'Giri/Haji' Episode 4: All the loose ends of the series are bound together by the butterfly effect
The story contains spoilers for Season 1 of 'Giri/Haji'
"Someone threw a stone in a pond a long way away and we're only just feeling the ripples," begins the Japanese-Anglo series 'Giri/Haji'. The story about a Tokyo detective Kenzo (Takehiro Hira), who travels to London to look for his long lost, presumed dead younger brother Yuto (Yôsuke Kubozuka) is based in the foundations of the butterfly effect.
With his family’s honor and the fragile peace between the warring gangs back home at stake, Kenzo must find his brother and bring him back home.
But before we get to that, the first standing question is how did these characters find themselves at this particular stage in life? The answer is rooted in the butterfly effect the series bases its premise on. And can be summed up in a single monologue delivered by Sarah (Kelly Macdonald) in episode 4.
Just as her relationship with Ian (Jamie Draven) is going downhill, Sarah delivers an epiphany she has when smoking some pot with her friend. "Do you ever think about how everything we do is an echo of something?" she begins. "Like how everything we've done is going to happen again. And everything we're going to do has already happened somewhere else? And we're all just dancing around each other like atoms and we can't even stroke a hair off our face without affecting the lives of a billion people? Like how every tiny split-second decision we make can potentially have a vast, profound effect on everyone around us? And maybe it's all planned: everything that's going to happen was always going to happen as if we're all being moved by this mad conductor. We've all been here before, just an endless road, right? Something we can't control. All we can do is hang on, and hope it sets us down in a better place than it picked us up."
She might have been stoned, but Sarah put together in five lines the beautiful, mindblowing premise of 'Giri/Haji' and what sets it apart. The soliloquy is overwhelmingly impressive when we reach the end of the episode where all loose strings are tied together to bring us to where the characters are today. And how decisions taken in a different part of the world come to change someone else's life in another part of the world.
Keep an eye out for episode 4. You might want to watch it again if only to marvel at how the dots are all connected and how actions and decisions taken an ocean away can come around to completely change your life.
All episodes of season 1 of 'Giri/Haji' are streaming on Netflix.