WIRED

Entry 01 - Lain Episode Analysis: Atmospheres.

Oct.2-2025
All stories start with something odd. A new introduction to a new world. A weird setting.

Serial Experiments Lain is a world that's both very familiar and yet very un-familiar. Elements such as telephone wires may feel familiar to many living in america, especially in populated cities, but the insiccent hum they sing within the show, may be unfamiliar to many who may have not been around when technology tended to do that. The setting as well, while perhaps a little foreign to a more western audience may be recognized by people who have watched anime before, and yet that scene of Lain exiting from a space that seems so empty and hollow, as if she were exiting out of nothing-ness or out of the blank spots of a sheet of paper is bizarre and strange. Haunting in some senses.

And of course the splotchy shadows. Bright red, hauntingly red, as if that opening scene of a student—Lain's classmate, Chisa—throwing herself off a building still haunts the entirety of the town, still haunts even Lain even before she knows it yet.

And that is only touching on the elements within the story that are consistantly weird. The introduction format, that opening line in english—even in the original language of the show—laughing as it says "present day, present time!" is a bizarre moment that seems to never be explicitly addressed within the show. Even the opening theme is Jarring to many fans who enjoy anime, all too used to hearing Japanese music, even in english dubs, and yet the opening theme, is in english, even in the original Japanese broadcast. Perhaps its gesture of aesthetics, of English words being cool the same way Japanese words were cool in some circles at the time, but it all contributes to the weirdness that not only the audience experiences at the new setting, but Lain does as well.

Lain Iwakura, a bizarre young girl with a strange asymmetrical haircut, quiet and reserved in classes, and prone to hallucinations. In this first episode, and only in this episode, the audience is shown Lain's hallucinations of thin white film escaping from her fingertips, of people in her school suddenly becoming blurry scribbles or words on the chalkboard becoming incomprehensable scratches, or becoming completely new words. And of course, at the end, that hallucination of seeing her dead classmate, Chisa, still imploring her to join her on the wired.

And it's only in hindsight that all of this becomes so much clearer. So much more understandable. The way Chisa's death haunts lain throughout the series, how her introduction to the Wired was through a dead classmate's email telliing her to join the Wired. And the English elements, included almost jarringly in a japanese show, perhaps signalling that blurred line between the global Wired and reality that Lain is meant to see to fruition. And Lain's hallucinations. While we never see some of the hallucinations in the later episodes return, like that white film or the blurry people or the changing words, Lain sees Chisa and visions of other people who have died. Most notably, people who have died and were presumably connected to the wired.