Buy our toys!
Impressions:
This episode took a bit of a turn. So much so that I doubted my sanity and had to go back and check the official site… and then check the Wayback Machine for what the site was two weeks ago and confirmed that I’m not crazy, and it WAS advertising itself as all just gray clonky mechs stomping around like a gritty Independence Day. So it seemed like what it was promoting itself as for most of the episode. But then, about two minutes from the end of the episode, after the aliens have shown up and have handily destroyed all of humanity’s vaunted guns and rocket launchers, out of nowhere, a goddamned toy robot shows up, the 80s music kicks in, and it becomes a toy commercial.
With the heavy swerve in the closing minutes, I’m not really sure what to make of it so far. I will say that the first 90% of the episode was not gripping me much. Not super boring, not interesting either. Not even really clear on who the protagonist was even supposed to be in this weird world of global paintball games with giant robots, so I assumed it was going to be kind of an ensemble cast where everybody is dealing with the alien invasion. It most certainly was not coming off as any kind of homage to the goofy super robot shows of decades ago. Good or bad? No idea. I’ll figure it out next week when it probably figures that out itself.
