What They Say:
When Dr. Gel kidnaps his favorite Boobies girl, Dandy joins forces with a suave and sophisticated alien in a dashing attempt to save the day and collect a big bounty!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
All throughout Dandy’s run I’ve hoped that Scarlet and Honey would get to star in an episode. With this episode, my wish was granted. Of course, I learn now that I should have hoped that Scarlet got an episode and Honey got an episode, for a total of two episodes. Honey unfortunately steals poor Scarlet’s thunder as part of the plot. There’s still five episodes left, Scarlet. Don’t give up all hope yet.
The episode marks Keiko Nobumoto’s third Dandy episode, and the first episode where she really nails the offball humor in a way that only Kimiko Ueno really had before. Director, animation director, and storyboarder is once again the talented Hiroshi Shimizu, who previously worked with a Keiko Nobumoto script in episode 8. The episode doesn’t have the personal touch of Yuasa’s or Oshiyama’s episode, Shimizu is still an incredibly talented craftsman in bringing a world to life, and his contributions are noticeable even though this episode once again seems to take place in the “main” Dandyverse.
This time, Dandy and crew are searching for a rare Cloudian. They crash an all-female buffet party where we find Scarlet, pampering herself to numb the pains of a lonely heart. Upon leaving the party, Scarlet bumps into a strange gentleman, who QT recognizes as the Cloudian they were after. Cloudians, it turns out, seek out lonely women and seek to comfort them, in a kind of galactic host club system. In a second plot thread, typical of Nobumoto’s prior script work, Honey is kidnapped by Dr. Gel and Bea after leaving a wrestling match. The two plan to scan Honey’s brain to extract all data about Dandy, but discover she is a super-genius half-Cloudian herself. When a ransom message for Honey’s kidnapping is broadcast to Dandy at the Cloudian’s mansion, the Cloudian, Gente seeks to rescue his fellow Cloudian and drops poor Scarlet like a hot potato.
What really sells the episode is the inclusion of a fourth-wall breaking laugh track that points out how awful and corny many of the jokes this episode are, and in the process, makes them funny again. The entire episode takes great pains to destroy a lot of what we’ve trusted about the Space Dandy world, including having Meow mention “the time Dandy was a zombie.” In that branch universe, all life was transformed into zombies, and the effects were never reversed, meaning that 1) continuity in Dandy is a sham, but also 2) continuity in Dandy does exist because everything that happened is remembered, even if there’s no realistic way it could be. It opens the door to character development, including fleshing out Honey’s story, which is one of the hopes I had for the series all along.
In Summary:
This week’s Space Dandy delivered a lot of what I wanted from the show, even if it wasn’t a Scarlet and Honey Dirty Pair-styled episode. (Though, if the show still wants to do that I’d look forward to it.) And I’m very happy that Nobumoto was the one able to deliver a lot of these developments, as I’d previously considered her the show’s weakest link. Now I look forward to her work in episode 22, which I hope will bring Scarlet some relief. In the meantime, Sayo Yamamoto’s second episode is next week! I couldn’t be more excited.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Funimation
Review Equipment:
Sony VAIO 20″
