[Review] Ingress Season 1 Episode 5 "Journey – Portal – Potential" Jumps the Shark but Sticks the Landing

If Episode 4 almost shouldn't work with its buddy comedy narrative focus, Ingress's Episode 5 "Journey – Portal – Potential" absolutely jumps the shark. Not only does this episode involve Makoto successfully landing an airplane despite not knowing how to fly, because he uses the flight controls' memory to learn how to not just execute an emergency landing, but it also turns the in-world Ingress app into an AR video game for the rest of the world. They also manage to sneak in a reference to the original game's creator, Niantic, by making the "Niantic Project" at CERN the experiment that revealed the existence of XM.

The episode also features more of Sarah being treated as particularly stubborn luggage, and then being tortured until her abilities get better.

"Journey – Portal – Potential" is just a mixed bag of over-used film tropes, an attempt at breaking the fourth wall that comes across as sincere as the character who delivers the blow, and more of Liu being a one-note villain. While the scientist/commander gets more screentime than ever this episode, it isn't a good thing. He rehashes the same orders he gave all four episodes before – don't harm Sarah, kill Makoto and Jack, finish the experiment. The show's attempts at making him into a menacing villain don't work because he's so one-note I can't even properly call him an edgelord despite how hard his character is trying for that classification.

"Journey – Portal – Potential" nearly manages to ruin all of the groundwork built by the previous four episodes, and is the weakest of the show so far. It almost feels like a different show, and not in a way that's at all enjoyable. It manages to land on the other side of the shark jump solely because if the pure terror and desperation portrayed by the Hulong agent who sabotages the plane in order to save his family. That small bit of humanity is the only bright spot in this miserable slump of an episode.

The biggest takeaway factor from "Journey – Portal – Potential" is that Makoto left his glove behind on the plane. It's a detail sure to become part of the plot in the future, given how long the camera spends focused on the dropped glove. It's also a detail rich with symbolic meaning for the show and for Makoto himself. From Episode 5, the gloves are off and Makoto can no longer hide from the world around him.

If only the rest of the episode was as well-thought out and executed as that one slow pan to the discarded leather glove.