Wooper: For anyone wondering when the summer season preview will go live, you can expect it in two or three days. For the rest of us, spring hasn’t yet sprung its last, so I’ve got more thoughts on the usual suspects, with the exception of Kowloon Generic Romance, whose four remaining episodes I’ll round up at the start of next month. Taking its place this week is a niche web series by one of my favorite modern anime directors – no prizes for guessing its title before clicking through, but I’ll be highly impressed if you do.
Apocalypse Hotel – 10-11
Just two weeks after Apocalypse Hotel aired its ninth and arguably strongest episode, it may have topped itself with number 11 – a mostly wordless trip through what remains of the Ginza district 600 years after humanity’s abandonment of Earth. Ponko’s increasing managerial duties created an opportunity for Yachiyo to take a day off, and she spent it in atmospheric style, initially strolling between familiar locations such as the robot scrapyard and the hotel distillery’s wheat field. Eventually she began traveling to new places: a still-functioning pachinko parlor, the Ryuko Fudo-son shrine, and the National Diet Building in the neighboring Nagatacho district. Along the way, she communed with both animal life and nature as a whole, leading to her discovery of a fallen service robot with which she shared a model. The respect with which Yachiyo took a crucial chip from that robot’s body gave me the impression that she viewed it as a part of the Earth, just like the creatures she encountered on her journey, though the script’s silence wisely left the moment up to interpretation. The whole story served as an excellent showcase for the series’ background art, too – an area where episode 10 lacked, given its mostly interior settings. Still, there were some highlights to its Detective Conan-esque proceedings, particularly the reveal that Ponko had given birth to a healthy daughter, Tamako. The comedy of the episode’s two identical-looking hotel guests (one a serial bomber and the other a “cosmic detective”) gave rise to some fun scenes, but there wasn’t much acknowledgment of the story’s underlying morbidity, which I thought was disappointing. Still, I consider Apocalypse Hotel to be one of this spring’s best shows, and I’m praying that it finishes strong next week.
Mobile Suit Gundam
GQuuuuuuX – 10-11
There was a scene in GQuuuuuuX’s 11th episode that, in my mind, stood as a perfect metaphor for the show as a whole. In it, Kycilia confronted Char on a stage within the Yomagn’tho (a clear allusion to the theater scene in Zeta’s final episode), and when he didn’t indicate any interest in joining her campaign, she threatened to kill him. Before she could pull the trigger, though, Machu fell from some unseen ceiling and crashed on stage between them. Seconds later, Nyaan busted through the backstage wall in the GFreD and threw the entire scene into disarray. What better representation of Machu and Nyaan’s negligible roles in this show could there be than their graceless interruption of its actual story? All this time, GQX’s writers have prioritized Zeon’s political and military landscape over everything, keeping Kycilia’s nonsensical plan to wipe out Earth’s human population as their trump card and teasing a nostalgia-hungry audience with characters and mechs from past Gundam series. The ending of episode 11, where the RX-78-2 emerged from a wormhole while Beyond the Time blared in the background, revealed that Shuji’s role in the story was simply to bring GQX’s timeline to an end. That means Machu and Nyaan were both in love with a human-shaped plot device, adding insult to the injury of their ultimate irrelevance. But hey, at least episode 10’s grayscale flashback to Challia Bull’s Jovian mission was kind of cool.
Terra Live – 1-3
I’ll watch anything with Jun Aoki’s name on it. He’s directed two of my favorite comedy anime of the last ten years in Pop Team Epic and Gal and Dino, but I also admire the rest of his filmography, from his early Youtube shorts to more recent works, such as the criminally unsubbed On Air Dekinai. His most recent effort is this short spinoff of Arknights, a gacha game about which I did zero research before watching these three episodes or writing this paragraph. I’m into Terra Live (otherwise known as U Takes Terra) not to gain a deeper understanding of its anthropomorphic chibi cast or its vaguely environmentalist themes, but for the gags and gaffes I expect from a Jun Aoki work. What I will say is that I dig the series’ globe-hopping concept, as main character Eureka’s IRL streaming job takes her to locales inspired by real world places, like the Norwegian mountain Kjerag or the Italian city of Siracusa. The former saw Eureka attempt to camp in freezing temperatures, including a scene where she threw her self-assembling tent into the air, only for it to be blown away by a sudden gust of wind. This shot had me laughing out loud, and though it was one of only a couple moments throughout these episodes to get that reaction from me, I did enjoy the show’s frenetic pace as it went on. Eureka got caught up in a rhinoceros race, a mafioso car chase, and a skateboarding sprint at various points, and the focus occasionally shifted to the franchise’s side characters, which kept her peppy persona from getting too grating. I’m surely one of the few Arknights philistines watching this thing, but I’m down to join hands with its fanbase just this once.
Shin Samurai-den Yaiba – 10-11
With less than a dozen episodes under its belt, it’s too early to label any episode of this show a “throwback,” but number 10 did remind me strongly of its earlier material, where Yaiba battled Onimaru’s eight animal-themed ogres over the course of several episodes. This time he and his allies had to contend with four animal-themed Devil Kings, most of whom were defeated in comedic fashion, as before. The use of villainous staples like trap doors, doppelgangers, and transforming mechs gave the episode a classic feel, although the parody of the Superman-aping Devil King was more boring than anything else. Thankfully, Yaiba’s sea cucumber companion was released from exposition duty here, playing a key role in the defeat of the chameleon Devil King and getting in the cutest little kick against one of Onimaru’s minions in episode 11. Of course, that episode was dominated by its central showdown, where Yaiba’s mastery of the Raijinken resulted in a billion volts’ worth of lightning-based cuts. The contrast between his green aura and Onimaru’s wind-based blue one was cool and all, but what I really loved was the scene where they fought within the eye of a localized storm created by their combined powers, where Yaiba made use of his superior agility by jumping between hunks of stone suspended in midair. Though Onimaru wasn’t defeated for good, he was forced to flee Tokyo for the time being – a smart development, as it’ll allow the show to shift gears for its concluding episodes.
Lazarus – 10-11
I’ve been quite lenient with Lazarus’s logical leaps thus far, but now that we’re just two weeks from its conclusion, episodes like number 10 feel less satisfying than ever. Opening with a montage of news reports about medical and financial chaos at least acknowledges the consequences of Skinner’s world-ending proclamation, but I’m not feeling the effects across the board. Take new character Dr. Millie, for example, who has information about the monitoring system used in Skinner’s artificial heart. She freely gives that data to Leland when he meets with her, and claims to have been waiting for someone to inquire about it. Why? Unless she wanted to watch the world burn, she would have turned it over to the authorities in the hopes that they’d use it to locate humanity’s only hope. As for Leland himself, it was his turn to be given a backstory in week 10, but I found all his half-sister’s exposition about their family succession issues to be terribly boring, especially when foregrounded against the impending end of civilization. By contrast, Soryu the assassin’s backstory in episode 11 was great, representing his fragmented memories with an appropriately jittery papercraft style. His fixation on the Hundun, a faceless beast said to represent chaos in Chinese mythology, was ushered to the forefront of his citywide duel with Axel through the latter’s wing pendant. That duel ended with a fishing spear through Axel’s gut – there’s no way he dies, given the recent reveal about his medical relevance to the overall story, but it’s cool that Soryu seems to be every bit a match for him.
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