The next call has gone out…
What They Say:
With Mutta waits to hear if he will become an astronaut, Kenji has received good news. The next candidate to get a call is Serika.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As became obvious in the previous episode, the focus is going to be spread out a bit as the various main candidates are getting individual calls that take up an entire episode. Not that it focuses just on that character for the entire thing though as we get a good little opening bit with Mutta waiting dutifully for his turn to be called while imagining the silly way that JAXA is making its choices. Makabe’s story worked surprisingly well as we got to see his kind of bland life and background that expanded more with meeting his future wife and how she nudged him towards his dream. With him not getting as much time during the closed sequence of testing, it’s something that he needed. But now the show wants to focus on Serika and the lead-up to her call.
Serika’s story plays out a little differently, instead starting after the call as she’s off visiting the grave site of her father, Rinpei, doing the familial duty of cleaning it and so forth. This segues us into seeing Serika as a child which begins to explore her own interest in space. Her father was a key figure in a way earlier in the series when she saw touches of him in the way that Mutta was acting at JAXA at one point, so getting to see what he’s really like when she was in her formative years, so outgoing and silly, is quite welcome. It also runs in contrast to the difficult time her father was having during this stage of her life, falling apart internally in ways that she couldn’t understand. While he’s a microbiologist, he has that desire to go into space which she latches onto in a silly way, but then takes more seriously as she learns about how his life is about to be cut short.
It’s filled with a lot of endearing and heartbreaking moments as we see his life go by in the hospital while they visit him and keep him up to date on their lives as the holidays go by and her dance recitals as well. Especially as he gets weaker and weaker. Things pretty much progress as one might expect since we know the end result and it’s a difficult but promising journey for her as she changes her life with what she wants to do because of it. It’s the kind of pain that’s difficult for a child to process, but one that as we see can redirect her life in a new way that will please not just her, but to succeed at something her father wanted as well which reinforces what she gets out of it.
In Summary:
Space Brothers gives us some token time for Mutta, but it’s appropriate once again that the main focus is on the next candidate to get the call. It’s not the call itself, the wait or the reaction to it that dominates here but rather the look at the pain in Serika’s past that has brought her to where she is in the present. It’s a difficult watch as a father myself but that just lets it all resonate all the more. There’s a lot to like here in general, but even with the light and silly moments, it’s a serious episode and one that could make some real impact on viewers depending on their own background. And that’s welcome to see done since so many shows that do things like this rarely resonate in a real way.
Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
