A real oddity, so packed full of ideas and tones that the final “twist” of the episode (which is at least set up from the beginning so it can’t be considered too much of a cheat) might feel like an excuse for what came before more than anything. Fear of crowds! Classic science fiction concept! Bureaucratic nightmares! Light comedy! Character drama! Of course, the episode is also a vehicle for reversing the giant monster style by presenting humans interacting with smaller humans – so, another episode where we get to see actors interacting with miniatures, but in a way different from “Metamorphosis”, as these are normal people in a miniature world which necessitates different sort of acting (it matters)! The episode can barely stick to one thing from minute to minute, and it comes off kind of jarring.
There are some interesting explorations of the central idea early on in the episode (the whole “human civilization would improve if we were smaller and took up less space” idea gets passed around all the time, and has always been a bit goofy) – I like the line of people with genuine questions about how this process will affect their lives, a fun way to build up the concept (which is introduced pretty much out of nowhere.) They actually treat the shrunken society with a fair amount of seriousness, right up until the “immigration authorities” show up and introduce that aforementioned nightmare bureaucracy scenario (taking advantage of the completely straight acting and the size contrast – being literally glowered over by big bureaucracy), which is a bit of high absurdity that leads to even higher absurdity when Yuriko gets locked in a box for most of the rest of the episode. A few gags in between (a comic relief rotund man and some nuns, which are just inherently funny, right?), and the rest of the episode becomes about Yuriko finding no way out of her bizarre predicament – seemingly abandoned and with no apparent way to reverse the situation, it becomes more about sad pathos. It ends as a sort of a bad dream (spoilers?), equal parts silly and frightening – despite the lack of a concise tone the rest of the episode, it finds a way to communicate claustrophobia they had in the opening sequence in a different but parallel way. It’s structurally bonkers, but there is a bit of structure there.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 