The prospect of this show quickly getting stale was one of the things that worried me about it, and to be honest I was feeling a bit of that worry when Sphinx announced yet another bomb. The more I see these videos the more I wonder why they don’t even try to disguise their voices. A game of chess? Not exactly subtle, Watanabe. After successfuly hacking the police network the two launch their next riddle and bomb…and this one has a twist. Toji starts to wonder if it would be better to take her in if they aren’t going to deal with her in some other manner – after all, she is the only person who knows their identity – but Arata is adamant about not getting anyone else involved.

Meanwhile Lisa is still on the run, hanging out in fast food joints and in alleys and anywhere else that isn’t her home. Being the one that was able to connect Sphinx to the missing plutonium, Shibazaki decides to visit the plant in Aomori to get more information.

The deeper Shibazaki digs, the more he discovers how well Sphinx have covered their tracks – everything from using fake credit cards to buy their bombs to picking said bombs up from convenience stores and not having them delivered to their homes…in other words, besides the connection with the missing plutonium and the witness sketch of the mystery worker there, the police have zero leads. One can only dream of a 26 episode epic saga this series could have been.Looks like MOS Burger. All in all, a good attempt, but a wasted one. The animation is mostly top notch and those familiar with Tokyo will recognize the city's landscape, streets, buildings and atmosphere (down to every inch of detail), with a few cell shaded CG being a bit distracting. The soundtrack is competent, but far from Yoko Kanno's best days.

Some questions are left unanswered or vague (do the children experiments make them live only a couple of decades?). However, the characters have so much to do and so little time, they rush to the conclusions and the character arcs feel sloppy (like Five being a thrown away villain, Twelve's relationship with Lisa, her own personal life details, the detective's relationship with his daughter, and the whole school setting, which is inexplicably introduced and abandoned after one scene). If they had the budget for 26 episodes, this would have been absolutely genius. However, it needed time for character development, mood setting, and time for the story to proper develop and the secrets to be revealed. ZnT is a well produced and generally well written series, with an interesting idea for a plot that borrows elements from real day politics, science fiction and Nolan films sense of doom and escalation (specially The Dark Knight).

Zankyou no terror episode 4 summary