Summary
Nanno once again takes issue with the rules in “Liberation”, and rails against the established structure.
This recap of Girl From Nowhere season 2, episode 6, “Liberation”, contains spoilers.
There’s a rule for everything, and a reason for every rule, or at least that’s the general operating principle of Pantanawittaya, the school that Nanno enrolls at in “Liberation”. This episode, filmed in black and white with flashes of color, evokes the draconian rules and regulations of the second episode but without the gender-based component. Immediately, it’s clear the monochrome aesthetic is designed to emphasize ideas of order and conformity, and the red of lipstick and blood represents rebellion — and who’s more rebellious than Nanno?
Miss A (Patharawarin Timkul) and Miss B (Chutima Teepanat) are similarly nameless symbols of obedience; Nanno’s punishment for rebellion is to learn the hefty rulebook back to back. Naturally, she reads it aloud in hysterics and burns it — there’s no rule against that, after all.
The Obedience Room and various increasingly severe punishments aren’t enough to dampen Nanno’s spirits. As the punishments worsen, so too does Nanno’s rebellion, symbolized in piercings and more outlandish hair colors, and resulting in increasing frustration among the faculty. Girl From Nowhere season 2, episode 6 reaches a turning point, though, when Yuri enrolls with designs on siding with the faculty and thwarting Nanno’s efforts.
Thematically, “Liberation” is most obviously concerned with the hypocrisy of those who make the rules and refuse to follow them, but it’s also designed to further the relationship between Nanno and Yuri and create a bigger rivalry between the two of them and contrast between their methods. When Nanno dies (again!), Yuri’s meddling sends the entire school into turmoil. The students turn on and brutalize the faculty. It’s a moment of triumph for Yuri, who once again addresses Nanno’s impaled corpse, explaining that for Yuri to win at this game, Nanno had to take one for the team.
Eventually, the emboldened students, whipped into a frenzy by Yuri, kill Teacher A and begin to turn on each other. The point, one supposes, is that in the absence of rules, chaos ensues, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. When the only remaining member of the faculty, the headmaster, pins the blame on Yuri, he asks for a vote on whether or not she should be killed, and the students all naturally turn against her. Yuri attempts to blame Nanno, but her triumphant return, along with various versions of her representing different manifestations of her rebellion, different rules being broken, throws Yuri for a loop. Nanno once again turns the students against the headmaster, and they remain defiant, filming him with his gun aimed at Nanno’s head. She demands that he shoot her, but seeing the cameras, he can’t. Nanno has won again, which she predictably finds hilarious.
Yuri, though, does not. The Nannos bind her in the Obedience Room with the ghosts of the faculty, her plan having backfired considerably. Some rules are there for a reason, and not messing with Nanno seems to be a big one. Girl From Nowhere season 2, episode 6 stills wheels out a cliffhanger, though, as a bloody Yuri emerges from the Obedience Room and screams.
