Every ultraman fan has a different insight into what makes The Targeted Town one of the most impeccable pieces of tokusatsu of all time. But selecting just one moment or element takes away what it stands for: just about every camera shot and dialogue is seamlessly woven together to feel like a truly surreal, almost entrancing chinatown mystery with a build-up that’s obscure in the best way with stunning cinematography, lighting and sound. It is, in nearly every way, flawless.
After attending the funeral to Anne’s uncle, who died in a tragic plane crash, Dan begins to suspect an unusual presence in the bumbling town of Kirishima after hearing rumours of many unfortunate accidents occurring rather simultaneously, only to witness several bizarre attacks from several people in seemingly unrestrained phases of anger-induced violence in the same town, including a man wildly shooting at pedestrians with a rifle. After discovering these people are heavy smokers, Dan soon traces down a particular tobacco vendor to find the cigarettes within it tainted by strange red seeds. What would a villain be aiming to accomplish with such a small-scaled ruse?
Right off the bat, the episode’s pacing is what makes its mystery exceptionally gripping. As the episode is shown almost completely from Dan’s perspective (even having several uses of back-tracking shots on him), we get a noticeably smooth and tranquil atmosphere as we’re focused more on the external environment of the ‘targeted town’ of Kirishima, with more focus on Dan and his unknown internal mentality as to the Ultra Garrison’s usual bumbling of what to investigate next. Dan also hardly has any dialogue, making his silence (and therefore the episode’s silence) take a nicely mysterious uncertainty and emotional captivation to this scheme until these unpredictable breakouts of violence randomly occur.
What makes this episode also one of the most interesting internal battles is that the only thing shown outside Dan’s perspective is the culprit’s furtherly quiet one during the shots of him supposedly peering in on his experiments (which I’ll expand on later) adding furtherly fantastic foreshadowing as both these characters bound to collide are first seen in a deceiving fight for control.
The cursed town of Kitagawa itself is smoothly unsettling, as everyone tends to speak connectively from Dan’s view, such as all the funeral attendees discussing the same disaster matters when he tours the grounds, making the imminent mystery feel more personal. The shrouded connecting rumours even make it seem like an alien world itself from his cut-off, isolated perspective (referencing Dan’s alien origin) providing a huge almost-artistic twist to the show’s formulae.
The scenes of people being underneath the red seed’s spell are each uniquely suspenseful and paranoid. Perhaps the most infamous one being a madly hostile man shooting at everyone in sight with a rifle, which is surprisingly horrifying for an ultraman show due to the lack of music bringing out all the sirens and terrified pedestrians’ screams, as well as the constant shots on the confused, distraught rifleman’s face making the concept of these seeds uniquely terrifying. Furuhashi even ends up getting shot, adding a dark realism from suffering such a casualty from an everyday pedestrian.
Other victim scenes include Furuhashi and Soga each unknowingly smoking a tainted cigarette, with the intriguing use of blood-red lighting glowing on their faces and a grindy, irritating noise when they show immediate symptoms of the drug’s spell feeling as if you’re experiencing their uncontrollable agitation yourself, making this possession eerily surreal.
The Targeted Town is also renowned for its heavy variety of music which adds more layers of tranquillity to this obscure scenario, such as some unusually blissful flute music being played for both Metron’s warning to Dan after dumping gravel onto his Pointer in an empty truck and his final confrontation which daresay feels almost homey, which is ironic given Dan is addressing another alien but under duress, showing the underlying sneering mockery to this villain. My favourite choice of music occurs when Dan and Anne silently spy on the shady disguised man restocking the cigarette vendor up from a café window, with the soothing piano music adding a calmer mystery to their observation.
But if there’s anything to say about The Targeted Town’s sound, it’s just how LITTLE music there is throughout, with nearly all scenes unusually having zero uses of music and instead chooses to absorb the background noise. This gives a much-needed break from the show’s addiction to campy upbeat filler music, allowing it to seep into the reality of Kirishima and notice more moods with the characters and adds more uncomfortable unpredictability to the foreshadowing alien’s reveal, which is wonderfully done.
Cinematographically-speaking, the episode is stunning. The Targeted Town’s stylish use of close-ups, such as when Dan dissects a tainted cigarette and when he and Anne stare out the café window, are uniquely captivating and show the artistic side to Tsuburaya. A couple more admirable shots being when Dan’s face is shown as half-lit during the recovered rifleman’s interrogation: some more juicy symbolism of his superficial human side and shadowed, despairing extra-terrestrial side. Speaking of Dan again, the camerawork carves out that melancholic self-centred perspective of him flawlessly, making you wonder as to why he’s being so mute and shadowy regarding this case and town. How isolated is he as an alien?
One very striking long over-the-shoulder take of Dan’s perspective is one of my all-time favourites of the show. He silently strides mutely across the funeral grounds but halts to listen in to passer-byers’ thoughts on their similar matters with many disasters sprouting from Kiriyama, such as cab and jet companies, all occurring within few weeks. Even the camera pans off to his own view of each person passing by: a fantastic attention to detail which is exceptional even for Ultraseven.
Occasionally the focus will go off Dan and instead on an unusual view of the action, such as the camera peering from behind a log at an affected man assaulting his wife or imperfectly up through the gap of a telephone onto a distorted Kiriyama’s face, implying someone is watching from the shadows, showing even the unaware Ultra Garrison are all part of his game and that Dan is the only one truly aware of such a presence.
Other clever play-arounds with perspective include, again, when we’re shown the cigarette effects on Furihashi and Soga, with sudden close-ups and tuned out background noises to leap into their plagued minds.
As for Metron’s grand introduction, it is unquestionably one of the most iconic moments in tokusatsu history and maybe even Japanese film as a whole due to how fantastically bizarre it comes across as by how paradoxically orderly and subtle it is. Metron immediately greets and invites Dan to sit with him at a traditional kokatsu table to warmly explain his plan. All those odd observing camera angles beforehand seemed to provide a suspense that would typically have you expecting the tranquil mood to be a shell and something horrific will surge from underneath once Dan hits his mark, but the episode contrastingly amplifies this tranquil subtleness upon revealing the shockingly polite and sophisticated culprit, which is something truly remarkable.
When Metron’s sits his crustacean bulk opposite Dan’s interrogating pistol and finally reveals his means of achieving his plan, we’re faced with one of the most timeless messages of old sci-fi. Metron realised all of the everyday man’s lifestyle was built on the simple essence of trust and, if that trust was removed, humanity would destroy itself in a heartbeat and the earth would be left at his disposal. By simply affecting this one vender with cigarettes to cause random, obscure attacks in this silent town, people will naturally take all opportunity to start pointing fingers via their self-absorbed egos than what’s truly justifiable, spreading the wildfire into an eventual grave tragedy. All he needs do is take away that trust. A small yet striking philosophy on humanity which is alarmingly true, even more so to this day. The red seeds affect only those who smoke them, but their effect will spread catastrophically, not by the drug itself, but by human stupidity and underlying mistrust, which seemingly only takes a small push to tear into chaos in this episode.
A dilemmic side to Dan’s place as a human is unveiled at this moment: why does he choose humanity through all their flaws? This episode is at-core, a fairly tropey plot of an alien addressing one another not to intervene, but he sees a moral-questioning dilemma in the way Metron aims to effortlessly exploit his seemingly treasured people by setting off a tiny spark for them to exploit themselves in a wildfire. This twist sees his previous shadowy behaviour as more understandable.
The tragedy is more than just a simple anti-smoking message and makes the at-first small-scale invasion plan all the more terrifying by wondering how easily Metron would’ve won by just using these few tainted cigarettes. How he so confidently talks of a horrifying yet disturbingly simple plan of an empty wasteland world being left for him by just affecting a few people (with Anne’s uncle turning out to have smoked his cigarettes before his flight and assaulted the pilot in-air), making it wonderfully engaging to his character and the episode’s structure as a whole. As Heath Ledger said: ‘All it takes is a little push.’
What makes Metron’s manner all the more dementing is how the Ultra Garrison got eaten from the inside-out, but it wasn’t even intentional: they brought it on themselves with cigarette dependency, an almost comedic, yet frightening display of power. Metron even directly states Ultraseven is the only one who matters, not the Ultra Garrison, and that he’s the only one who can see clearly, which is frightening to us, the observers, who’ve mostly only seen things from his vision and obscured thinking.
When the two opponents finally duel, it’s a greatly executed but noticeably short confrontation, with Seven and Metron barely making contact before Metron gets split in mid-air by the eye slugger. But it’s so well executed and fits in emotionally with the rest of the episode too well to matter. The finale also includes some more timeless cinematography, such as Metron and Seven’s duel reveal as reflections in the water puddles and the shoddy apartment miniatures being greatly brought-to-life by the iconic sunset background and further uses of grand-scale longshots, which also makes the shadowed appearances of Seven and Metron surreally stunning.
The finale’s triumphant music, the only music in the whole episode which isn’t melancholically tranquil, goes against the episode’s vibes of distrust and gullibility, implying Seven and the Ultra Garrison CAN protect earth together in the end, as Metron and his plot get destroyed with the two’s combined efforts. This greatly hints them as the ideal image of trust and unification people should look up to and shows their tied significance.
Another noticeable thing about this finale is the lack of an UG regroup, given the show tends to have its characters look back on the episode’s events and have a laugh towards the future, whereas this episode instead ends immediately after the climax with one of the most powerful messages from the narrator that nails the hammer on the point:
‘Please do not worry, as this scheme could only have happened in the far, far future. Why is that, you ask? Because in this world, there isn’t nearly enough trust to exploit.’
It snaps you to reality after addressing in black and white how the show’s optimistic views are superficial with today’s social standards and these wondrous things the show has are forever impossible without the basic necessity of trust. It’s an absolutely timeless message with humanity’s trust being ever worse now with social media harassment and narcissism. The ending’s refusal to surrender the melancholic, yet hopeful emotion built throughout its events with a mellow, upbeat Ultra Garrison reunion also kept that lonely wanderer feel of Moroboshi till the end.
The Targeted Town is as much a piece of history as it is a spectacle. The way it experiments with camerawork, moods with lighting, unique music with absence of music and slow anticipating pacing are only part of what makes this episode a cult classic. The way the fantastically unusual alien plot is unravelled through witnesses and our characters in similar ways and the final confrontation between our two focused rivals is simply unforgettable, not to mention sporting one of the deepest messages in early tokusatsu.
As for Metron, he’s unquestionably one of the franchise’s most beloved aliens and it’s easy to see why. His design boasts practical surrealism with his bold colours and interesting body proportions, taking inspiration from a variety of Japanese crustaceans (and even a face-down whale!), not to mention his arms ironically resembling burned-out cigarette butts. His sophisticated collected speaking makes him more memorable than the show’s typical loudmouths and his mannered use of kokatsu is absolutely unforgettable with a heavy use of Japanese culture and the finest example of a face-to-face exchange between two aliens to date. Another thing worth mentioning is how he’s treated as just another bystander who disappears into the crowd among these Kirishima people nattering about their business, which is heightened amusingly with his polite manner.
While he is, at heart, a simple menacing villain, the ideology behind his confidence and simple laid-back plan is horrifyingly real. It’s simply explained to suit children but the meaning behind the philosophy grows terribly true and relatable with age and explains more to Dan’s unusually shadowy behaviour over the sacrifice of loving a race that would easily destroy themselves over a few tainted cigarettes. Was the Pegassan tragedy worth it?
It also makes it oddly terrifying how humanity’s destruction, beyond all weaponry and defence, lies within a little vending machine nobody would a cast second glimpse at. Who was truly right in the end? Was Metron simply too arrogant? Or did Dan find his biggest struggle to entrust these people who can barely even trust themselves?
