What They Say:
The astronaut candidates have reached the sixth, and final, day of survival training. But Mutta is down with a fever. Can Team E complete the training?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a few episodes worth of recap, owing to the show being in a new timeslot and adjusting potential new audience members to the series since it’s been running for over a year now, Space Brothers gets back on track with a new episode here. With the series having worked through some in-show delays that dealt with Nitta and his phone, we get a further look at that here with those that are supervising the whole program and seeing that there are personal erasons that the phone was allowed, but it’s an interesting discussion about how Nitta was responsible for any issues with it, which has now resulted in them getting delay and Mutta getting sick. Which would be a bad thing, except that Mutta is loving that he’s getting treated by Serika. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s gotten lucky, but there’s a truth to it.
The bigger problem is that because he’s down, the team now must face the choice of going on with him in this condition and trying to finish or conceding outright. Of course, knowing the way the team has been from the start and their longer connections going back to JAXA for some, there isn’t a surprise with the choice that they make here. Nor is it a surprise that Nitta steps up to do more to ensure that they make it back by helping out with Mutta’s gear. But what really sells it is that everyone steps up and they distribute a good part of it among them so as to ensure nobody else gets taken down hard because of it. Mutta’s surprised by it all of course, since his experiences haven’t always been the best, but this just furthers the bond between them all and even redoubles their incentive to finish and move on to the next challenge.
While Mutta’s team makes its slow but steady progress, we get to see some of the others that have made it back move in to the next phase of the training program. This one avoids the physical and planning sense of things and goes for just brain work, one that they have two weeks to complete involving working on some miniature rovers. The rules aren’t laid out all that clearly, but we see how there’s still a big challenge going on between the teams and taking downtime just doesn’t factor into it. When Mutta’s group gets to it, kind of ending the desert trek a little unceremoniously, we discover that there are five engineers spread across the five teams. And because they’re the last ones, they get what looks to be the most awkward and unlikely engineer to work with, someone that you can imagine is just hugely difficult to work with and seems to prove it at every instance. Though things are just getting underway here, a lot is dropped in as we get to know engineer Pico and his personality, but also what the team itself has to face.
In Summary:
Space Brothers gets back on track with this episode, but things are a bit shaky all over. The desert survival trek takes up a good chunk of it, but it ends on an off note that leaves it feeling less than settled. The shift to the next challenge, building a working miniature rover of sorts while coping with an engineer who wants nothing to do with them, gets started more quickly than one would expect. But with the structure of the tests out of whack, this isn’t too much of a surprise overall. But not giving the teams even a day to get readjusted after the trek just seems like more than is warranted. There are some cute moments here overall and a bit of clarity comes into the picture here and there, but overall it’s just good to be back in real story mode again and seeing where it’s all going to go.
Grade: B
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.
