forward.
33:16The numbers on the nodes put them in chronological order, but not
33:20all of them are accessible in chronological order.
33:23Also, they are only in chronological order in relation to nodes of the same type. Yet
33:29the overall story is broken up between all of these different types of nodes.
33:33What this means is, piecing together when certain events take place between the counseling sessions,
33:38diary entries, and movie clips is difficult as you’re playing through the game.
33:42This is intentional on the part of the creators. There’s a linear
33:46story here, but you’re not meant to experience it in a linear fashion.
33:50In fact, as we’ll see later, even attempting to cut up recorded footage of a playthrough and place
33:55all of the different types of nodes in the exact chronological order in which they all take place
34:00proves to be a very difficult task, because there are intentional gaps in the narrative.
34:04There are a couple of different ways to tackle the game as well.
34:07You could attempt to move through the levels in order,
34:10backing out of node screens and scouring the cylinder for the next numerical node.
34:15Or you could use the keyword system and piece together the
34:17story through its themes in a more abstract way. The choice is yours.
34:21I’ll say this, though the characters and the narrative are interesting and engaging,
34:26playing through the game to try to piece the story together is a test of patience.
34:30For every video I make, I take extensive notes while playing through games and capturing
34:34footage. Since I was playing through this game in a browser. This is what that process looked like.
34:39I’d access a node, write down its alphabetic and numerical code,
34:43and write a brief description of what the conversation or movie clip was about.
34:47This was work. It was like having a data entry job. And
34:50it only became more tedious as the playthrough wore on.
34:53Now, I knew I’d be making a video,
34:55so having all of these notes and timestamps and everything clearly labeled was essential.
34:59But even without all of this, actually playing Serial Experiments Lain can be pretty monotonous.
35:05I’d recommend just going with the flow, trying to follow keywords, not worrying
35:09about what nodes unlock and which ones don’t, and just letting the narrative wash over you.
35:14Eventually, in Site B, on either levels 12 or 13,
35:17you’ll reach the final counseling, diagnosis, Dc, Touko’s diary, and Lain’s diary nodes.
35:24Each of these will trigger an ending cutscene. And by this point, you will not have been able
35:28to open all of the nodes, so you know where this is going: a 2nd playthrough.
35:33After the ending cutscene plays, Lain will turn and face the screen and actually say the
35:39name that you input on the name entry screen when you started a new game, or authorized a new user.
35:44And here’s where entering my name as “ダンジョン” came back to bite me in the ass.
35:49She couldn’t say the name.
35:53I don’t know if this is a bug in the browser version or the same
35:56would have happened on the PS1 original, but I was stuck here.
35:59No matter how many times I reloaded, tried different ending nodes,
36:02refreshed my browser, nothing worked.
36:05I thought this was it, and I wouldn’t be able to continue, or I’d have to start over.
36:09By this point, I’d played for about 9 hours, though,
36:11and having to start over would have been painful.
36:13So I started digging around the 3d.laingame site.
36:17On the options page, at the bottom of the screen was a dialogue box
36:20that contained the “save file” for the game.
36:23Scrolling to the bottom of this text, reveals the player name, which was still displayed as “ダンジョン”.
36:28Since Lain was having such a hard time saying this,
36:31I decided to delete some characters until my name was just “ダ”.
36:35I then hit the load state button and reloaded the website, as per the instructions here.
36:39This time, after triggering the ending cutscene and arriving at
36:43the screen where Lain says the player’s name,
36:45she said it and the game advanced to a screen asking me whether or not I wanted to continue.
36:50I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
36:53Hitting “end” will just bump you back to the authorize user or load data screen.
36:58Hitting “continue” will send Lain back to Site A where not only will you be able to
37:02access more of the nodes you couldn’t on a first playthrough, but new nodes will also appear.
37:08There are even some new types of nodes that show up. The Tak,
37:12or talk, nodes. These are short audio clips that I’ll discuss more later on.
37:17During the 2nd playthrough, more of Touko’s diary becomes available, specifically entries
37:22that deal with events before the start of the game that are hinted at in the 1st playthrough.
37:26More of Lain’s diary entries also become available,
37:29but not all of them. There’s one that still won’t open.
37:32There are also new Ekm, Ere, and Eda nodes that appear but don’t open. On this playthrough.
37:40That’s right. Once you’ve opened all of the nodes that you can during a 2nd playthrough,
37:45it’s time to trigger the last cutscene through one of the other ending nodes again.
37:48The cutscene does not change. Nor will it for the
37:51next 4 times you need to run through the game to unlock every single node.
37:56So technically, you need to
37:57go through seven playthroughs to see everything the game has to offer.
38:01I’m using the term “playthrough” as loosely
38:03as the developers used the term “game” when designing this thing.
38:07Each time you view one of the ending nodes, more of the other nodes will unlock,
38:11with the final nodes being those talk nodes I mentioned earlier.
38:15And as I said they’re just Lain speaking a few lines
38:17that honestly don’t have any bearing on the story.
38:20In fact, during my fifth playthrough, I started to get the feeling that
38:23the game’s designers were mocking me for digging this deeply into things.
38:36But there were still new nodes unlocking that revealed more of the overall story.
38:41Now, could you just hit continue after viewing the ending cutscene and head straight for the
38:46top of Site B to complete another ending node, and just do that 5 times in a row
38:51to have everything totally unlocked without scouring both Sites A and B each and every time?
38:57I don’t know. I didn’t try it.
38:59I don’t know if certain nodes need to be completed before viewing an ending again unlocks others.
39:05If anyone has any clue about that, leave a comment.
39:07Being able to just bum rush the endings and then have everything
39:11open on one pass through both Sites would make things slightly, SLIGHTLY,
39:16less tedious, I suppose, but there are still a lot of nodes to go through.
39:20687 in total.
39:23And I unlocked every single one of them.
39:27So now you know, basically, what the structure of this game is and how to complete it.
39:31But what is our reward for doing this? What grand narrative does
39:35all of this menuing and data entry reveal?
39:38Well, we’ll get to that.
39:39First of all, most people experienced the TV series before the game, so I feel like it makes
39:44sense to talk about the events of the series before talking about the events of the game.
39:49I know there’s gonna be at least one smartass out there who comments that actually they played
39:53the game first, but you know what, just shut up and accept that you’re a freak.
39:57It’s ok. We don’t judge here.
40:13As we’ve established, the creators of Serial Experiments Lain envisioned a
40:17multimedia project. And from the outset,
40:20they wanted to create something, for lack of a better word, experimental.
40:25And, uh, yeah, if you just watched the previous section of this video,
40:28it feels like they accomplished that.
40:30This isn’t an uncommon practice for Japanese media companies.
40:33Manga series receive anime adaptations in hopes of selling more manga. TV series
40:39get video games. Video games get TV series. Profits cycle among these different products.
40:44So it wasn’t any sort of a crazy notion for them to consider the anime as a way to
40:49get people interested in buying their video game.
40:52This is confirmed in that same interview with producer Yasuyuki
40:55Udea in FRUiTS magazine that I referenced earlier.
41:04It’s only in hindsight, knowing how popular and influential the TV series became,
41:08that you sort of wonder at the fact that it all kind of started out as,
41:12“Hey, let’s make this anime too, so people buy our video game.”
41:15Ueda gave Chiaki Konaka and the other main creative members of the anime
41:20staff a lot of freedom to create a story distinct from the game’s,
41:24merely using its elements as a springboard.
41:27This idea of a reiteration, another experiment,
41:31if you will--is what inspired the final title of the franchise, “Serial Experiments Lain.”
41:37This is confirmed in the episode breakdown guide, Visual Experiments Lain.
41:41While Junji Nakahara directed the gameplay portion of the Serial Experiments Lain
41:45video game and Tetsuya Endo directed the animated movie portions, for the series,
41:50Ueda needed staff who were more experienced in anime production.
41:54He tapped veteran director Ryutaro Nakamura for
41:57that role and Takahiro Kishida for character design and layout art.
42:01Endo’s interpretations of Yoshitoshi ABe’s original designs are a bit
42:05cutesier and are sort of jarring if you’re coming from the anime.
42:08I feel like Kishida’s designs are more faithful to ABe’s concept work.
42:12Kishida also played a large role in shaping some
42:15story elements and designs that give the TV series its unique personality.
42:20In fact, one of the series most iconic images was created by him.
42:24Lain in the bear suit pajamas. We’ll examine this more later.
42:28Junji Nakahara would go on to handle digital effects for the Lain TV series,
42:32designing the NAVI’s Communication OS and the more advanced Copland OS,
42:37as well as crafting various other effects that the show employs throughout its episodes.
42:41Meanwhile, Ryutaro Nakamura’s unique directorial style and eye for shot
42:46composition and the pacing of scenes gave anime Lain a much different feel than game Lain.
42:51Nakamura would go on to direct several critically acclaimed, avant-gard anime
42:55series throughout the rest of the 90s and 2000s, such as Colorful, Kino’s Journey, and Ghost Hound.
43:02In 2009, it was announced that Nakamura would reunite with ABe and Konaka to direct Despera,
43:08a proposed anime series set in the early 20th century during Japan’s Taisho era, about a
43:14young girl who can build various devices despite having no background in science or engineering.
43:19The series entered development hell in the early 2010s and was ultimately shelved in
43:232013 when Nakamura passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
43:28It’s sad that we lost such a creative voice and visionary.
43:32Both Konaka and ABe have made statements about reviving the series, but as of 2025,
43:37the only thing that exists is a book published by Konaka and ABe that has various artworks and
43:43short stories that were created while the series was in active production.
43:46We can only wonder at would could have been and
43:49hope that someday the series they envisioned sees the light of day.
43:52It definitely won’t be the same without Nakamura helming it,
43:55but still, the story that the book hints at looks really interesting.
43:59But back to Lain, it became evident from the production
44:02of episode 1 that the series was going to be something special.
44:05When the cut of episode 1 was completed, before it aired, tapes of the episode were
44:10passed around to different animation studios in Japan who marveled at its artistry.
44:14Its landscapes of powerlines crisscrossing the sky,
44:17its main character draped in wires, its visions of monstrous PC hardware,
44:22this is imagery that permeates the collective unconscious of the internet even today.
44:26But it wasn’t just the visuals that floored all of
44:29these industry veterans back in 1998. It was the sound as well.
44:33Sound director Youta Tsuruoka and sound designer and engineer Kouji Kasamatsu,
44:38along with music director Akira Takemoto created a lush soundscape that assaults,
44:43unnerves, plays tricks, and delivers emotional punches.
44:47In an interview in the back of Visual Experiments Lain,
44:50the three of them detail their approach to the sound design in the series.
44:54One of the more interesting revelations to come out of
44:56this interview was how they buried the dialogue in the overall mix.
45:00Usually voices are placed up front, so they stand out and are easy to hear.
45:04In an attempt to give the series a more couched and claustrophobic feel,
45:08they placed the dialogue lower.
45:10The team was actively crafting the sounds of the series to create feelings of tension and unease.
45:16Distortion, layering, placing sound effects and music at different frequencies were all
45:21techniques they implemented with the help of director Nakamura,
45:24who if you’ve seen any of his other series, has a keen interest in sound design in his productions.
45:29The attention to detail is astounding.
45:31Lain is a series best experienced with headphones to appreciate the richness
45:35of its audio, but even just watching it on a TV with only decent speakers,
45:40the effort put into the sound design still shines through.
45:43And the creators knew this, because they knew most
45:45of their audience would be viewing it on small CRTs at the time of its broadcast.
45:50Of course, you can’t talk about the sound without mentioning the iconic opening,
45:54which doesn’t begin with the opening song, but a white screen and the lines:
45:59"Present day, present time"
46:06This is so iconic that I’m sure there are people out there who
46:08have seen this segment as a meme but didn’t even know where it came from.
46:12You don’t need to have seen Lain to know Lain.
46:15It’s only after this that the song “Duvet” by English alternative rock band Boa kicks in.
46:21Duvet is a haunting track, originally released on the band’s 1998 debut album,
46:26The Race of a Thousand Camels.
46:28And this whole album is fantastic by the way. Hard recommend Boa. They’re excellent.
46:32The band didn’t really have any part in the song winding up as the opening for Lain. Ueda heard
46:37the track and wanted to use it, so the dealings went through legal departments for the most part.
46:42Lead singer Jasmine Rogers has answered numerous questions about Duvet’s inclusion in Lain,
46:47and all she can really say on behalf of the band is they were
46:50pretty excited to be part of an anime production, even in a tangential way.
46:54In fact, the resurgence of popularity of Lain and Duvet in the late 2010s and
46:59early 2020s is what led Boa to reunite after initially breaking up in 2005,
47:04according to social media posts from the various band members.
47:07They released a new album, Whiplash,
47:10in 2024. I listened to it as part of my research for this video.
47:13No, I’m just kidding. Although I have listened to the album. It’s good.
47:17The ending music track “Tooi Sakebi,” “Far Cry” or “Distant Scream” was written by
47:23Reichi “CHABO” Nakaido, best known in Japan as the guitarist and vocalist
47:27for the band RC Succession, who were formed in 1968 and broke up in 1991.
47:33They were hugely popular during the 70s and 80s.
47:35“Tooi Sakebi” is a powerful ending track featuring Nakaido’s slithering
47:40electric guitar lead and raspy vocals, backed by a forlorn acoustic progression
47:45with ghostly wobbly synthesized tones occasionally surfacing in the background.
47:49The rest of Lain’s background music is more in this rock-inflected styling,
47:53though there are some more techno-inspired tracks sprinkled in throughout.
47:57One of my favorite tracks is the bizarre, effects-drenched guitar noodling of “Mist
48:02of Different Dimension,” which plays initially near the end of episode 1
48:05and shows up near the end of several other episodes throughout the series.
48:09Unfortunately, I can’t play snippets of any of these tracks,
48:12because copyright, but the soundtracks are on YouTube, so you can easily find them.
48:17Lain the game featured one monotonous music track. Lain the anime features a
48:28rich palette of music that adds to the series mystifying atmosphere.
48:33The episodes of Lain are called layers, possibly in reference to the Open Systems
48:37Intercommunication or OSI model’s layers of connection between devices and networks.
48:43Though they could also be referring more metaphorically
48:45to the layers of the narrative and characters throughout the series.
48:49The ambiguity is almost definitely intentional.
48:52Every episode has a similar introduction that portrays
48:55various shots of the streets of Shibuya. A voiceover usually accompanies these scenes.
49:00The content of the voiceover is cryptic but related in some way
49:03to the storyline of each episode, and then we get the layer title screen.
49:07These are also pretty iconic. They use
49:09the “whisper” voice from the MacOS Speech Control Panel.
49:18In fact, there are many Apple and Macintosh references throughout the
49:21series, some blatant and others fairly obscure.
49:25But now, I think it’s time to dive into the story of Serial Experiments Lain the anime.
49:30As I mentioned earlier in this video, I feel like it’s impossible to talk
49:34about the game’s story without first looking at the anime’s.
49:37I also just want to analyze the story of Lain, because I think it’ll be fun.
49:41If you’ve watched this channel before, you’ll know I spend pretty much the entire last half,
49:46sometimes even the last two-thirds of my
49:48videos’ runtimes analyzing the narrative in the games I cover.
49:52And it’s really just because I love storytelling and looking
49:54at the structure of stories and what makes them function.
49:57There’s also a lot of information about Lain
50:00specifically that I found in the supplemental books and interviews
50:03I read that will be interesting to point out while examining the story.
50:06So even if you’re a Lain veteran, you may want to stick around through this
50:10next section of the video. There might be some tidbits even you never knew.
50:13But if you’ve never seen it and want to watch it on your own first, you can go to this time
50:18to skip to the next section of the video where I go over the game’s story in detail.
50:23If you’d rather avoid both of these spoiler-filled segments, you can skip to the pretty much spoiler
50:29free conclusion of the video where I talk about Lain’s legacy, a few events that have
50:33happened recently related to Lain, as well as my final thoughts on everything Lain.
50:39I can’t make any promises that there might not be a couple spoilers in the conclusion,
50:43but I don’t talk about any major story beats or anything, just overall themes mostly.
50:48So, yeah, the choice is yours.
50:50Obviously, I’d prefer it if you just watched the whole video, you know, but, yeah, it’s up to you.
51:14The first Layer, Weird, kicks off with the death of Chisa Yomoda, a 2nd-year junior high
51:20school student who jumps from the top of a building in the backstreets of Shibuya.
51:24This opening sequence does a lot of heavy-lifting,
51:26introducing the mood of the series, as well as several of its visual motifs and story themes.
51:31The shallowness of modern city life, powerlines in the sky,
51:36splatters of red in shadows, on-screen text, background sounds warped and garbled.
51:41All of these elements will be further utilized and expanded on throughout the entirety of the series.
51:47Two of the most prominent visual elements throughout the series are
51:50the images of power lines and the “blood-spattered” shadows.
51:53The power lines are thoroughly explained in the episode 1 breakdown in Visual Experiments
51:58Lain. And there are really two sides to their prominence throughout the series.
52:01On the one hand, they represent the border between the real world and the Wired. The
52:05physical lines that carry electrical impulses and information to and fro throughout the world.
52:11In fact, when the border between the real world and the Wired is shattered
52:15later on in the series, the power lines in Lain’s neighborhood break.
52:19The other reason for their inclusion is pretty simple
52:22actually. This is just what Japan looks like.
52:24The power wire section of Visual Experiments Lain details how in New York City throughout
52:29the 20th century, the power lines were mostly all buried underground.
52:33This was due to a massive snowstorm that swept the city in the 1880s,
52:37causing huge infrastructural damage.
52:39Afterwards, the city started burying them to better prevent
52:42massive blackouts due to weather disasters.
52:45Many European cities also have their powerlines underground.
52:48In virtually all of Japan, though, both city and countryside, the powerlines remain above ground.
52:55The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this video.
52:58Though Tokyo did launch an initiative in the lead up to the 2020 Olympics to bury
53:03many of the cities powerlines, but this took place only in the busiest
53:06tourist neighborhoods and areas surrounding the Olympic village.
53:09Point is, look around Tokyo, Kyoto, small towns and villages in the countryside,
53:14and you’ll still see these weblike lines.
53:18Now, the blood-spattered shadows are in fact not there in real life,
53:22and much has been made of their meaning in Serial Experiments Lain.
53:26And actually calling them “blood-spattered” isn’t technically correct. They don’t always
53:30appear red. Sometimes there are blue, purple, and white splotches mixed in.
53:34The various supplemental materials make little mention of them. However, in a Q&A panel from
53:39American anime convention Otakon held in August 2000 with Yoshitoshi ABe and Yasuyuki Ueda.
53:46ABe explains that the splotchy shadows were director Nakamura’s idea and were meant to
53:51represent the Wired’s ever present influence in the real world, always there in the shadows.
53:56This may also explain why, a few scenes later, when there is a deliberate shot
54:01of Lain’s shadow on the ground, it’s filled with a substance that looks like clear water.
54:05Lain hasn’t yet been corrupted by the Wired.
54:08At school, her classmates Alice and Reika are comforting Julie,
54:12and I’m just going to use the English pronunciations of Alice
54:15and Julie to make it easier on myself throughout the rest of this video.
54:18When they approach Lain, they mention Julie is upset because she’s received
54:22an email from Chisa Yomoda, even though she died a week earlier.
54:26The other girls hypothesize that someone is playing a cruel prank.
54:29Lain is unaware of any email, because she’s not really up on
54:33all the gadgets and technology that the other kids her age are using.
54:36As the school day continues, Lain experiences a few visual hallucinations. Students outside
54:42turn to silhouettes and disappear, the writing on the classroom blackboard becomes blurry,
54:46and a smoky, ectoplasm-like substance leaks from her fingertips.
54:51Mental illness and Lain’s auditory and visual hallucinations actually play a central role in the
54:56story of the game, so we’ll examine this in more detail during the next section of the video.
55:00But concerning the scene where Lain sees a smoke-like substance coming out of her fingers,
55:05both Konaka, in his footnote about the scene in Scenario Experiments Lain,
55:09and Ueda, in that Otakon Q&A panel, mention that these hallucinations
55:13are meant to firmly situate the show in Lain’s own perception of reality.
55:18And the inspiration for this scene, in particular,
55:20came from reports of actual schizophrenic patients who described similar hallucinations.
55:25All throughout these early scenes, text keeps appearing on screen,
55:29taken from the emails that Chisa supposedly sent to her classmates.
55:34When I died? It hurt! Lol
55:39After school, Lain checks her own computer, or NAVI, as they’re referred to in the world of Lain.
55:44The name was inspired by Apple’s Knowledge Navigator,
55:47and as I mentioned earlier, was first used in Konaka’s screenplays for Armitage the Third.
55:51Lain’s NAVI is an older model for kids,
55:54pushed off to the side and seemingly forgotten on the desk in her bedroom.
55:57Unsurprisingly, Lain also has a message from Chisa who invites her to come to the Wired,
56:02because she’s found god there.
56:04Lain’s home life seems fairly depressing. Everyone appears lost in their own world,
56:08as evidenced by their silent dinner where her older sister, Mika, excuses herself.
56:13Lain tries to tell her mother that she’s received an email from a girl who’s been dead for a week,
56:17but her mom doesn’t even acknowledge the comment.
56:19And now we come to the bear suit.
56:21Much has been made of this particular outfit. It doesn’t show up in the screenplay for episode
56:261 and was actually designed by anime character designer Takahiro Kishida.
56:30It became a small point of contention between the creators. When Konaka and
56:35Ueda first saw the design they were resistant to including it, thinking it was, I don’t know,
56:39for lack of a better way of putting it, too weeby for the story they were trying to tell.
56:44Kishida found an ally in director Nakamura,
56:46who understood that the design represented a way for Lain to insulate herself from
56:51interactions with her family and to cut off interference from the outside world.
56:55After a bit of back and forth, Kishida and Ueda were ultimately convinced of
56:59the outfit’s purpose, and it found its way into the finished product.
57:03Now, along with “Present day, present time,” the layer titles, the powerlines,
57:07and the splotchy shadows, it’s one of the series most iconic elements.
57:11Lain’s father returns home from work later in the evening and eagerly heads
57:14to his home office to install a new component he’s received in the mail.
57:18Her father, despite being distracted by his Neil Peart-style computer setup,
57:22seems to have more of a connection with Lain than her sister and mother.
57:26When Lain meekishly broaches the topic of upgrading her old NAVI, he sees it as a
57:31sign that she’s growing up and encourages her to make new friends in the real world and the Wired.
57:36The next day, the train Lain takes to school has an emergency stop because of an accident.
57:40Outside, the powerlines drip with blood and Lain
57:43has visions of a girl her age being hit by the train.
57:46After experiencing another hallucination at school,
57:49where she sees the words “come to the wired” written on the chalkboard,
57:52she encounters Chisa or some manifestation of her on her walk home.
57:57The episode ends with the familiar phrase “To be continued.”
58:00The red and blue B and E are another tangential Apple reference,
58:05this time to the BeOS, a now-defunct operating system created by Be Inc.,
58:10whose founder Jean-Luis Guasse was a former Apple executive.
58:14This [__] runs deep.
58:17Layer 2, Girls, introduces the under-18 techno club Cyberia, popular hangout
58:23spot for the technologically obsessed youth in the series.
58:26Though the place doesn’t seem to serve alcohol, they do peddle narcotics,
58:30such as Accela, a nanomachine like device that
58:33interacts with the electrical currents in users brains, speeding up synapses.
58:38While under the influence of Accela, the boy in the club sees Lain in an argument with
58:43other patrons, but she doesn’t seem like the quiet girl we were introduced to in the first episode.
58:48Or does she?
58:49This episode also introduces us to news segments and information leaks. Here,
58:54there’s a description of Accela and its effects.
58:57These short segments will become more prominent as the series goes on and are meant to further
59:02illustrate the idea that the barriers between the real world and the Wired are breaking down.
59:07A flood of information is constantly upon us.
59:10We also see a man in black for the first time. Conspiracy theories
59:13and other fringe topics will creep into the story as well.
59:16The fact that the font and style of the Serial Experiments Lain logo mimics that of the popular
59:221990s American television series, The X-Files, was a deliberate choice on the part of the creators.
59:28At school, Alice, Julie, and Reika discuss how they saw a girl who looked just like
59:33Lain at Cyberia the night before. Though they’re convinced this couldn’t have been the same person.
59:38They invite Lain to come to the club with them that evening, a plan that Lain isn’t too keen on.
59:43Later on, Lain encounters the ghost of the girl who was hit
59:45by the train near the end of the previous episode.
59:48There’s a lot made about this and other ghost encounters in Visual Experiments Lain.
59:53As the barrier between the real world and the Wired continues to deteriorate, traces
59:57of information left behind on the internet by people who have died start to appear in reality.
1:00:03You could view it as more hallucinations or as Lain being more sensitive to these information
1:00:08leaks than others, for reasons that will be expanded on as the series continues.
1:00:13When Lain arrives home from school, she finds that her father has ordered her a brand new NAVI,
1:00:18the newest, top-of-the-line model released by Tachibana General Laboratories, in fact,
1:00:23we learn from the overzealous delivery man.
1:00:25Oh, and don’t mind the way mom and dad are just making
1:00:27out by the front door. That’s not weird at all.
1:00:29Lain’s father sets up her new NAVI and Lain authorizes herself as its user.
1:00:34Before she can settle in and run it through its paces, she gets another
1:00:37message from Alice asking where she is, so Lain decides to head to Cyberia after all.
1:00:42Instead of a simple night out with the girls, they witness a shooting
1:00:45perpetrated by the kid who was dropping Accela in the beginning of the episode.
1:00:49When he notices Lain, he starts freaking out,
1:00:51ranting about how he doesn’t want anything to do with the real world and the wired merging.
1:00:56We get our first glimpse of Lain’s other persona here, a more forthright and self-assured version
1:01:01of herself. She informs the boy that no matter where he goes, people are always connected.
1:01:06Rather than endure the prospect of, ugh, human interaction, he goes ahead and shoots himself.
1:01:15Layer 3, Psyche--the series uses the original Greek pronunciation
1:01:19for “psyche”--begins with Lain and her friends being questioned by police.
1:01:23Lain gets dropped off at home by a patrol
1:01:26car but finds the house empty. Her parents and her sister are nowhere to be found.
1:01:30There’s clearly something strange going on with Lain’s family.
1:01:33The next day, her mother doesn’t have anything to say about the family’s absence the night before.
1:01:37On the way to school, she sees a black car parked in front of her house.
1:01:40She hears a voice talking directly to her on the train, telling her that she’s not alone.
1:01:45At school, the other girls talk excitedly about the events of the previous night.
1:01:49This scene reminds me of the beginning of Moonlight Syndrome where the girls
1:01:52in that game gossip matter-of-factly about a murder/suicide at a club that they all witnessed.
1:01:57We get another information dump about a special processor for the NAVI called Psyche.
1:02:02And Lain gets another visit from Chisa,
1:02:04which compositionally is just a really creepy shot. I love this.
1:02:09At the end of the school day, Alice talks to Reika and Julie about how it’s strange that they
1:02:13can speak so detachedly about a disturbing event that they all witnessed first hand.
1:02:18The other girls think Alice is weird for looking at it that way,
1:02:21but the conversation quickly gets derailed when Lain pulls an envelope from her shoe locker.
1:02:26The girls suspect that it’s a love letter, but inside is a Psyche processor.
1:02:30We hear a bunch of crosstalk about many different topics.
1:02:33Most of it is random, but one guy mentions an elite hacker group called the Knights,
1:02:37who will become important later.
1:02:39Another girl mentions being visited at night by a tiny gray being in a red and
1:02:43green-striped shirt that stands watching her from the doorway to her bedroom.
1:02:47This not only brings to mind alien abduction lore, that’s again so prevalent in The X-Files,
1:02:53but the red and green-striped shirt and the fact that the girl is visited at night
1:02:57in her bedroom is a reference to Freddy Kreuger, according to Konaka’s footnotes.
1:03:04Interestingly, in the English dub, this line is voiced by a random voice actress,
1:03:08but in the Japanese version, the voice belongs to Alice.
1:03:11Konaka’s notes in the screenplay dictate that this line should be
1:03:15read by Alice’s voice actress. We’ll find out why much later.
1:03:18Back at home, Lain asks her father about the Psyche, but he remains mysteriously tight-lipped,
1:03:24so Lain heads to Cyberia to ask the delinquents hanging out there about it.
1:03:28The DJ, JJ, recognizes her and comments on the childishness
1:03:32of her outfit and says she should organize another rave again sometime.
1:03:36Whoa.
1:03:36Taro, Masayuki, and MyuMyu are three elementary school
1:03:40students who regularly frequent Cyberia. They’re thoroughly impressed by the fact
1:03:45that Lain has a Psyche processor and tell her how to install it.
1:03:48Taro suspects that this Lain is the Lain who’s been making waves recently on the
1:03:53Wired. He asks for a date as payment for the information about the Psyche,
1:03:57but not with this timid Lain in front of them.
1:03:59He wants to go out with the more mature and self-assured Wired Lain.
1:04:02A glare from Lain sets him in his place.
1:04:05We then see Mika walking home from school. She runs into two men in black wearing some rad
1:04:10eyewear, but when she asks who they are and threatens to call the cops on them,
1:04:14they tell her that would be useless, because they were never really there.
1:04:17Mika tries to tell her mom to call the police the next time they show up,
1:04:21but mom is typically aloof.
1:04:23Annoyed by the whole thing, Mika heads upstairs and finds Lain in her underwear,
1:04:27installing the new processor into her NAVI.
1:04:29Mika asks her what she’s doing, and Lain mentions
1:04:32the warning the kids at the club gave her about avoiding static electricity.
1:04:36Lain suddenly looks up with an elated expression and excitedly says, “welcome home!” to her sister.
1:04:42This is one of the stranger moments in the series,
1:04:44and I don’t really know what to make of it other than it’s really creepy.
1:04:49In Layer 4, Religion, Mika attempts to talk to
1:04:52her parents about Lain’s strange behavior, but they brush it off.
1:04:55After Mika leaves the room though, the two of them say some ambiguous
1:04:59things to each other and engage in more affectionate touching.
1:05:02I don’t know. Maybe this is just how moms and dads who
1:05:04actually love each other act. I wouldn’t know...
1:05:08Cut to a guy getting chased to his apartment door by a creepy little girl.
1:05:14That’s horrifying.
1:05:15What’s even more horrifying is finding out that that dude was supposed to be a high-school senior.
1:05:20Kids grew up fast in 1990s Japan.
1:05:22The girls at school mention that he jumped from the roof of his apartment building.
1:05:26Much to their surprise Lain’s already heard this rumor.
1:05:29They’re even more surprised when they learn that she’s also been modifying her new NAVI,
1:05:33and they comment on how she’s changed recently.
1:05:36After school, the four hang out, but Lain runs off to continue working on her computer.
1:05:40A little girl who looks exactly like the girl
1:05:42from the night before bumps into Alice and drops her stuffed animal.
1:05:45The little dog was deliberately designed to look like Bikke, Lain’s stuffed animal
1:05:50from the video game and ABe’s one-shot manga, The Nightmare of Fabrication.
1:05:54I know I probably sound like a broken record, but more on that later.
1:05:57At Cyberia, Lain asks JJ about the game the kids are playing,
1:06:01and he tells her about Phantoma. When he turns around, though, Lain’s not even there.
1:06:06After that, we see a boy wandering around some rooftops inside Phantoma,
1:06:10which turns out to be a VR dungeon-crawler.
1:06:13He mentions numerous times that he’s already logged out, so he doesn’t know why he’s still
1:06:17stuck in the game. He even smashes his handheld NAVI in an attempt to escape.
1:06:22The little girl from earlier sneaks up on him and he shoots her using a
1:06:25weapon from Phantoma. This ends up killing the girl in reality.
1:06:29More examples of the border between the real world and the Wired breaking down.
1:06:33Lain receives a message from JJ telling her that Phantoma and a child’s hide-and-seek
1:06:38VR net game got linked up. There’s a strong indication that the Knights may
1:06:42have exploited holes in the two games’ connection protocol to make it happen.
1:06:46Lain’s dad interrupts her and tells her not to confuse the wired for the real world,
1:06:50but Lain basically says, “Shut up, dad” and tells him with her upgraded NAVI,
1:06:54she’ll soon be able to cross the border that separates the two.
1:06:58By the way, Lain’s cable management could use some work, don’t you think?
1:07:01She notices red dots probing her room and from her
1:07:04window finds the men in black standing in the street below.
1:07:08Then, she uses her psychic powers to blow up one of their eye pieces.
1:07:12Where the hell did that come from?
1:07:17Layer 5, Distortion, has some of the most surreal imagery in the entire series. It also
1:07:23has one of the most confounding story beats at the very end of the episode.
1:07:27In the footnotes in Scenario Experiments Lain,
1:07:29Konaka reveals that he was suffering a high fever while writing this episode,
1:07:33which may have influenced some of the strange sights and the disjointed nature of it.
1:07:38Maybe because of that, the finished version of the episode also differs quite a bit from the written
1:07:42screenplay, with several lines of dialogue and smaller scenes omitted and others shuffled around.
1:07:48I think the way it turned out in the end is better than how it was structured in
1:07:51the screenplay. It’s a bit too convoluted in its written form.
1:07:55Regardless, this is my favorite episode of the series, so here we go.
1:07:59Distortion begins with Lain speaking to the voice that she heard on the train
1:08:02in episode 3. It talks about how mankind has reached the limit of its evolution,
1:08:07but its greatest achievement was the creation of the Wired.
1:08:10The voice also reveals that it is God.
1:08:13We then follow Mika as she walks through Shibuya and witnesses a traffic accident.
1:08:18Meanwhile, or, well, I guess “meanwhile” would imply that this is happening at the same time,
1:08:23but it’s unclear when these scenes are actually taking place,
1:08:26so I guess I’ll just say, “in the next scene.”
1:08:28Lain talks to a doll in her room, asking it to tell her a story that she hasn’t heard before,
1:08:33but the doll says that there’s nothing that Lain doesn’t know,
1:08:36so it can’t tell her a story that doesn’t exist.
1:08:39It then mentions that for every event, there’s a prophecy that precedes it,
1:08:43which as we’ll come to learn is the thesis statement for this episode.
1:08:47We hear a news report that the traffic control system in Tokyo was hacked,
1:08:50which caused the accident that Mika witnessed.
1:08:53Back in Shibuya, Mika is handed a pack of tissues from a tout in the streets
1:08:56and runs into Taro who tries to pick her up, the little scamp. First Lain, now her older sister.
1:09:01He ends up spilling his drink on her and runs away. Smooth.
1:09:05Mika pulls out one of the tissues from the pack she’s just been given to clean up her uniform,
1:09:09and finds that someone has written a note on the tissue in red.
1:09:13“The other side is overcrowded. The dead will have no place to go.”
1:09:17Mika then hears people making a fuss about something, and witnesses
1:09:20Lain in the middle of the scramble muttering to herself as cars whiz by.
1:09:24And Mika just brushes it off, like yeah, that’s my weird sister, playing in traffic again.
1:09:29But as she turns to walk away,
1:09:30she sees Lain’s face projected on a large monitor overlooking the crossing.
1:09:35Back in Lain’s room, she’s now speaking to Darth Vader. Or actually,
1:09:39some kind of tribal mask that tells her the prophecy is being fulfilled.
1:09:43At school, the girls ask Lain about the hacking
1:09:46stunt that she pulled that may have been related to the traffic accident.
1:09:49Lain has no idea what they’re talking about, though.
1:09:52Alice, Reika, and Julie are then sitting in a fast food restaurant discussing an email
1:09:57they received referencing a prophecy and theorize that the Knights are behind it.
1:10:01Back in Lain’s room, this time she’s talking to her mother,
1:10:04who’s floating in the air before her. In her mother’s ramblings,
1:10:07she mentions how the Wired may just be an upper layer of the real world.
1:10:11Lain asks if the person floating in front of her is her real mother,
1:10:15but she offers no answer and fades away.
1:10:18At dinner, Mika asks Lain if she was in Shibuya earlier that afternoon.
1:10:22Before she can get an answer, she’s blinded by the reflection in her
1:10:25drink and finds herself in the middle of Shibuya crossing as cars whiz by.
1:10:30The camera pulls up and reveals that she’s trapped inside a strange symbol,
1:10:34which we’ll learn shortly is the mark of the Knights.
1:10:37Mika wakes up in the same fast food restaurant that Alice,
1:10:40Reika, and Julie were previously in. A bunch of other people are there now.
1:10:44Mika reaches for her coffee,
1:10:46and spills it across the table. The message “fulfill the prophecy” forms in the liquid.
1:10:51When she looks up, the restaurant is empty.
1:10:53She heads to a public restroom to try to get a grip on herself and the lights are
1:10:57turned out on her. In the darkness, she hears one of the stall doors creak open.
1:11:02Inside, she finds nothing.
1:11:03The lights come back on, and the stall door closes behind her. The words “fulfill
1:11:07the prophecy” are written over and over in red on the back of the door.
1:11:11Back in Lain’s room, she now speaks to her father, floating before her in the
1:11:15same way her mother did. This conversation is about how another world may have been
1:11:19created with the advent of the Wired, and that there may be a god who exists there.
1:11:24He posits that the Wired god is already affecting the real world in the form of a prophecy.
1:11:29Visual Experiments Lain comments on these scenes in Lain’s room,
1:11:33proposing the idea that they could be either corrupted memories from Lain’s past,
1:11:37further hallucinations, or they could be connected to an experiment dealing with
1:11:42latent psychic abilities in children that will be expanded on in the next episode.
1:11:46We already saw that Lain may have some level of psychic ability at the end of the previous
1:11:51episode. In any case, yeah, these scenes are ultimately left up to interpretation.
1:11:56Mika arrives home after a very difficult day to say the least and finds herself in her own house.
1:12:04The original Mika disappears, but Lain can see
1:12:08the traces of her wavering at the front door before that essence also disappears.
1:12:13The only footnote Konaka offers up for this bizarre turn of events is that in
1:12:18hindsight he feels that this story beat occurs a bit too early in the narrative.
1:12:22Super helpful.
1:12:23Ueda, in the Otakon Q&A, says Mika became stuck in
1:12:27the Wired and her body only exists in the real world now as a sort of puppet.
1:12:31There are some other scenes in episode 9 that we’ll need to look at before we really
1:12:35dive into what happened to Mika, so, say it with me now, we’ll come back to this later.
1:12:41In Layer 6, Kids, Lain’s PC has fully engulfed her room. There’s
1:12:46even water on the floor that’s leaked from her cooling system.
1:12:49The real question is, can it run Crysis?
1:12:52Lain’s having fun conversing with voices in the Wired who turn out to be members of the Knights.
1:12:57As she leaves for school the next day,
1:12:58she sees a young boy standing in the road with his arms outstretched starting up at the sky.
1:13:03The girls feel like Lain is reverting back to her old,
1:13:06introverted ways, so they invite her out after school.
1:13:09As they wander the city, they see more kids gesturing toward the sky,
1:13:13and a heavenly vision of Lain appears from behind some clouds, before quickly disappearing.
1:13:18This incident is even reported on the news in the evening.
1:13:22Back home, Mika has become just a shell. Hi, Mika.
1:13:25And Lain heads into the Wired to figure out what the kids are up to.
1:13:29She’s accosted by a Cheshire Cat-like floating
1:13:31mouth who’s impressed that Lain is able to project her full body into the Wired.
1:13:36Most users can only manage to create eyes, a nose, or a mouth, not full bodies.
1:13:42Lain pulls up information on Professor Hodgson, the child-killer scientist, and finds out that
1:13:47the old man is currently on his death bed in a hospital with his mind hooked up to the Wired.
1:13:52She finds him on a veranda overlooking a vast sunset,
1:13:55a scenic place where he waits quietly for his body to die. She asks him about something called Kids.
1:14:01Turns out, Hodgeson was the head researcher of the Kensington Experiment,
1:14:05which was an attempt to harness children’s latent psi abilities.
1:14:09He hooked dozens of children up to outer receptors, peripherals capable of capturing psi
1:14:15energy. The outer receptors would then feed that energy into a large central device he dubbed Kids.
1:14:21However, the experiment went horribly wrong and all of the children were killed.
1:14:25Though Hodgeson destroyed the device afterwards, the schematics found their way onto the Wired,
1:14:30and someone has updated it so that psi energy can be collected without the use of outer receptors.
1:14:36Before Lain can get anymore information out of Hodgeson, he goes off to die,
1:14:40but he comments that Lain is extremely powerful, a child blessed by the god of the Wired.
1:14:45Lain puts the pieces together and figures out that the Knights were the ones who
1:14:49found Hodgeson’s schematics and have altered the Kids device.
1:14:52The saintly image of herself in the sky was a cruel joke played on her by the Knights,
1:14:57using the children as projectors.
1:14:59She tries to confront the Knights on the Wired, but they’re silent now,
1:15:02as opposed to the beginning of the episode when they were posing as her friends.
1:15:06The men in black show up again, and Lain runs outside to confront them,
1:15:09asking if they too are members of the Knights.
1:15:12Just then an explosion rocks her room.
1:15:14The men in black explain that a parasite bomb was planted in her
1:15:17cooling system and that the Knights were the ones who put it there.
1:15:21In Layer 7, Society, Lain is intent on tracking down
1:15:24the Knights and Mika’s just, you know, creepin’.
1:15:28Because Lain is now attempting to learn the identities of the Knights members,
1:15:31we finally get introduced to some of them.
1:15:33There’s an elite businessman, a slobby otaku, and a bored housewife.
1:15:37It’s funny that her kid asks if he can go over and play face-to-face at a friend’s house,
1:15:42and she responds that he can just stay home and play with his friend on the Wired.
1:15:45We’re also introduced to Nezumi, Japanese for mouse, a weird dude walking around the
1:15:50city with a bunch of devices strapped to him. He wants to join the Knights.
1:15:54It doesn’t end well for him.
1:15:56The men in black show up to take Lain to meet their boss,
1:15:59who attempts to find out if the real world Lain and the Wired Lain are in fact the same person.
1:16:04He prods her with questions about her mother and father’s birthdays,
1:16:07when they got married, how they met.
1:16:09Lain doesn’t know the answers and becomes increasingly flustered.
1:16:12Lain’s voice actresses’ performances, in both Japanese and English, are really good here.
1:16:17Finally, he asks when and where Lain herself was born.
1:16:20This pushes her over the edge, and Wired Lain appears.
1:16:23The bossman says it’s amazing that she can summon Wired Lain without the use of a device, but that
1:16:29he and his group are fighting to make sure that the real world and the Wired remain separated.
1:16:34She’s sick of the old man’s ranting and goes to leave,
1:16:36but one of the men in black grabs her arm and gets reprimanded for it.
1:16:43I love that line read.
1:16:44So we learn this guy’s name is Karl. In fact, all of the Men in Black technically have names.
1:16:49Karl Haushofer, Lin Sui-Xi, and the bossman here is Kurosawa, only ever given a last name.
1:16:56In Layer 8, Rumors, Lain visits an adult site to speak with someone
1:17:00and get more info about Tachibana General Laboratories. She noticed
1:17:04the name plate on the building that the men in black took her to.
1:17:07Good job being covert about that, guys.
1:17:09This is also the first mention of Internet Protocol version 7, the series central macguffin.
1:17:14Tachibana General Labs is rumored to be involved in several corporate
1:17:18sabotage activities in an attempt to gain exclusive control of IPv7.
1:17:23Currently, in the real world, we run on IPv6.
1:17:26There’s another creepy scene involving Lain’s parents.
1:17:28When Lain enters the kitchen,
1:17:30they’re sitting next to each other in the dining room just staring at the table top.
1:17:34Lain gets a drink from the fridge and nervously tells them about
1:17:37someone who recently asked her if her parents are her real parents.
1:17:41She says that’s a funny thing to say, hoping that her parents will agree with
1:17:44her, trying to convince herself that the suggestion isn’t true.
1:17:48Her parents keep their backs to her.
1:17:49She finishes her drink and washes up the glass, and when she turns around,
1:17:53her mother and father have now turned around to look at her, their faces expressionless.
1:17:58The camera pulls back toward the ceiling and the scene just fades out, leaving no resolution.
1:18:04I know this scene is here to make us wonder if what the men in black said
1:18:07is true and to show that Lain, despite probably already realizing the truth,
1:18:11wants to convince herself that these are her real parents,
1:18:15but I still can’t help wonder what would follow from this scene for these characters.
1:18:19Throughout the series, there are a lot of these fragmented, unresolved moments,
1:18:23like half-remembered memories or snippets from a dream.
1:18:26This is part of what lends Lain its surreal atmosphere. The imagery and
1:18:30shot composition does a lot of the heavy lifting, but I feel like these more subtle
1:18:34elements are the ones that tie the whole mood of the series together.
1:18:37The next day at school, the girls confront Lain over a rumor that’s spread concerning
1:18:42Alice and a young, male teacher. Reika and Julie believe that Lain was the one
1:18:46who started the gossip, but Lain has no idea what they’re talking about.
1:18:49Alice decides that she wants to give Lain the benefit of the doubt.
1:18:53In class, Lain uses her pocket NAVI to try to figure out where the rumors originated.
1:18:58We get another scene of many voices gossiping on the Wired and hear once again about a
1:19:03small being in a red and green-striped shirt that visits a girl in her bedroom.
1:19:07We heard this same rumor back in layer 3.
1:19:09Lain tries to cut through the chatter and hears the voice of God again. They have
1:19:13a lengthy conversation about the nature of God,
1:19:16whether God is an all-powerful being that creates or just an omnipresent existence.
1:19:21He then steers the conversation to the nature of Lain’s existence and tells her that her
1:19:25body is just a container for her higher consciousness that exists in the Wired.
1:19:30He mockingly asks if she really believes the real Lain and the Wired Lain are one in the same.
1:19:36When Lain comes out of it, everyone in class is staring at her, and she
1:19:39gets a message saying that she’s a peeping tom.
1:19:41As she moves through the school, looking for Alice, everyone watches her.
1:19:45Alone and confused, Lain wonders what the Wired version of herself has been
1:19:49doing while she’s been living her normal life.
1:19:51Lain then has a vision of herself destroying the school, in a scene reminiscent of Carrie.
1:19:57Later that evening, we see Alice in her bedroom with the young,
1:20:00male teacher and find out that this is a simulated encounter inside the Wired.
1:20:05Interesting to note, the dialogue between Alice and the teacher was
1:20:08cut from the broadcast version of this episode.
1:20:10The implications of their conversation were deemed inappropriate by Japanese censors at the time.
1:20:16It was restored for home video releases.
1:20:18Just as Alice is about to lose herself in the moment, so to speak,
1:20:22she spots Lain sitting on her bed, but this is not real world Lain or Wired Lain.
1:20:28This imp-like creature is yet another version of Lain,
1:20:31referred to by the creators as Alphabet Lain.
1:20:34The reason for this strange nickname is lost a bit in translation, but when designing the
1:20:39different versions of Lain for the series, they were all given different names in the screenplays.
1:20:43Real world Lain is denoted by the use of kanji for her name. Wired Lain uses katakana,
1:20:49which are Japanese characters usually reserved to spell out loan words from
1:20:53other languages or onomatopoeic words, and are sometimes used just because they look cool.
1:20:58Then, there’s this demonic Lain,
1:20:59which uses English letters to spell out her name, hence the nickname, Alphabet Lain.
1:21:04This designation was used in design documents as well as in the scripts to help voice actress
1:21:09Kaori Shimizu distinguish between the three versions of the character she was playing.
1:21:14She lends each Lain unique speech patterns and different
1:21:17vocal inflections to project these different personalities.
1:21:20I have to also say, Lain’s English voice actress, Bridget Hoffman,
1:21:23did an outstanding job portraying the many facets of Lain as well.
1:21:27In fact, Serial Experiments Lain’s English dub is probably one of
1:21:30the best of its time. Right up there with the English dub of Cowboy Bebop.
1:21:34And Lain goes the extra mile, because they even tried to accurately reproduce a lot of
1:21:38the audio effects that were applied to the voices.
1:21:41I don’t think they quite achieved the same balance between dialogue and sound
1:21:44effects that the Japanese version has, but they did an incredible job.
1:21:48Especially considering the English version came out in 1999, a time when anime was just beginning
1:21:53to brush the mainstream in the US and when dubbing was done quickly and cheaply for the most part.
1:21:58In ABe’s artbook, An Omnipresence in Wired, and in Visual Experiments Lain,
1:22:03there is a lot of attention paid to the eyes, the different facial expressions,
1:22:07and the body language that differentiate each version of Lain.
1:22:11Real Lain’s face is softer, eyes rounder, eyebrows raised, and her overall posture is more tense.
1:22:17Wired Lain has a harder expression with slightly furrowed brows. Her stance is more confident.
1:22:23Meanwhile, Alphabet Lain, has droopy eyes
1:22:25and a mischievous grin. She likes to slouch and her movements are looser.
1:22:30I love the design of Alphabet Lain. She’s such a creep.
1:22:33As Alphabet Lain mocks Alice for playing with herself while fantasizing about a teacher,
1:22:38the Real Lain lies in bed in her own room, horrified.
1:22:41Wired Lain confronts Alphabet Lain and attempts to strangle her,
1:22:45but she feels that pain within herself.
1:22:47As Alphabet Lain explains, you can’t kill just one part of yourself.
1:22:52These scenes are our first real indication that Lain doesn’t just
1:22:55have some level of dissociative identity disorder but that her different personas
1:23:00all exist at the same time and are operating independent of each other,
1:23:04another product of the deterioration between the real world and the Wired.
1:23:08This is further confirmed when Wired Lain discovers a room full of Lain duplicates,
1:23:13more versions of herself than what we’ve seen so far in the story.
1:23:16In fact, the creators also refer to the heavenly vision of Lain that the
1:23:20children produced with the help of the Knights in Layer 6, God Lain, as another version of her.
1:23:26And one more version of Lain appears in an upcoming episode.
1:23:29In another conversation with God, he explains that Lain is the same as he is,
1:23:33a being that has always existed in the Wired. She is omnipresent
1:23:37and exists with everyone who has ever accessed the Wired.
1:23:41He also says that she’s done the right thing by bringing rumors about other
1:23:45people to light. Information on the Wired should be shared by all, shouldn’t it?
1:23:48Lain decides to find a way to scrub the memories of Alice’s rumor from the real world.
1:23:53And God just says, yeah, ok,
1:23:55give it a try. But with no sarcasm. He really wants to see if she can do it.
1:23:59In the next scene, Alice, Reika, and Julie rush to meet Lain at the school gates,
1:24:03but Alphabet Lain steps forward to meet them.
1:24:06As the girls make plans to hang out after school and head to Cyberia in the evening,
1:24:10real world Lain protests that she is the actual Lain.
1:24:14After the girls walk off together,
1:24:15Alphabet Lain confronts real world Lain and confirms, yes, she is the real Lain.
1:24:21Which “she” she’s referring to isn’t made clear,
1:24:24reinforcing the idea that all Lains exist at all times.
1:24:28In front of her NAVI, with tears in her eyes, Lain asks her computer if this Lain,
1:24:33sitting, right here, right now, is the real Lain.
1:24:39Layer 9, Protocol, is filled with information on conspiracy theories
1:24:44and various developments in computer networking throughout the 20th century.
1:24:48The X-Files influence is strong in this episode.
1:24:51Things kick off with a summary of the the Roswell incident where a supposed UFO crashed in the
1:24:56desert in New Mexico, after which Lain sees a little gray alien standing in her doorway.
1:25:01More information leakage.
1:25:03All this information just leaking all over the place, like the water from Lain’s coolant system.
1:25:08Next, we get a discussion of the MJ12 document, materials that first surfaced in the 80s,
1:25:13believed to be agreements between several government agencies and top US officials,
1:25:18signed by President Truman, dealing with the recovery of alien spacecraft.
1:25:22Just as an aside, the MJ12 documents are largely believed to be a hoax,
1:25:27but researchers involved in such things are still divided on whether it was a
1:25:30prank pulled by conspiracy nuts or part of a government sanctioned disinformation campaign.
1:25:35In the Wired, Lain argues with the weaker users,
1:25:38plebs who can only manage to conjure up an eye, an ear, or a nose for their online avatars.
1:25:44We then get an info dump about Vannever Bush, an American engineer and inventor
1:25:49who created MEMEX, a primitive form of information access using microfilm,
1:25:53anticipating the rise of multimedia and the internet.
1:25:56At Cyberia, JJ gives Lain an envelope that he says she left behind the last time she was there,
1:26:02inside is a small computer board with the Knights symbol on it.
1:26:06Next, we learn about John C. Lilly and his sensory deprivation experiments. Through
1:26:11the combined use of isolation tanks and psychoactive narcotics, Lilly believed
1:26:15that he made contact with the lowest level of a cabal of extraterrestrial intelligence.
1:26:21Yeah? Really, dude?
1:26:22He detailed the hierarchy of this organization in his autobiography.
1:26:26The level that he made contact with through his journeys, so to speak,
1:26:30were called the Earth Coincidence Control Office, or E.C.C.O., for short.
1:26:35Lilly then began experiments in an attempt to interact with dolphins,
1:26:39who use ultrasonic waves to communicate.
1:26:41And now you know where Ecco the Dolphin got his name.
1:26:45Lain confronts the kids in Cyberia and takes Taro up on his earlier offer for a date.
1:26:50And she invites him upstairs.
1:26:51She shows off her NAVI and then ambushes him, accusing him of being a member of the Knights.
1:26:56He admits that he’s a junior member, but they only give him
1:27:00small tasks with no explanations as to the grander purpose of what he’s doing.
1:27:04During their conversation, Lain turns on the track that plays frequently in Cyberia,
1:27:09and accuses Taro of being complicit in manipulating the club-goers memories.
1:27:13There’s a cut to downstairs where Lain’s parents
1:27:16speak cryptically to each other about “it” almost being over.
1:27:20And Mika starts doing her best dial-up modem impression.
1:27:23And now, we can finally talk about what the hell happened to Mika.
1:27:27As we’re seeing more of these Knights references surfacing,
1:27:30we can put together that Mika’s mind was trapped by the Knights in Layer 5.
1:27:34Taro was complicit in this, though, being a junior member, he may not have even known
1:27:39what the point of his actions were. He probably didn’t even know that Mika was Lain’s sister.
1:27:44The Knights forced Mika’s consciousness out of her body,
1:27:47creating just an empty shell that they could use to keep tabs on Lain.
1:27:51There are several scenes between episodes 6 and 9 of
1:27:54Mika looking in on Lain as she’s using her NAVI.
1:27:57This whole trap was only possible because of the flimsy border between the real world and the
1:28:01Wired, and now Mika is just a communication device the Knights use to spy on Lain’s activities.
1:28:07Lain asks Taro what the board with the Knights symbol on it is, and he’s not 100% sure,
1:28:13but he believes that installing the chip would wipe Lain’s memories.
1:28:17She decides to let him go, and he gives her a goodnight kiss,
1:28:20because, as he explains it, he’s a guy after all and he has to.
1:28:24But he leaves behind his already been chewed gum in her mouth. Gross.
1:28:28We then learn about Ted Nelson, who proposed an electronic library
1:28:32of stationary satellites that could be accessed anywhere by terminals on Earth.
1:28:36He dubbed this network, Xanadu, after the Mongolian capital that was said
1:28:40to house a library containing a record of all written cultures.
1:28:44Through his Xanadu concept, the idea of hypertext was conceived.
1:28:48Lain sits in front of her NAVI,
1:28:50sounding off commands as if she herself is just a computer terminal.
1:28:54She then sees a... flashback? Hallucination? We’re never
1:28:58given a clear indication here--of Lain’s introduction to her family.
1:29:01Lain’s father takes her upstairs to her room, which is decked out in traditionally girly decor,
1:29:07and is nothing like the room that we saw in the first episode of the series, and especially
1:29:11not like the tangled mess of cables, wires, and liquid coolant leakage that her current room is.
1:29:16As Lain and her father stand in the doorway, in this vision, Lain,
1:29:20in the present, turns to face them and says that this a lie.
1:29:24Whether she’s referring to the fact that her family is
1:29:26a fake or that this vision is false, is unclear.
1:29:30We still have a couple more educational presentations
1:29:32to get through before this episode ends.
1:29:35The next one is on the Schumann Resonance,
1:29:37the 8hz frequency that is latently given off by Earth’s magnetic fields.
1:29:41Douglas Rushcoff proposes that when the population of all human beings
1:29:45on Earth reaches the number of neurons in the brain, 86 billion give or take,
1:29:50and when all humans are then connected to each other and begin to resonate
1:29:54at the same 8hz frequency, then the Earth itself will awaken to consciousness.
1:29:59This last part concerning Douglas Rushcoff and the
1:30:01Earth’s consciousness is a complete fabrication on the part of Konaka’s,
1:30:05only meant to tie these real world conspiracy theories together with the world of Lain.
1:30:09He was most likely referencing real life-media theorist and writer, Douglas Rushkoff, with a “k.”
1:30:14The real-life Rushkoff has never proposed any sort of theory like
1:30:18the one just explained. Though, he did write a 1994 book titled Cyberia,
1:30:22which is where the name of the night club in the series comes from.
1:30:25Finally, into full on fiction, we learn about Masami Eiri,
1:30:28chief researcher at Tachibana General Labs,
1:30:31who believed that all humans could be connected to the Wired without the need for devices.
1:30:36Eiri put the Schumann resonance into code and without the knowledge of his superiors,
1:30:41inserted that code into the 7th generation internet protocol.
1:30:44When this was found out, he was fired from his position and found dead on
1:30:48the Yamanote line train tracks one week later.
1:30:51Outside, Eiri appears before Lain, and his design shows off the result of his gruesome
1:30:56demise, his body taped together where he would have been run over by the train,
1:31:00which is a really cool touch on the part of Abe.
1:31:05In Layer 10, Love, Lain speaks to Eiri. He is the god, or Deus,
1:31:10as the screenplay refers to him, who has been speaking to Lain all this time.
1:31:15Eiri takes over Lain’s body and starting explaining things. Meanwhile,
1:31:18Lain is in Eiri’s body asking questions.
1:31:21A really bizarre way of introducing a character,
1:31:24but also a way to illustrate Eiri’s notion that bodies have no meaning in this world anymore.
1:31:28Eiri talks about the compressed information that he put into his
1:31:32Schuman resonance code which he then inserted into the 7th gen protocol.
1:31:36This compressed information contained his own memories so that he could exist in the Wired
1:31:41forever, and so he now exists in the real world perpetually as well, since the two have merged.
1:31:46He also reveals that the Knights were operating under his orders, probably unknowingly.
1:31:51There’s then a vision of Lain in school, but her desk is missing and no one seems to notice her,
1:31:56further reinforcing Eiri’s claim that Lain no longer needs a body.
1:32:00Back at home, no one seems to be around, but it turns out Lain’s dad is still
1:32:04there. He calls her Lain-san now, denoting a distance and unfamiliarity between them.
1:32:09He says their work is finished and that Lain is free to become anything she wants.
1:32:13He confesses that he wasn’t given permission to say goodbye, but he’s come to love her.
1:32:17He also says that he’s jealous of her existence.
1:32:20Another interesting point about this scene is that instead of being denoted
1:32:24as “Yasuo” in the script, which is Lain’s father’s name by the way,
1:32:28he’s instead referred to only as “Otoko” or man, robbing him of his identity.
1:32:34You have to wonder, if Lain’s family was in fact fake, who gave them their orders to play house?
1:32:39In the Otakon Q&A panel from 2000, that question was asked.
1:32:43Ueda responded, “as to who they are and who they work for,
1:32:46it’s left up in the air for you to decide, but they’re basically there
1:32:49to collect information and report to somebody else in the background.”
1:32:53Lain finds herself in a strange cityscape with traces overlaid on the sky above,
1:32:58electrical current flowing through them.
1:33:00Voices tell her that the Knights of Eastern Calculus, the full name of the
1:33:04Knights organization, and badass name by the way, is descended from the Knights Templar,
1:33:09the military arm of the Christian church that operated between the 12th and 14th centuries.
1:33:14The Knights of Eastern Calculus is a reference to the Knights of Lamda Calculus, a semi-fictional
1:33:19group of hackers that are basically an in-joke that may have originated in computer labs at MIT.
1:33:24Computer nerds make the most elaborate in jokes.
1:33:27Lain says that Eiri has only become a god because he has worshippers to follow him,
1:33:32so she decides to track down the identity of the Knights.
1:33:34Lain succeeds in her endeavor, and their names leak all over the Wired.
1:33:39The men in black and their associates are now hunting
1:33:41them down all over the world and silencing them.
1:33:45The men in black then visit Lain, but say that she’s safe and Eiri’s
1:33:48thoughts will be scrubbed from protocol 7. This scrubbing will also eliminate the rogue code
1:33:54that Eiri implemented, reestablishing the border between the real world and the Wired.
1:33:58Karl also says that he loves Lain.
1:34:01This seems weird at first, but there’s a battle of beliefs that’s about to take place,
1:34:04and remember, Eiri believes a god needs worshippers in order to exist.
1:34:09Lain confronts Eiri and tells him that all his
1:34:11believers are gone. Eiri counters that he still has one believer.
1:34:15Lain.
1:34:16He explains that he created Lain in the Wired and that the real world Lain is
1:34:19only a homunculus. She had a fake family, fake friends, her whole life was a lie.
1:34:24Lain says that Eiri is lying, and it’s hard to tell if what he’s saying is the truth or
1:34:29if he’s only trying to keep Lain as a believer so he can continue existing.
1:34:35Layer 11, Infornography, ya like that?, begins with this jazz fusion freak out recap that takes
1:34:41up the first half of the episode, which is an interesting concept for a recap segment.
1:34:46The guitar solo here is performed by Reichi “CHABO” Nakaido,
1:34:49performer of the series’ ending theme.
1:34:51The title of the guitar solo is “Wind of Space and Time,” but it’s overlaid
1:34:56on a jazz track in the episode, which adds a suitably chaotic feel to the proceedings.
1:35:00There are some more Apple references, and a couple scenes that weren’t actually shown
1:35:04in the series but were alluded to, the most prominent being Lain’s walk
1:35:08home with Chisa that Chisa mentioned in her email to Lain in episode 1.
1:35:12The live-action shot of the city at one point shows a time stamp that was planned to line
1:35:17up with the exact time that this moment would air on the TV Tokyo broadcast of the episode.
1:35:22The message that scrolls at the bottom of the
1:35:24screen says that Tachibana General Labs has successfully mapped the human genome.
1:35:29After over 8 minutes of this, we find out that the recap was
1:35:32actually Lain attempting to load an emulator of her NAVI into her brain.
1:35:37More practically, we learn from the supplemental
1:35:39materials that Konaka originally wrote a 12-episode outline for the series,
1:35:43but 13 episodes were ordered when they went into production, so they needed to kill some time.
1:35:48Impressively, the screenplay for episode 11 lays out a lot of the major scenes
1:35:52that were meant to be shown here and in what order they were meant to appear.
1:35:56Neat.
1:35:57Eiri warns Lain that ingesting too much information will cause
1:36:00her to overflow. Lain warns Eiri not to talk about her as if she’s a machine,
1:36:05but Eiri says that Lain isn’t hardware, but software, an executable program with a body,
1:36:10meant to break down the border between the real world and the Wired.
1:36:13Lain then starts seeing the dead, or at least their information,
1:36:16which is still present in the Wired.
1:36:18Chisa and the boy who shot himself in the club at the end of episode 2 tell
1:36:22her that she was the one who called them to the Wired, basically telling them to kill
1:36:26themselves in the real world so they could exist forever in the form of information.
1:36:30This is never revealed, but my guess is it was Alphabet
1:36:33Lain who contacted them and relayed this message.
1:36:36In the next scene, we finally get the payoff about the being
1:36:39in the red and green-striped shirt that kept visiting the girl in her bedroom.
1:36:43The girl was Alice and the being was Lain. Or Grein,
1:36:47as the creators dubbed this version of her, a portmanteau of gray and Lain.
1:36:51The alien Lain tells Alice that it wasn’t her who leaked the rumors. Not her,
1:36:56but another version of her, again most likely the demonic Alphabet Lain.
1:37:01But then again, it could have been a Lain that we never actually see in the series. Who knows?
1:37:05Alien Lain promises that she’ll make it so the rumors never happened.
1:37:09Lain has already destroyed the border between the real world and the Wired,
1:37:13so now she can go anywhere without the need for a device.
1:37:16“Grein” is my second favorite Lain after Alphabet Lain.
1:37:19There’s an interesting note about her in Visual Experiments Lain,
1:37:22where it says that she can’t get inside the room, she can only stand at the door frame.
1:37:26Konaka’s footnote about Grein’s appearance
1:37:28in the screenplay also notes that she never tries to come through the door.
1:37:33This version of Lain could be meant to represent her feelings as an outsider,
1:37:37an alien, who can’t enter into other people’s lives.
1:37:40Either way, the way the notes are worded in Scenario and
1:37:42Visual Experiments are incredibly creepy.
1:37:45And the whole scene itself, though sort of funny at first glance, is incredibly creepy.
1:37:49The next day at school, it turns out the rumors about Alice and the teacher
1:37:53have been erased from everyone’s memory.
1:37:56Well, everyone’s except for Alice’s.
1:37:58In fact, Lain didn’t just erase everyone’s memories,
1:38:01she erased the actual events from ever occurring.
1:38:04Alice then realizes that her visit from alien Lain wasn’t just a hallucination or dream.
1:38:10Layer 12, Landscape, the penultimate episode,
1:38:13begins with Lain explaining that people only have substance in the memories of other people.
1:38:18That’s why there are so many versions of her, they each represent an image of how
1:38:22anyone she’s ever interacted with, in the real world or the Wired, perceived her.
1:38:26Which is an interesting thing to think about, the you that other people perceive,
1:38:30and whether or not that projection measures up to the you that you perceive yourself to be.
1:38:35An idea that will be further expanded on in the story of Lain the game.
1:38:38Lain uses her god-like powers to manipulate news broadcasts
1:38:42and includes a special message for everyone.
1:38:44Let’s all love Lain!
1:38:53In the screenplay, when the announcer says Lain over and over again,
1:38:56Lain’s name is written in the different styles, perhaps implying to love all versions of Lain.
1:39:02This could be Lain’s way of trying to turn herself into a god to combat Eiri’s influence
1:39:06over the Wired or, you know, since the real and the Wired have merged, just the world in general.
1:39:11Eiri explains that bodies stop humans from evolving,
1:39:15that the information that has accumulated within us through the generations reaches an end point.
1:39:20In the beginning, all humans were connected in the primordial soup of life,
1:39:23so he’s merely brought things back to that original state by connecting all humans.
1:39:28In a dark parking garage, the men in black discuss whether or not Eiri was
1:39:32actually the one behind the orders to wipe out the Knights members,
1:39:35and whether he was actually behind Tachibana’s machinations as well.
1:39:38Kurosawa shows up and tells them to run to a place that has no powerlines or
1:39:43satellite coverage, which of course doesn’t exist.
1:39:46It seems that Kurosawa is now playing along with the idea of connecting the real world
1:39:50and the Wired, whereas before, in episode 7, he said he was fighting against that.
1:39:55I feel like this whole scene is meant to be convoluted and to intentionally detract you
1:39:59from who is double crossing who and who anyone is actually working for.
1:40:04Lin Sui-Xi then starts convulsing and dies. When Karl checks on him,
1:40:08he sees an image of Lain inside one of his eyes.
1:40:10Through his super cool cyberpunk visor, he sees something approaching him through
1:40:15the parking garage, and were left with his screams echoing in the darkness.
1:40:20Alice visits Lain’s home, which is trashed, and encounters Mika on the
1:40:24stairs, who’s been abandoned by the Knights since they’re all dead now.
1:40:27Mika then she disappears.
1:40:29In Lain’s room, Alice finds Lain buried under a blanket of cables and wires. Alice asks her what
1:40:35all the devices are for, and Lain says, nothing, she’s just been watching stuff.
1:40:40“Hey, everyone. This is ManlyBadassHero.”
1:40:42Alice then asks Lain why she erased everyone’s memories except for hers.
1:40:47She thinks Lain is doing this to punish her,
1:40:49but that wasn’t Lain’s intention. Lain reveals that Alice is the only one she’s cared about.
1:40:54Lain’s reconnected all the other people in the world, but left Alice separate.
1:40:58When Lain explains that she’s only a program meant to break down the
1:41:01border between the real world and the Wired, Alice protests and tries
1:41:04to show Lain that she’s real flesh and blood, a warm body with a heartbeat.
1:41:09Eiri interrupts and tells Lain that Alice is only
1:41:11saying this because she’s afraid of losing her body.
1:41:14Eiri says he’ll need to debug Lain and reaches out to her. His hand appears, which freaks out Alice.
1:41:20Lain refuses to go with him though, and tells Eiri he’s not a god. All he did
1:41:24was remove devices and input the code into the protocol, but he couldn’t have done any
1:41:28of that without all of the work done by other people leading up to the creation of the Wired,
1:41:33which is the reason we went through all of those information dumps in episode 9.
1:41:37Lain accuses Eiri of not actually being a god at all. He didn’t create
1:41:42anything. He’s just the mind of a dead man trapped in the Wired.
1:41:45In frustration, he tries to manifest a body for himself in an attempt to actually exist.
1:41:51Lain continues, saying that the Wired isn’t an upper layer of the real world. The world
1:41:56existed before the Wired, therefore the foretelling of its connection only came
1:42:00into existence after the Wired was created, so it’s not some prophecy or word of god.
1:42:06Furthermore, by attempting to create a body for himself,
1:42:09Eiri has proven that humans do need bodies, contradicting his own dogma.
1:42:14So like any petulant wannabe god,
1:42:16he tries to crush Lain and Alice with his slimy primordial limbs.
1:42:21The final episode, Layer 13, Ego, picks up directly where the previous left off.
1:42:27With Lain’s declaration that Eiri does in fact need a body to exist, he disappears.
1:42:32Alice wrestles free from Lain and slaps her, causing her to bleed.
1:42:35I think this is meant as proof that even though Lain may have
1:42:38been created as some program, she does still need a body to exist.
1:42:42Or it could be that she was a normal human all along. There
1:42:45are a lot of ways to interpret this tiny moment.
1:42:48Alice is clearly traumatized, and Lain,
1:42:50upset over how much pain she’s caused her, decides to reset the entire world.
1:42:55We see shots from earlier episodes, but Lain doesn’t exist in any of them.
1:42:58There’s a scene with Lain’s mother, father, and Mika eating breakfast together. Lain’s
1:43:03father looks toward the empty fourth chair at their dining room table,
1:43:06and seems to remember something, but ultimately brushes it off.
1:43:10The girls meet in front of the school gates and make plans to go to Cyberia.
1:43:13Alice opens her NAVI to contact somebody about their plans. The girls wonder who
1:43:18Alice wants to tell, and mistake it for Chisa, who’s still alive.
1:43:21We know, of course, that Alice was thinking of
1:43:23contacting Lain. Alice declares that what isn’t remembered, never happened.
1:43:27If you aren’t remembered, you never actually existed.
1:43:30We see that all of the other characters are living
1:43:32normal lives now, and others who have died are still alive.
1:43:36Lain appears in Taro’s NAVI briefly.
1:43:38Coupled with Alice’s half-remembrance, these scenes show that there are still
1:43:42fragments of Lain that exist throughout the world, even though no one remembers her.
1:43:46I like that the men in black are utility workers.
1:43:49And that Eiri is still alive as a disgruntled salary man.
1:43:52In the Wired, Lain speaks with Alphabet Lain, according to the screenplay.
1:43:56Alphabet Lain says that Lain has proven that the Wired is not an upper layer
1:44:00of the real world, but a network that merely passes information through it.
1:44:04Lain now exists as an omnipresence in Wired, and Alphabet Lain tries to convince her to
1:44:09become god and start things over the way they were in the beginning of the series.
1:44:13Lain resists, causing Alphabet Lain to cease existing.
1:44:17Before disappearing completely, she asks Lain what she actually is. Lain doesn't know,
1:44:22but then she hears the voice of her father, and sees him looking down on her.
1:44:25She’s back in the bear suit, sitting at a table with him.
1:44:28He tells her that she doesn’t need to wear the bear suit ever again.
1:44:32An indication that she doesn’t need something to insulate herself anymore.
1:44:35But as Konaka notes in the screenplay, this line was also meant as a bit of an in-joke
1:44:40for the creators, referencing the conflict the bear suit caused within the production staff,
1:44:44with Konaka writing that since this is the end of the series,
1:44:47Lain will literally never have to wear the bear suit again.
1:44:51At the end of this scene, Lain’s father mentions
1:44:53that next time they meet they can enjoy tea and madeleine cakes together.
1:44:57This entire scene was actually scripted differently. In Scenario Experiments Lain,
1:45:01Lain and her father do share tea and madeleines.
1:45:04Konaka explains in his footnote that he wanted Lain to experience the raw act of eating,
1:45:09something human, which would then cause her to break down with emotion.
1:45:12He says he still thinks the way the scene ended up in the series was done beautifully, but he
1:45:17wishes that his original idea could have made it into the final cut.
1:45:20In the city, in the future, Alice, now 22 years old,
1:45:24walks with her fiancee. She spots Lain on a pedestrian bridge and runs to meet her.
1:45:29She feels she knows Lain from somewhere, but Lain only says “nice to meet you,”
1:45:34so Alice is convinced that they don’t know each other after all.
1:45:37And so Lain remains to watch over this version of the world.
1:45:42Konaka’s final footnote says that it’s hard for him to look subjectively at the series,
1:45:47even after so much time away from it.
1:45:49He says that he loves Alice, and he loves Lain,
1:45:52maybe echoing Lain’s father’s sentiments from episode 10.
1:45:55What started out for both of them as work, an assignment, became something much more.
1:46:01There’s a lot more to cover as far as analysis of the TV series goes, but I’ll save that for after
1:46:06we discuss the story of the game and start making connections between these two works.
1:46:15Lauded for its visual and technical achievements,
1:46:18revered for its mature themes, psychological storytelling, and daring questioning of our
1:46:23modern world, Serial Experiments Lain, the television series, was a massive success.
1:46:28While it may not have been quite as popular as some other breakout 90s series,
1:46:32such as Neon Genesis Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop,
1:46:36it still had an impact on anime culture both in its native Japan and abroad.
1:46:41Much of what it has to say about technology and how human’s use it is still relevant today.
1:46:46The physical form of the hardware and the barrier to entry based on technical skill may be outdated,
1:46:52but the degrading effects on communication and the draining effects it has on our mental states,
1:46:58on our perception of reality, are just as much issues now as they were back then.
1:47:03Even more so, really.
1:47:05It’s a prescient meditation on modern issues, a dark observation on human nature. Yet,
1:47:10in the end, there is light. Hope that we will overcome, persevere, and continue on.
1:47:17And now, for the complete opposite of that.
1:47:36The Serial Experiments Lain TV series introduces us to the idea of seemingly infinite versions
1:47:42of Lain, presenting several throughout its run and hinting at countless others,
1:47:46inviting us to wonder what Lains we haven’t seen.
1:47:49And so, we’re introduced to a few other Lains in Serial Experiments Lain the video game.
1:47:55This version of Lain is in her last year of elementary school,
1:47:58two years younger than the Lain we saw in the anime.
1:48:01We’re also introduced to a different family, just a mom and dad, no older sister, several
1:48:06different friends, and Lain’s counselor, Touko, as well as several characters related to Touko.
1:48:12I’ve already talked about the structure of the game, so for this section of the video,
1:48:16I’m going to attempt to talk about the story in semi-orderly fashion.
1:48:20There are basically 4 concurrent storylines running through the game.
1:48:24Touko and Lain’s counselling sessions, Touko’s personal life, Lain’s personal life,
1:48:29and another more difficult to easily categorize overarching event that leads to the game’s ending.
1:48:35As mentioned in the gameplay portion of the video,
1:48:37all of the nodes containing these story moments are scattered throughout the two
1:48:41cylinders that you traverse, and many nodes are unlocked on separate playthroughs,
1:48:46jumping back and forth through time, creating a kaleidoscopic view of the story and characters.
1:48:51Before we get into it, I’d just like to give a warning that the story here is much,
1:48:56much darker and more depressing than the anime’s storyline.
1:48:59We were already dealing with some heavy subject matter there, but the game goes a
1:49:03lot harder in some of its story moments, so just a heads up, disturbing content ahead.
1:49:08If you would prefer not to have the story of the game spoiled and want to experience
1:49:13it on your own, you can skip to this time to jump to the conclusion of this video.
1:49:21On a first playthrough, the story begins with Lain and Touko’s counseling sessions
1:49:26as well as Touko’s diagnosis reports and diary entries from that time.
1:49:30Early on, Touko’s diary is mainly concerned with her boyfriend, Takeshi, and her work life.
1:49:36It mentions that both she and Takeshi work at the same research institute and
1:49:40that they both studied overseas in America before returning to Japan to begin this job.
1:49:45On a 2nd playthrough, Touko’s earlier diary entries unlock,
1:49:49which detail her student days spent studying in America and dating Takeshi.
1:49:54This is chronologically where the story begins, about a year before the main events of the game.
1:49:58They follow Touko through her return to Japan, and expound upon the differences
1:50:03between American and Japanese work culture, as well as her growing frustration with the
1:50:07workplace bullying she experiences as a result of studying and working overseas.
1:50:12These elements actually hit pretty close to home for me.
1:50:15As a foreigner who has lived and worked in Japan for over a decade,
1:50:19I’ve not really been the target of workplace bullying and power harassment,
1:50:23though I’ve spoken to Japanese friends and former coworkers who have detailed their
1:50:27own struggles with this unfortunately highly common practice in Japanese work settings.
1:50:32A lot of what Touko describes here, the passive aggressive comments, the refusal to allow her to
1:50:37actually work on anything significant or within her skill range, the treating of her as an
1:50:42outsider because she spent time overseas and has developed a more Western attitude towards things.
1:50:47These are unfortunately all stories that I’ve heard first-hand in real life,
1:50:52even among Japanese friends who haven’t spent time overseas.
1:50:55The senpai-kohai hierarchy of Japanese employee relationships seems to normalize this bullying
1:51:01practice. It’s especially common among older generations of Japanese workers,
1:51:05but is still inherent in young professionals as well.
1:51:08I’m not going to attempt to make any kind of cultural critique here, because, like I said,
1:51:12I don’t have much experience with it myself, but I just wanted to point out that a lot of what
1:51:17Touko describes reminded me of conversations with friends, and the writing here is shockingly real.
1:51:22Touko’s supervisor, Dr Takashima, refuses to give her any responsibilities beyond
1:51:27just acting as his personal secretary, even after Touko has passed all of her
1:51:32certification tests required in Japan for her to start seeing patients as a counselor.
1:51:37He also makes unwanted sexual advances toward her, of course, I say with weariness.
1:51:43Eventually, after several months of grunt work, Touko is assigned her first patient, Lain Iwakura.
1:51:49Touko describes Lain as a cute, 12-year old girl suffering from
1:51:52auditory and visual hallucinations and who feels psychologically unstable.
1:51:57This is where the counseling sessions between Touko and Lain enter into the story.
1:52:01In her diagnosis reports, Touko describes Lain’s
1:52:04family life and upbringing as normal with no history of mental illness. However,
1:52:08Lain’s mother informs Touko that Lain suffers from frequent night terrors.
1:52:12She hears garbled voices and is suddenly awakened and forced to watch a video.
1:52:17Nothing more is said about what kind of video or why.
1:52:21Other examples of Lain’s hallucinations include her playing in the park and
1:52:25suddenly finding herself alone when before she thought there were other kids around.
1:52:29Later on, when Lain begins to open up to Touko about her condition,
1:52:33she also says she feels like someone is touching her when no one is there.
1:52:37She describes it as if there’s another her, touching her body, trying to rip her apart.
1:52:42And these sensations don’t just occur while she’s sleeping either. She feels them while
1:52:46she’s awake and even while at school, talking with friends.
1:52:50This is incredibly unnerving,
1:52:52especially when you stop to consider that Lain is just a 12-year old girl experiencing these things.
1:52:57We also learn that the voices Lain hears come from the power lines.
1:53:01Touko notes Lain’s asymmetric hairstyle,
1:53:04and learns that it isn't just a quirky choice. The long forelock is meant to
1:53:09protect her from these hallucinations or stimuli actually entering her head.
1:53:14Doesn’t seem to be doing its job.
1:53:16As their counselling sessions continue, Lain gradually begins to open up to Touko more.
1:53:20Their relationship is an interesting thing to see develop,
1:53:23especially through the different lenses of the counselling sessions,
1:53:26the diagnosis reports, Touko’s diary, and eventually Lain’s own diary.
1:53:31In a similar way to how the series presents different versions of Lain,
1:53:35the game does the same thing, but with a slightly more down-to-earth approach.
1:53:39The Lain we see in the counselling sessions is different to the Lain we
1:53:43see in her school and home life that’s described in her diary.
1:53:46When Lain eventually starts to take an interest in computers and begins
1:53:50spending more time online, we see a different version of her there as well.
1:53:54This extends to Touko, too. I’ve already touched upon this a bit,
1:53:57but the Touko in the counselling sessions is different from the Touko
1:54:01in the diagnosis reports is different from the Touko in her diary entries.
1:54:05The fragmentation of the two central characters here is a complex one,
1:54:09and their character developments throughout the story actually run inverse to one another.
1:54:13As Lain gains more skill and knowledge in the world of the Wired,
1:54:17she becomes more confident and more in control.
1:54:19She starts to become more interested in Touko’s
1:54:22work and asks questions about psychiatry and mental illness during their sessions.
1:54:26At first, Touko feels that learning more about the process of counselling and therapy will help Lain
1:54:31overcome her issues, but as Lain’s proddings start to become more personal and Lain starts revealing
1:54:37that she knows information she shouldn’t, about not only Touko’s diagnosis reports,
1:54:41but Touko’s personal life as well, Touko becomes understandably suspicious.
1:54:46She grows to fear and almost hate Lain. She begins losing control,
1:54:50and her grip on reality and her sense of self starts to deteriorate.
1:54:54While all of this is going on there are several
1:54:57subplots in both Touko’s and Lain’s personal lives.
1:55:00We’ve already touched upon Touko’s relationship with her longtime boyfriend,
1:55:04Takeshi. Their relationship starts to fall apart, and he becomes increasing distant as the story
1:55:10continues, until it’s eventually revealed that he’s gotten engaged to somebody else.
1:55:14There is no formal breakup that occurs, just over the course of
1:55:17the months while Touko is counseling Lain, she sees less and less of him.
1:55:21Leading up to this, Touko reveals an obsessive side to her personality.
1:55:24She doesn’t really see what’s happening in front of her, concerning Takeshi’s behavior
1:55:28and attitude, and continues to fantasize about her and Takeshi’s future together,
1:55:33so the news of his engagement hits her devastatingly hard.
1:55:36Coupled with her frustrations with her supervisor, who she wishes would just die,
1:55:40and her paranoia about Lain, the stress starts to tear her down.
1:55:44She meets a new guy in the office, a representative named Yoshida from a
1:55:48third-party medical supply vendor. He’s peddling some sort of relaxation device called an RML.
1:55:54I thought it was revealed in one of Touko’s diary entries what RML stands for, but after
1:55:59looking through my notes and scrubbing through footage, I can’t find it, so it’s just RML.
1:56:03After meeting Yoshida, she immediately starts fantasizing about a romantic relationship with
1:56:09him, and comes right out and says she hopes it will make Takeshi jealous.
1:56:12Because of this, she decides to test out the RML for him. It doesn't exactly make her feel relaxed.
1:56:18It starts to affect her mentally. She begins getting headaches and feels that
1:56:22the machine is actually making her more exhausted.
1:56:24She decides to stop using the RML for a while,
1:56:27but Yoshida urges her to continue. In order to please him, she does.
1:56:32During this time, we find out that Dr. Takashima has died.
1:56:35He committed suicide in the lab. Touko isn’t too broken up about it.
1:56:39As she continues to use the RML, it becomes difficult for
1:56:43her to distinguish between her dreams and reality.
1:56:46Finally, she does stop using it and finds out that Yoshida was using her
1:56:50the whole time just to have a test subject for the experimental RML device. Of course.
1:56:55Before we go any further with Touko’s diary entries, we should go back to Lain’s though,
1:57:00because things start to become more entangled from here on out.
1:57:05Lain’s diary entries talk about her life at school, and mention a friend,
1:57:09Kyoko. She touches upon being bulled at school,
1:57:12and admits she’s jealous of Kyoko, because Kyoko’s just a normal girl, unlike herself.
1:57:17Lain’s friendship with Kyoko is further detailed in Ekm nodes that unlock during a third
1:57:23playthrough. There are only six of them, and they show a fairly normal friendship between the two.
1:57:27As Lain’s diary entries continue, sometimes she feels like she’s getting better, sometimes worse.
1:57:33Sometimes she feels that she’s drifting apart from
1:57:35Kyoko after Kyoko begins hanging out with another girl from school.
1:57:39But then Lain feels accepted again when Kyoko and
1:57:42the new girl come to her house to visit her while she’s out sick from school.
1:57:46Sometimes Lain wants to go to school, sometimes she doesn’t.
1:57:49Sometimes she feels like she’s cured. Sometimes she feels like she’s losing control again.
1:57:54There are many inconsistent and contradictory feelings and events detailed throughout Lain’s
1:57:59early entries, and all I can say about this is, welcome to the world of a preteen.
1:58:04Lain’s diary entries are incredibly well written and feel authentic.
1:58:08I’m pretty sure everyone watching has gone through these conflicting feelings as a teenager.
1:58:12Confident one day, uncertain the next. Socially accepted on a Monday, an outcast by Friday.
1:58:18Dialogue writer Hideko Shimizu really nailed this constantly fluctuating turmoil,
1:58:23and it’s incredibly fascinating to experience these shifts through Lain’s point of view.
1:58:28Maybe you can begin to see why I suffered through Serial Experiments Lain’s actual
1:58:32gameplay. It was the characters and the story that kept pulling me along.
1:58:36Another interesting thing to note about Lain’s diary entries is that she doesn’t
1:58:40tell Touko about most of the anxiety she goes through in her personal life in their sessions.
1:58:46Even when Lain is suffering, worried about a rift in a friendship or experiences something
1:58:51that well and truly upsets her and seems to be the end of her world, in the beginning of the
1:58:55next counseling session, Touko will ask Lain how she’s doing and Lain will say, “Fine.”
1:59:00I’m just impressed by the multifaceted nature of these characters, and the
1:59:04level of complexity in the writing from a video game released in 1998.
1:59:08Lain describes becoming more and more interested in computers. She studies
1:59:13programming from books at the local library.
1:59:15She mentions that this is only to pass the time until she enters junior high school. After that,
1:59:20she’ll be too busy with school and friends
1:59:22and won’t have all this free time to devote to computers.
1:59:25Also within these entries Lain talks about the worsening relationship between her parents.
1:59:29Much like the anime series, Lain has a better connection to her father than her mother. He
1:59:34even stays home from work to talk with her on some days when she doesn’t go to school.
1:59:38One day, he leaves on a business trip to America for 2 months,
1:59:42and this is where the cracks in her semi-normal life start to appear.
1:59:46She decides to try out an online game,
1:59:48sort of similar to the hide-and-seek game that the children were playing in the TV series,
1:59:53however in this iteration of the game, the goal is to kill the other player when they’re found.
1:59:58Lain isn’t a fan of this concept and fills out a developer survey asking
2:00:02for her thoughts about the game, where she answers honestly that she didn’t like it.
2:00:06Shortly after that, she receives an email with a photo of a dead
2:00:09infant. She suspects that this is somehow connected to her critique of the game.
2:00:14And you know, based on real life examples, not really a huge leap of logic there.
2:00:19She speaks to friends online about what happened and meets a user named Rabbit,
2:00:23who teaches her how to trace information to find the identity of the sender.
2:00:27After only a day, Lain manages to track the person down and doxes them. However,
2:00:32she also finds that her own diary entries have been copied and shared as well.
2:00:36She wants further revenge and consults Rabbit, who says to leave it to him and forget about it,
2:00:41so she gets suspicious that the original prankster and Rabbit somehow know each other.
2:00:46Lain’s online escapades get swept aside for a bit when she enters junior high school.
2:00:50She makes a new friend, Misato, another quiet girl who is often absent from school.
2:00:55Misato turns out to have many talents, such as playing the violin and painting.
2:01:00She also seems to be popular with the boys, because as Lain says, she’s cute,
2:01:05but, at least according to Lain, Misato doesn’t seem to have any interest in them.
2:01:09Lain and Misato end up joining the art club at school together, and overall, things seem to
2:01:13be going well for her. She even mentions that she hasn’t had any hallucinations for a while.
2:01:18She also says that she’s not planning on logging onto the Wired for the time being.
2:01:22She’s busy with school and a new friend and doesn’t have a need for it anymore.
2:01:26During this time, Lain’s father returns home from his business trip,
2:01:30and he’s brought Lain a present, a stuffed dog that she names Bikke.
2:01:33We’ll learn more about Bikke later on.
2:01:36Lain spends time with her family and practices art. One day, Misato even comes over for dinner.
2:01:41Lain’s dad drives her home, and they meet her mother at the door and chat for a bit.
2:01:45These details may seem superfluous right now, but they’ll become important soon.
2:01:49For the upcoming cultural festival at school, the students from the art club
2:01:53need to submit paintings. Misato submits an oil painting of a pegasus that impresses everyone.
2:01:59Lain admits she feels a bit envious of Misato’s
2:02:01skills and thinks to herself that her only skill is with computers.
2:02:05She wants to exchange emails with Misato and show her the friends she made on the Wired,
2:02:10hoping this will impress her. But it turns out that Misato isn’t a fan of computers.
2:02:15These events cause Lain to start going back onto
2:02:18the Wired where she decides to join a news group that has an art thread.
2:02:22At the cultural festival, everyone loves Misato’s artwork so much that
2:02:26the art teacher decides to submit it to a prefectural art exhibition.
2:02:30Lain posts a photo of Misato’s painting in the art thread she’s now active in,
2:02:34but other users say that Misato’s work is plagiarism.
2:02:37Lain doesn’t believe it, but rumors spread around
2:02:39the school that Misato copied her painting, and she stops showing up.
2:02:43It turns out an incredibly similar piece was submitted by a young Japanese artist
2:02:48to an American art magazine, where it won a prize and was published in said magazine.
2:02:53Lain still isn’t convinced that Misato could have plagiarized her work,
2:02:56so she starts digging into the matter on the Wired.
2:02:59After contacting the art magazine, Lain discovers that Misato’s initial sketch
2:03:03for her painting was done 2 months before the work in the magazine was published.
2:03:07She doesn’t get a chance to celebrate this win though,
2:03:09because she finds out that Misato is transferring schools.
2:03:12The other kids say that she’s too embarrassed to come back
2:03:15after it was found out that she was a plagiarist.
2:03:17Lain knows the truth, but no one will listen to her.
2:03:20“Why do people spread rumors without knowing what they’re talking about?
2:03:24Don’t they care about who they might be hurting?”
2:03:26One of the most interesting things about this entire Misato saga is that
2:03:30most of it isn’t revealed until a 2nd playthrough.
2:03:34On your first time through, when you get to these diary entries, you’ll see a few
2:03:37referencing Misato and Lain’s friendship and then they just jump straight to her having moved away.
2:03:43Of course, you can see through the numbering that you’re missing several entries,
2:03:46but you don’t really know what’s going on until after you’ve finished the game once.
2:03:51There may be a very important reason for that.
2:03:54Around the time all of this is going on,
2:03:56Touko decides to interview some of Lain’s friends from school.
2:03:59She chooses Kyoko, her on again off again friend from elementary school and Kaori,
2:04:05a girl who Lain has never mentioned in her diaries.
2:04:07Touko makes up a story that she’s Lain’s home tutor and is worried about her to
2:04:12get the girls to talk and not reveal that Lain is receiving counseling.
2:04:16Kaori seems more interested in getting Touko to
2:04:18tutor her and only has some basic observations about Lain to offer.
2:04:22Kyoko talks about how she and Lain used to be friends but drifted apart near the
2:04:26end of elementary school and now hardly ever talk.
2:04:29Kyoko drops a bombshell when Touko asks about Misato, though.
2:04:33There is no girl in their class by that name.
2:04:37During a later counseling session, Touko confronts Lain about Misato. Touko tells
2:04:41her that she spoke to one of Lain’s classmates who said there’s no girl named Misato in their class.
2:04:46Lain insists that Misato exists, but that she moved away. Touko asks if
2:04:52Lain can give her any proof of Misato’s existence,
2:04:55which is a weird request, and Lain says that she has her memories of her.
2:04:58Then the conversation turns a bit philosophical with Lain questioning
2:05:02why you need a body to exist, and Touko abruptly ends the session.
2:05:06The next month, Touko apologizes for getting angry and admits that it was
2:05:10wrong to go behind Lain’s back and ask her friends about her.
2:05:13Yeah, you think? I wonder how many ethical rules and regulations Touko broke by doing that.
2:05:17Lain wants to know who Touko talked to. When she says Kyoko
2:05:21and Kaori, Lain reveals that she knows Kyoko but doesn’t know who Kaori is.
2:05:26Touko suspects Lain is playing with her. Kind of mocking her
2:05:29for saying that Misato didn’t exist in the previous counseling session.
2:05:32This whole thing is really interesting and furthers Lain’s ideas about memory
2:05:37and existence, but couldn’t Touko have just asked Lain’s parents about Misato?
2:05:42Lain said in her diary that Misato came over for
2:05:44dinner and Lain’s dad even drove Misato home and spoke with her mom one evening.
2:05:49Seems like that would be an easy way of finding out if Lain was making Misato up or not.
2:05:53As we’ll come to find out, though, by this point in the story, Touko may not be in her right mind.
2:05:59Back to Lain’s diaries for a minute though,
2:06:01after Misato’s exit, she throws herself back into the Wired.
2:06:04Her mother and father’s relationship is also at its worst.
2:06:08Lain describes a huge fight her parents had where her father hit
2:06:11her mother. Lain blames herself for all of these things happening.
2:06:14During this time, something happens to Lain while she’s at school. She went to school in
2:06:18the morning, but wakes up in her bedroom in the evening having no memory of how she got there.
2:06:23She’s also begun experiencing hallucinations again. Stronger than ever.
2:06:27What actually happened is revealed in several Dc nodes.
2:06:30Lain went to the school bathroom, shattered the mirror with a broom,
2:06:34and cut herself with the broken glass.
2:06:36Most likely passing out and hitting her head as well, to explain the head bandage.
2:06:40Lain’s father hasn’t been home for a while and Lain’s mother,
2:06:43worried about Lain’s mental state has requested a leave of absence from school,
2:06:47so Lain spends all of her time at home on her computer.
2:06:50She doesn’t really want to use the computer all day. In fact, it makes her feel sick to do so,
2:06:55but her father gave it to her, so she feels she can be closer to him by using it.
2:06:59Lain starts to wonder if she’s even her mother and father’s
2:07:02child. She comments that she doesn’t really look like her mother at all.
2:07:06One day she finds out that Rabbit, the guy on the Wired who taught her how to trace information,
2:07:11has died. It feels to her that everyone she gets close to in any way leaves her.
2:07:16Then, the news comes that her parents have gotten a divorce. Lain’s father goes to live on his own,
2:07:21leaving just Lain and her mother in the house.
2:07:24Again, another momentous and psychologically damaging moment
2:07:27that Lain makes no mention of to Touko in the counseling sessions.
2:07:31And I guess Lain’s mom doesn’t mention it to Touko
2:07:33either. It’s just never brought up between the two of them, which is pretty strange.
2:07:37This is also when Lain decides to hack into Touko’s research and winds up stumbling upon
2:07:42Touko’s diary. There are already hints that Lain was looking into Touko’s personal life.
2:07:47Early on in the story, she found out when Touko’s birthday was, without Touko ever mentioning it.
2:07:52But now Lain’s managed to crack the diary and observes that Touko is just another human being,
2:07:57concerned about petty things, mostly about men.
2:08:00The whole hacking and spying on Touko thing occupies Lain for a bit,
2:08:03but then her diary entries start to focus more on her father not being around.
2:08:07She reveals that she’s downloaded some AI software to replicate voices and images
2:08:12and attempts to construct her father in the program.
2:08:15This starts out weird, but even Lain admits that
2:08:17it’s goofy and just something that makes her feel a little less lonely.
2:08:21It very quickly spirals out of control.
2:08:24Lain gets heavily invested in machine learning, having her AI dad go out
2:08:28onto the net to research and grow. The AI even begins to recognize shapes through the screen.
2:08:33She builds a 3D model of her father and implements the AI into that.
2:08:37“I’m breathing dad’s life into the computer dad gave me.”
2:08:41One day, she shows the model of her father that she’s created to her mother,
2:08:44and her mom leaves the room horrified. Naturally.
2:08:47Lain then begins corresponding with MIT robotics students and, yeah,
2:08:52you know where this is going. She even starts to look into how to grow artificial organs.
2:08:57Interestingly, one of the only references to protocol 7 is among these entries.
2:09:01This is a concept that’s more thoroughly developed in the TV series,
2:09:05but it’s neat to see it mentioned here too.
2:09:07A deeply disturbing diary entry arrives after Lain has built a
2:09:11torso and arms for her robot dad, and I’ll just let Lain tell you about it.
2:10:01There have been a few mentions earlier of kids at school discussing sexual topics
2:10:06and Lain stumbling across adult sites. By this point she’s also read Touko’s diary,
2:10:11and Touko has mentioned sexual encounters with her boyfriend Takeshi.
2:10:14Lain always gets embarrassed talking about this stuff, but she also shows curiosity.
2:10:19She even mentions Touko at the end of this robot dad encounter,
2:10:22saying that there’s something wrong with her and she has no business criticizing Touko.
2:10:27As Lain continues building robot dad, she decides there’s not enough space
2:10:31in her room and somehow purchases a derelict factory and has construction work done on it,
2:10:36posing online as a buyer and never meeting anyone in person.
2:10:40I’m guessing she used the AI model of her dad to do the transactions through video calls.
2:10:44She mentions that the developer was a bit suspicious about never
2:10:47meeting the client in person, but this never becomes an issue, and Lain moves
2:10:51robot dad to the new factory where she continues her work.
2:10:54In the Dc nodes, an event occurs that isn’t directly mentioned in any of the diary entries.
2:10:59Lain has been in contact with someone online who can get her parts for her
2:11:04project. She wants an actuator motor, so she meets with the guy at a shopping mall.
2:11:08On her way to the meeting, we see a distorted scene of Lain walking through a crowd.
2:11:13Near the beginning of the game, Touko mentions Lain’s visual acuity in one
2:11:17of her diagnosis reports. Apparently, she has better than perfect vision,
2:11:21and at one point Lain talks about how she can see purple in the sky.
2:11:25I guess this scene is supposed to show us how Lain views the world with her better-than-fighter-pilot
2:11:30vision. Lain’s exceptional eyesight could also be another clue that she’s not a normal human.
2:11:36She catches a glimpse of a junior high school girl kissing an older man in the crowd.
2:11:40In the food court of the shopping mall, during her meeting with her contact,
2:11:43she sees the same girl and man having some sort of argument and then...
2:12:37Again, this scene is never commented on anywhere else in the game,
2:12:41but Lain picking up that gun will become important later.
2:12:44Back to her diary entries, Lain is having trouble working on the lower body of robot dad. Ugh.
2:12:50And he doesn’t have a head. Ugh.
2:12:52She puts an artificial head on him temporarily.
2:12:55At one point, he starts to move on his own, and Lain wonders if he’s trying to see her.
2:12:59She also wonders if this dad is really her dad, the one that loves her more than anyone else.
2:13:05After this, Lain discovers that someone has tried to access robot dad through the Wired.
2:13:09She starts having hallucinations again and mentions seeing another version of herself.
2:13:14“She’s in elementary school. But she’s different from the person
2:13:17I was then. She had conviction in her eyes. Was the me that I was then me?”
2:13:22During her next counseling session with Touko, she gets the feeling that Touko is frightened of her.
2:13:27This diary entry corresponds with Counseling nodes 046 and 047. In this session, Lain asks Touko
2:13:33specifically about her lover, who at this point in the story could be either Takeshi or Yoshida.
2:13:38Either way, Touko gets suspicious and asks Lain if she’s really Lain.
2:13:43If you remember from Touko’s diary entries, she’s losing grip on reality,
2:13:46so her unprofessionalism here could be contributed to that.
2:13:49There’s also a subtle reversal thats been happening in the counseling sessions ever
2:13:53since Lain read Touko’s diary. This comes to a head during this session,
2:13:57where Touko snaps back, saying that the counseling is for Lain not for her.
2:14:01She says Lain is the proper, reserved, sad girl without much self-confidence. But Lain says that
2:14:07she doesn’t think that sounds like her at all, as distortion creeps into the audio.
2:14:19Over the next few sessions, the timings of which are hard to place,
2:14:22the roles have completely reversed.
2:14:24Lain is now acting as Touko’s counselor. She also mentions that she and Touko are connected,
2:14:29a word that holds a lot of weight in this series.
2:14:32The breakdown of Touko’s self is further confirmed in her later diary
2:14:36entries where she speaks about suffering from visual and auditory hallucinations.
2:14:40She mentions at one point that she’s beginning to feel like Lain.
2:14:44Afterwards, Lain hacks in to the research center again. This time,
2:14:47she finds some files that she wasn’t able to access before.
2:14:50Touko discovers that Lain has been looking at her files and
2:14:53suspects that she’s read everything, including her own diary entries.
2:14:56This is also around the time when she discovers that Yoshida betrayed
2:15:00her and was just using her as a guinea pig for the RML device.
2:15:03A few more of Lain’s diary entries reveal that her mother has disappeared. She contacts the police,
2:15:09but after seeing empty liquor bottles scattered around the house,
2:15:12they assume her mother is just out on a bender, and the police do nothing.
2:15:15What they do best.
2:15:16Lain is completely alone in the house now and starts receiving silent phone calls,
2:15:20but she can hear some sort of noise on the other end of the line.
2:15:24It’s never really explained what this is,
2:15:26but it could be the information from the Wired leaking into the real world.
2:15:31And I think I’ve managed to line up all of the various story threads now,
2:15:34so it’s time to talk about the ending.
2:15:37In Touko’s diary, when she figures out that Yoshida was using her,
2:15:40we hear a bunch of static creep in.
2:15:42Touko says that she will no longer treat Lain and accuses Lain of killing Dr. Takashima,
2:15:47but then she says something really interesting.
2:15:50“I had nothing to do with it. The police said it wasn’t me. They think it was a suicide.”
2:15:55This isn’t exactly a confession, but afterwards,
2:15:58Touko does beg Lain to help her and calls her a good girl, perhaps trying to placate her,
2:16:03because she knows Lain knows the truth behind Takashima’s death?
2:16:07This is left up to interpretation.
2:16:08Though, Takashima’s suicide does come at a very opportune time when Touko is extremely
2:16:13stressed out, losing grip on reality, and fed up with his treatment of her.
2:16:17Touko spends the next few diary entries begging Lain to leave her
2:16:21be, so let’s check in on what Lain has actually been up to.
2:16:25Lain wakes up one morning with a gun in her hands, having no recollection of how she got it.
2:16:30We know from the earlier scene at the mall that she picked it
2:16:33up after the murder/suicide that occurred there.
2:16:35She decides to place it inside of robot dad for safe keeping. While she’s there,
2:16:39robot dad hugs her, and she wonders if he can hear her footsteps approach and knows who she is.
2:16:45She feels that something has gone wrong with his development.
2:16:48Ya think?
2:16:49Lain decides to make a copy of herself and put it on the Wired using the same
2:16:52machine learning software that she used to create her father.
2:16:56After a few days spent in development,
2:16:58Lain has a conversation with her new self on the Wired. There’s also this brilliant line,
2:17:02which I don’t know, I just think it’s one of the best in the entire game:
2:17:05“She’s the same as me, so she’s predictable”
2:17:09So now a Wired version of Lain has come into existence.
2:17:12A Lain who is combing through data and learning about not only Lain,
2:17:17but Touko as well and everything related to their interactions.
2:17:21Sounds a lot like exactly what we’re doing while playing the game, doesn’t it?
2:17:25So yes. If you haven’t already guessed, we are the Lain that Lain has just created.
2:17:31Or rather, we’ve been guiding this Wired Lain through all the nodes
2:17:35attempting to access information and learn more.
2:17:38By this time, Touko has completely taken on the role of the patient in the counseling sessions,
2:17:43and Touko’s loss of identity is pretty much confirmed in the diagnosis reports,
2:17:47which now have Touko and Lain’s voices overlapping each other.
2:18:03In her final diary entry, Touko resigns herself to
2:18:06the loss of her body and her impending connection to Lain.
2:18:25Now, these final bits of the story,
2:18:26I found really difficult to fit into an exact timeline, so I’ll just refer to the Dc nodes.
2:18:32One night in the lab, Touko is going through her files when Lain appears in the room with her.
2:18:37Touko mentions that Lain appeared in a laboratory two years ago,
2:18:40and that all information about her was entered into a database.
2:18:44However, Touko says the final update is from a date two years in the future.
2:18:48Touko also asks Lain why there isn’t any data about Lain prior to three years ago.
2:18:54She comes to her own conclusion that Lain was born in her current state at that time.
2:18:58Lain says all of that doesn’t matter, that she wants to connect with the entire world.
2:19:40What in the--, like, I don’t know.
2:19:42My guess is that Wired Lain has now completely taken over, possibly even killed or merged
2:19:48completely with the real world Lain and has manipulated the data about herself.
2:19:52The entry from two years in the future could also be a demonstration of Lain’s
2:19:57omnipresence. Could omnipresence extend beyond time as well?
2:20:00If anyone has any thoughts about this whole scene, leave a comment.
2:20:04There are a couple reasons why this scene is hard to place.
2:20:06For one, Touko is acting very differently from
2:20:08the way she acts in the final counseling sessions and her last few diary entries.
2:20:13The other reason comes from what’s written in
2:20:15Lain’s diary and what happens in the subsequent Dc nodes.
2:20:18Through her digging, Lain finds a piece of information that says her
2:20:21mother and father are actually together. We don’t ever see where Lain learned this,
2:20:26but she suspects that Touko knew the truth and was hiding it from her.
2:20:30Could possibly be the reason why she killed her instead of merging with her,
2:20:34as Touko suspected would happen, in the previously described scene.
2:20:37Lain then goes to the abandoned factory and destroys robot dad and all of her
2:20:42equipment. In her diary, she says that she killed her father, and her mother is next.
2:20:47The next entry skips ahead one year. Lain is
2:20:50talking about taking her final walk. She sees her mother out in the city,
2:20:54but her mother doesn’t recognize her, which she isn’t particularly bothered by.
2:20:58But I guess this means that she didn’t kill her mother after she destroyed robot dad.
2:21:03In the Dc nodes, we see Lain walking through the city, carrying a plastic bag.
2:21:07On a bridge, she encounters the other version of herself.
2:21:10Lain says that it’s over, but the other Lain says that for her, it’s just beginning.
2:21:42Do I have a sad existence? I guess people think so. I don’t mind that much.
2:21:49I don’t need a backup. That would be useless.
2:21:53The me on the Net also had a sad existence.
2:21:56That’s why I killed her.
2:21:58Hey, did that hurt?
2:22:02In Lain’s last diary entries, she comments on dying and feeling fear
2:22:07because of her genes. She says she doesn’t need those kinds of
2:22:10genes. This is a small world that seems large only to parasites.
2:22:14All the while the beep, like that of a heart rate monitor, plays in the background.
2:22:20Lain then has a contradictory conversation with herself,
2:22:24talking about where she will go from here, and whether or not she’ll need a body.
2:22:28Finally, she asks what she’ll need to survive on the Wired.
2:22:32The answer: Existence and will.
2:22:35The rest is just data.
2:22:39This echoes Lain’s final words to Touko in their last counselling session. Touko
2:22:44says that she can’t understand her sense of self from moment to moment.
2:22:48Lain replies, “The judgement you have exactly at that moment is you. The rest is just data.”
2:22:57As mentioned in the gameplay session, you can only watch each of the final nodes:
2:23:01Lain’s dairy, Touko’s diary, Digital camera, Diagnosis, and Counseling, once per playthrough.
2:23:07Each of them will trigger the same ending cutscene,
2:23:10an abridged recap of all of the animated segments throughout the game.
2:23:14Then you’ll see Lain,
2:23:15who will turn and speak whatever name you entered on the name entry screen.
2:23:19If you’re lucky!
2:23:20And the process will start again if you select “Continue.”
2:23:23On a fourth and fifth playthrough, another new type of node will appear: Eda nodes.
2:23:28These nodes consist mostly of interrogations of the man Lain
2:23:32met with in the shopping mall. His name is Makino.
2:23:35He’s asked about what he witnessed in the mall as well as his connection to Lain.
2:23:39As these interrogations continue, it becomes clear that the interrogator
2:23:43isn’t connected to the police, but one of the shadowy groups interested in Lain,
2:23:48possibly Tachibana General Labs, possibly someone else.
2:23:52In the last interrogation, Makino tells about how he hasn’t been able to sleep
2:23:56and only feels at ease when looking at a computer.
2:23:58He shows off his scars from cutting himself and asks for a psychiatrist.
2:24:03Some kind of struggle ensues, and in the end, the interrogator calls for a cleaner instead.
2:24:08And a cup of coffee.
2:24:11The last Eda node is a press conference from the director of the research institute
2:24:15answering questions about the two suicides that have taken place on the premises.
2:24:19The death of Dr. Takashima and the death of Touko.
2:24:22There are several, let’s just say,
2:24:24insensitive remarks about the mentally ill in this long speech.
2:24:28I can’t really tell if these are intentional or a product of the time the game was released, but I
2:24:32winced at a few descriptions and explanations of mental illness that were given here.
2:24:37But with all these nodes revealed,
2:24:38the story is concluded. These finish unlocking on a 6th playthrough.
2:24:43The only thing left after that are all of the talk nodes, but the only bearing they have on
2:24:47the story is that you’ll eventually start hearing Touko’s voice instead of Lain’s.
2:24:57And certain lines will be repeated by both Lain and Touko.
2:25:01Touko may have died in the real world and lost her body,
2:25:04but she continues to exist in the Wired, connected to Lain.
2:25:08But even after all of this, there’s one more piece to this puzzle that we’re missing.
2:25:14There are a total of 58 numbered Dc nodes in Serial Experiments Lain,
2:25:18but only 55 are unlockable through gameplay.
2:25:22Two of the missing nodes are on the game disc, but can only be accessed by dumping
2:25:26the game files. These are Dc1001, which is just an establishing shot of some powerlines,
2:25:32and Dc1058 which shows the aftermath of Lain’s suicide.
2:25:37Dc1029, however, is completely missing.
2:25:41So, where is it?
2:25:43Well, inside Yoshitoshi ABe’s An Omnipresence in
2:25:46Wired is a 19-page manga titled “The Nightmare of Fabrication.”
2:25:51DC1029
2:26:12The story takes place entirely in Lain’s room. She wants to talk to someone, but running through
2:26:17the list of all the people she knows, she figures no one else wants to talk to her.
2:26:21When she thinks about Misato,
2:26:23she tries to convince herself that her friend wasn’t an illusion.
2:26:26She remembers buying pastels with her, remembers the smell of them,
2:26:30but right now, she can’t find the paint set anywhere in her home.
2:26:34These pastels were actually mentioned in one of
2:26:36Lain’s diary entries where she talks about her mother not liking the smell of them.
2:26:40Lda071, if you’re wondering.
2:26:42She also can’t recall when she bought them, or when she got her head injury,
2:26:46which occurred after she passed out from cutting herself in the school bathroom.
2:26:49She comes to the conclusion that her memories aren’t connected,
2:26:53and if they aren’t connected to anyone, then she’ll disappear.
2:26:56While thinking about this, she’s cut off the bell that was around Bikke’s neck,
2:27:00the stuffed animal that her father brought home for her as a gift from his business trip.
2:27:04She builds a robotic device to place inside Bikke, repeating all the while
2:27:08that this won’t hurt as she cuts open the stuffed animal and puts the device in.
2:27:13After she’s finished, Bikke makes weak barking sounds. Lain, overjoyed,
2:27:17vows to program him to walk, then install an AI so they can talk together.
2:27:22Then she’ll make her father, and her friends, and a mother who won’t get mad at her.
2:27:26She’ll be able to talk to all of them and they won’t be able to hurt her. In this way,
2:27:30she’ll be able to connect to everyone again.
2:27:32Her moment of triumph is short lived, though.
2:27:35Bikke weakly utters Lain’s name before exploding into pieces.
2:27:40As Lain grieves over the loss of her stuffed dog, a voice calls out to her
2:27:44and tells her that things that are broken can be replaced, the dead can be brought back to life.
2:27:49The voice belongs to Masami Eiri, the godlike figure from the anime
2:27:54who wrote his consciousness into the 7th protocol.
2:27:56He gives Lain a replacement Bikke and says from now on this one is
2:28:00the original. They can dispose of the broken one and because no one
2:28:03knows that she killed the original, that means that it never happened.
2:28:07Lain protests, saying that she knows what she’s
2:28:10done and a replacement isn’t the same as having the original brought back.
2:28:14Eiri tells Lain that she can just rewrite her own memories,
2:28:17then that will make it real. He also says that Lain has already done this many times before.
2:28:23Lain then says that she’s had Bikke since she was born, which we know is a lie,
2:28:27because she received the toy from her father recently.
2:28:30However, maybe there is some truth to this, considering Lain and Touko’s conversation at the
2:28:34research institute, where Touko claims that Lain only came into existence just a few years ago.
2:28:39Eiri suggests this in his next line when he says maybe Lain wasn’t born as long ago as
2:28:45she thinks. He asks where all the people who have any memory of her have gone.
2:28:49Lain still resists all of this and says that her memories are real.
2:28:53Eiri tells her that a memory is just a record,
2:28:56where thoughts and reality separate is just a thin border that can be overcome.
2:29:01Even if Lain forgets this conversation,
2:29:03deep down she’ll know that this is the truth. And that he and she will continue to exist.
2:29:09Lain then wakes up in her room and finds Bikke unchanged, sitting on her desk.
2:29:14However, on the floor next to her foot is the bell that she cut from Bikke’s neck.
2:29:19This Bikke still has a bell around its neck.
2:29:23In the end, she buries the bell in the backyard. If no one knows about it, then it never happened.
2:29:28She’s rewriting her memories, burying her nightmare, that way it never happened.
2:29:36This possibly explains why, even after this traumatizing event,
2:29:36she still went on to try to build a replacement for her father.
2:29:36The Nightmare of Fabrication offers several key connections between the
2:29:40story of the game and the story of the anime series.
2:29:42The most obvious is the appearance of Masami Eiri, looking exactly the same as he does in the anime.
2:29:48But we actually hear Eiri’s voice in the game.
2:29:51Aside from all of the nodes that I’ve already exhaustively discussed. There are some extra
2:29:56scenes that play when you stay idle in each level of the two cylinders throughout the game.
2:30:00Some of these play pieces of conversations that you’ll hear
2:30:03in other nodes. Some of them show scenes that are mentioned in diary entries,
2:30:08such as a construction accident that Lain mentions witnessing in Lda107.
2:30:12But there are a few where a mysterious man is speaking,
2:30:15saying that he knows about Lain and that he has to die in order for them to meet.
2:30:25Eiri’s talk of Lain having reset her own memories many times before this and being able
2:30:30to shape reality in her own image, also speaks to several key plot points in the anime series.
2:30:35But the question is, is a god created or has it always existed, eternally, outside of time?
2:30:42Does it continue to exist when there’s no one around to believe
2:30:45in it? Does anything exist if there’s no one around to remember or believe in it?
2:30:50These are questions that the TV series tangoes with, and I think they’re important questions
2:30:54to consider when trying to figure out the connections between the game and the anime.
2:31:19One of the biggest things I noticed from reading so many comments from and interviews with the
2:31:23creators of Lain is that they’re reticent to explain many of the stories greater mysteries.
2:31:29This is because, as Ueda hints at in the Otakon interview, and the writers of Visual
2:31:33Experiments Lain hint at in several of the blurbs in the episode breakdowns,
2:31:37they wanted people watching to come to their own conclusions.
2:31:40To quote Ueda from that wonderful Otakon Q&A panel, “when we made this,
2:31:45we had certain goals and certain things we wanted to express, but everyone has their own opinion,
2:31:50their own reality--if you were--that they posses...
2:31:52“Just because I think a certain way, or I want this certain thing to be understood,
2:31:57that doesn't mean that I don't think you should get something else out of it.”
2:32:01One of the biggest reasons I had for making this video was to find out what the direct connections
2:32:06were between the story of Serial Experiments Lain the anime and Serial Experiments Lain the game.
2:32:12In an interview with Animerica magazine in Vol. 7, No. 9, Ueda had this to say
2:32:17about the relationship between Lain the anime and Lain the game:
2:32:21“The approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the
2:32:24work by the total sum of many media products.
2:32:28“In the game, users can interactively access the fragments of Lain’s memory.
2:32:33Then users can actually feel the Lain who exists inside the Web.
2:32:37“In the TV animation, people can understand Lain by following the story. In the end,
2:32:42I wanted people to understand Lain, the girl. Ultimately, I want them to love her…
2:32:48“The game’s basic viewpoint is the record of Lain when she was little. In the animation,
2:32:53we didn’t specifically say that Lain in the game and Lain in the anime are the same person,
2:32:58but the creative staff assumed the two are one and the same person, and Lain’s memory
2:33:02in the game had a big influence on the anime.”
2:33:05The story of the game covers Lain’s last year of
2:33:07elementary school and first year of junior high school.
2:33:10In the TV series, she’s in her 2nd year of junior high.
2:33:13So if we follow the chronology of events, based on the two stories actually being connected,
2:33:19then after game Lain dies, she is replaced by a new version of Lain.
2:33:24After all, if Eiri is to be believed, Lain’s body is just a homunculus, a storage unit housing the
2:33:29executable program that is Lain, so it’s easy enough to just replace her body and start over.
2:33:35There were even mentions of creating artificial organs in Lain’s diary when she talks about
2:33:40creating a new father. That level of sophisticated bio-technology exists in the world of Lain.
2:33:45So nothing is actually lost, and Lain has even
2:33:49gone ahead and created a Wired version of herself that continues on as well.
2:33:53Also, because there are many versions of Lain existing at the same time--an infinite number
2:33:59of them, if another scene from episode 8 is to be taken at face value--this version of Lain
2:34:04has no recollection of past events that other versions of Lain have experienced.
2:34:09In fact, we know this to be true, because Lain has no recollection of
2:34:13Alphabet Lain spreading rumors about Alice in the TV series.
2:34:17Or if she does, they’re buried somewhere deep in her psyche,
2:34:20in the same way that the Lain in The Nightmare of Fabrication buried the truth about Bikke.
2:34:25If something or someone isn’t remembered by anyone, then it’s as if it never existed.
2:34:30So things could just be on a linear timeline.
2:34:33But there’s another way to look at things if
2:34:34we take into account Lain’s ability to reset the world.
2:34:38If, as Eiri suggests in The Nightmare of Fabrication, she already has that ability
2:34:43before the start of the series, and has reset the world before, then it stands to reason that she
2:34:48reset things sometime between the events of the game and the events of the anime.
2:34:52So the events of the game happened in a previous version of reality.
2:34:57This could be the reason for having a different family dynamic in the
2:35:00series. Game Lain doesn’t have a sister, but anime Lain does.
2:35:04We actually don’t know if game mother and father are the same as series mother and father,
2:35:09because we never see or hear them in the game, which is really interesting.
2:35:13We know that Lain also has the ability to make it so events never happened,
2:35:17like when she erases the events that make up the rumors surrounding Alice and the teacher.
2:35:22So, Lain could have erased the events of the game from ever happening as well.
2:35:26This brings up an interesting question, though,
2:35:28and one that The Nightmare of Fabrication and the TV series tackle over and over again:
2:35:33If something is forgotten, does that mean that it never actually happened?
2:35:37Even when Lain erases herself at the end of the series, there are still traces of her in the
2:35:42world, in Alice’s memory, on Taro’s NAVI. Hell, she’s even still hanging around at the very end.
2:35:47So it seems that the TV series is saying just because no one remembers something,
2:35:53that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
2:35:55There are even more subtle traces in the TV series, like Lain being given the gun
2:35:59by the boy from Cyberia, calling back to the gun Lain used at the end of the video game.
2:36:04That deleted world leaves behind remnants.
2:36:07There’s also the possibility that the game and the anime could just
2:36:11be alternate tellings of the story of Lain, completely separate from each other.
2:36:15A riff on the same themes, using the same main character,
2:36:18since Lain is the only character who crosses over between the two stories.
2:36:22This theory is supported by the fact that Ueda wanted to
2:36:25create a story that could be viewed through different media projects.
2:36:28That may be a boring idea, but there aren’t any details that don’t support this theory either.
2:36:34Personally, I feel like it’s all of the above and more.
2:36:37The creators are inviting you to make connections and think about things in your own way.
2:36:42I prefer the ambiguity of it all. It’s fun to fall down rabbit holes and discuss,
2:36:46theorize, analyze all of the little details.
2:36:49If there were solid answers, it would take away from the mystique that is Lain.
2:36:53This is a franchise built around mythologizing and at times deifying its main character.
2:36:59Omnipresence and infinity are concepts that human beings can
2:37:02only grasp theoretically. Pondering them opens up a void of thought,
2:37:06because it’s something we can never actually experience and understand completely.
2:37:10And I love the mystery inherent in that.
2:37:13I love that Lain tackles these questions and
2:37:15forces us to ponder what it really means to be all of these things.
2:37:19Or to be none of these things, just another node,
2:37:22connected to another and another in a long chain, inside this perception we call reality.
2:37:41By attempting to piece together the story of Serial Experiments Lain the game in chronological
2:37:47fashion, I think I realize now why the creators structured that story the way they did.
2:37:52Several events and plot threads occur at the same time, and in some cases,
2:37:56may not actually be happening at all, depending on how you look at it.
2:38:00There are also quite a few ‘aha’ moments that arise from hearing certain bits of information,
2:38:04and not knowing what’s going on, only to later unlock a new node
2:38:08and hear something that makes it all fit into place among the larger narrative.
2:38:12It creates an interesting tension. With each node that you gain access to,
2:38:16you’re slowly uncovering more pieces to this gigantic jigsaw puzzle of a story.
2:38:21And despite a few scenes that are difficult to fit into a linear timeline,
2:38:25much of the story does end up coming together in the end.
2:38:28On a more conceptual level, the fragmented structure mirrors the
2:38:32fragmented nature of its two main characters.
2:38:35Like the anime series,
2:38:36the game deals with multiple versions of each, just in a different way.
2:38:40In the anime, we see physical manifestations of Lain’s different personas.
2:38:44In the game, we see interactions, diary entries,
2:38:47and professional reports that show the different masks that the characters
2:38:51wear depending on who they’re dealing with and how they want to be viewed.
2:38:54It’s some of the deepest characterization I think I’ve ever seen (or rather, heard) in a video game.
2:39:00And it’s the biggest factor that kept propelling me to continue playing the game.
2:39:04The gameplay itself, if you can call it that, wears out its welcome well before
2:39:09the end of the first playthrough, but I needed to keep going, because I needed
2:39:12to see what parts of the story I was missing, what parts of these characters I was missing.
2:39:17Is this a satisfying tale that can be taken on its own and appreciated?
2:39:22I don’t think so.
2:39:23You don’t need to play Serial Experiments Lain to watch Serial Experiments Lain, but I do think
2:39:28you need to have watched Serial Experiments Lain to play and appreciate Serial Experiments Lain.
2:39:35As a piece of the larger work that is Serial Experiments Lain,
2:39:39and as another lens to view the world and story and characters of Lain in the TV series through,
2:39:44the game is worthwhile, but only for the most die hard and patient fans.
2:39:49You really need to know what you’re getting into.
2:39:51It’s slow-paced, at times exhausting and tedious,
2:39:55and it won’t offer a grand illumination of the mysteries in the anime series.
2:39:59It will give you several more perspectives through which to view that story though,
2:40:03and will give you much more to ponder just by looking at its story on its own.
2:40:08It was made as an experiment in gameplay and interactive
2:40:11media and spawned an anime that was also just meant to be an experiment,
2:40:15but that ended up becoming the beating heart of the whole thing.
2:40:18Or maybe the central processing unit of the whole thing, to stay within the parlance of Lain.
2:40:27Even over 25 years after the broadcast of this quirky 13-episode anime series
2:40:32and the release of its companion video game, Lain is just as popular as ever.
2:40:37Living in memes, appearing on the covers of indie electronic albums,
2:40:40and acting as the subject for wacky interactive experiments with technology and the internet.
2:40:46In 2013, Wired Sound For Wired People was launched,
2:40:49an interactive visual and sound experiment developed on neocities by a user named fauux.
2:40:55It’s still online today, and you can check it out.
2:40:57Definitely need to give a flashing lights
2:40:59and epilepsy warning though. The imagery can get pretty intense.
2:41:03It’s a creepy little experience where you click through various
2:41:05web pages with simple animations and collages of music and sound effects.
2:41:10There’s a link in the description below, if you want to explore for yourself.
2:41:13In the fall of 2023 through the spring of 2024,
2:41:18an AI chat service called AILain allowed users to have conversations with Lain.
2:41:23It was constructed using samples of Kaori Shimizu’s voice. The service has since been
2:41:27shut down, but in their coverage CONTINUE Motion Graphics magazine writer Gumi Ishibayashi called
2:41:33it an evolution of the video call conversations seen in the 1996 PS1 game, NoEL: Not Digital.
2:41:40So it all comes full circle.
2:41:42In mid-2024 VRChat worked with the Anique Museum based in Tokyo to host
2:41:47a digital art museum dedicated to Lain called the Weird Exhibition.
2:41:52Due to popular demand they reopened it between November 29 and January 19, 2025.
2:41:58Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity to attend this exhibit, but I did read about it
2:42:03in Volume 85 of CONTINUE Motion Graphics, where they devoted an article to covering the event.
2:42:08Shout out to one of my Patron’s, HighFoodcourt, for providing footage
2:42:12from the Weird Exhibition and for giving me links to the document and Q&A from the event.
2:42:13You can find a link to his full walkthrough of Weird Exhibition in the description below.
2:42:17It’s really awesome, check it out if you’re interested.
2:42:19I mean, it was exactly what it sounds like, a virtual museum where you could
2:42:23view artwork and concept art as well as walk around virtual recreations of some of the
2:42:28settings of the anime, like the street in Lain’s neighborhood and her bedroom.
2:42:31There was also a Q&A with Ueda, Abe, and storyboard artist Takuya Sato,
2:42:36as well as questions culled from a Reddit AMA that I combed through.
2:42:40In the museum though, there is an interesting document,
2:42:42titled “Project Lain,” stamped top secret, and dated January 2, 1998.
2:42:48The document, featuring several blacked out lines,
2:42:50details the Lain software project, and development of a new lifeform.
2:42:55There are several references to characters in the video game,
2:42:57such as Lain’s friend Kyoko, and counselor, Touko.
2:43:00It also references diary entries, monitoring from the age of 11 to 13,
2:43:05as well as the placement of this Lain lifeform in the care of a fake family for observation.
2:43:10Near the end, there seems to be some reference to Lain being installed in
2:43:14Touko and her body being thrown away, but much of this line is blacked out.
2:43:19In the Q&A, Ueda confirmed that this was an actual design document that he had
2:43:24written during Lain’s pre-production. The blacked out lines and top-secret
2:43:28stamp were added when it was decided it would be placed in the museum.
2:43:32There is an uncensored version of this document floating around
2:43:35that you can probably find on your own if you’re resourceful enough.
2:43:39I’ve seen it and read it, but I’m not going to show it.
2:43:42The creators have said that it was a mistake that it was ever shown in the first place,
2:43:46and if you’ve been paying attention to my analysis,
2:43:48you don’t really need to see what’s under those blacked out portions to put the pieces together.
2:43:53Although, you will need to be able to read Japanese.
2:43:55Also, the team’s whole deal was creating something that people could analyze for themselves.
2:44:00As Ueda said at that one Otakon all those years ago, just because he thought a certain way,
2:44:05doesn't mean that you shouldn’t get something else out of it.
2:44:23As you can see, Lain’s legacy continues to endure.
2:44:26It’s never going to be popular enough to sell McDonald’s hamburgers.
2:44:40But the series lives on through fan creativity, weird art installations, and internet memes.
2:44:45And the creators couldn’t be happier about that.
2:44:48In the interview with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe in volume 85 of CONTINUE Motion Graphics,
2:44:54the two creators both agree that this is the most fitting legacy for Lain.
2:44:58Lain embodies the culture of the terminally online, the always connected. We’ve traded in
2:45:03our wires, for the most part, but we’re still metaphorically draped in them.
2:45:07You could argue that the world we live in has already had its
2:45:10borders between the Wired and the real broken.
2:45:13Rumors and speculation make their way through social media and become truth.
2:45:17Everything that seemed in 1998 to be only fiction,
2:45:20a story we told ourselves was a dystopia, has become reality.
2:45:24Our world is a Nightmare of Fabrication.
2:45:28Good night, everybody.
2:45:30No, but, yeah. I wish I was joking.
2:45:34After plumbing the depths of this series, living in it, and obsessively thinking and
2:45:39writing about it for the 2 months that it took to make this video, the origins of
2:45:43Lain and the connections between the game and the series have been slightly more elucidated,
2:45:48but I can still safely say that a lot about Lain is just as much a mystery to me as when I started.
2:45:54And you know what? I’m glad.
2:45:56By unlocking so many tidbits of knowledge about its creation,
2:45:59its references, and its legacy, I’ve only come to appreciate it more.
2:46:03The truth is, there is no conclusion here.
2:46:05There’s so much more to think about and unpack, so many details to mull over,
2:46:09different angles to look at, and lenses to peer through.
2:46:12I’m probably going to watch Serial Experiments Lain again before I finish editing this video.
2:46:17And I’ll most likely watch it countless more times in the future.
2:46:21It remains as vital and as real as ever.
2:46:23Lain is omnipresent.
2:46:25And you don’t need to have seen Lain to know Lain.
2:46:31And that’s it for Serial Experiments Lain. I hope you enjoyed the video.
2:46:35If you did, there’s a like and a subscribe button. There’s a
2:46:39comment box. You can share it with friends. Share it with strangers. Spread the word.
2:46:44I think it goes without saying,
2:46:45but this video was the most extensive and obsessively researched that I’ve ever done.
2:46:50Just the research phase of the video took about 2 weeks, and then I played the game
2:46:53and played some other games that I talked about in this video, and some that I didn’t.
2:46:57But yeah, then writing the script took about 2 and a half weeks,
2:47:01and I was rewatching the anime and reviewing the game footage, and yeah, editing took a long time.
2:47:06But anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to spend the
2:47:08time doing all of that research if it weren’t for the Dungeon Dwellers.
2:47:12They support me monthly on Patreon and through YouTube memberships,
2:47:16and if you’d like to become one of them you can click the Patreon link in the description
2:47:20below or click the join button on this video page to become a YouTube Member.
2:47:24All supporters get their names in the videos, they get to watch the videos ad
2:47:28free a few days before they’re made public on YouTube, they get exclusive updates from me,
2:47:32they get to vote in occasional polls on what games I cover next, and they also get access
2:47:37to the Dungeon Dwellers Archive, which is a playlist of bonus videos exclusive to supporters.
2:47:43If you support with $5 a month or more,
2:47:45you also get your name read out loud at the end of videos like these Dungeon Architects:
2:48:53As well as these Dungeon Connoisseurs:
2:50:52Thank you all for your support, and thank you, once again, for watching.
2:50:56The next video shouldn’t take as long to make as this one did, so look forward to that.
2:51:02I’m not gonna say what it is yet, because I’m still deciding what exactly it will be,
2:51:05but I have a couple ideas, and they’re not going to require as much work as this one.
2:51:09So yeah, sorry this one took so long, but hopefully the wait was worth it.
2:51:13And, so, yeah, Serial Experiments Lain. Check it out.
2:51:18Dungeon Chill. Out.

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