When things don’t go to plan, everything goes out the window.
What They Say:
Pied Piper runs into an unusual situation where there is a confirmed Scub Burst, but no Secret in sight. They collect the Quartz and that seems to be the end of it, but strange things start to happen when they return to base.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After an interesting episode that focused on a Scub Burst in Arizona, we got a bit better feel for some of the global politics and the strange bedfellows that comes from it with what Generation Bleu has to deal with. Getting a bit of a bigger picture of what’s going on and how some of the governments operate, especially after the political pressure was brought to bear before that got Generation Bleu to help out in the Middle East, this cements more opinion on what’s oging on. For this episode, we get another Scub Burst that has occured and Generation Bleu is on the scene to deal with it, but there are no Secrets coming from it, something that hasn’t really been seen as happening before.
As Ao gets a minor education about, the two are definitely tied together and having one but without the other is a cause for concern to say the least. But with no Secret there, they have to deal with the Scub Burst there, they have to deal with it and the arrival of Truth that looks to get in the way, which is a good thing since while the series story, plot and characters may be lacking in a lot of ways, it excels with the action. Even a brief burst of it that we get here early on helps the overall tone and engagement with the show. While dealing with those events is over relatively quickly, we do get the whole quartz removal and return to the home facility, leaving those in Australia to keep an eye on any potential issues.
The show does bring in some other interesting elements to it that feel kind of unwieldy in a way as well with the addition of a “rock star” Miller, a young woman who may have a greater connection to things than most expect. Having her in the city and hooking up with Ao for awhile lets it have a kind of teenage innocence about it, but it also comes at a time when things are getting rather surreal for Generation Bleu, what with a giant floating teddy bear in their eyes that they’re trying to deal with. Toss in Elena as well as the three get together and the show really does feel like it’s so scattershot in what it’s doing that it’s leaving me more and more confused. Watching it with no interruptions and I feel like every new scene shifts the show in some other direction that doesn’t quite connect with what just happened.
In Summary:
As Eureka 7: AO goes along, I keep finding these small moments of beauty and technical enjoyment when it comes to the animation, mechanical and character designs, but the story feels like such a hodgepodge of a mess that I don’t know what it’s trying to tell anymore. The more it goes on, the more I feel that this is a series that will click together better as a marathon viewing where all the elements may be tied together better. Or perhaps it’s just a show that won’t make sense at all, go big at some point and then end. For a show that was my biggest anticipated work of the season it started in, it’s turned out to be such an odd and confusing work that I don’t know where to stand on it anymore and keep hoping that we’ll have an episode where everything clicks. Sadly, this was not it.
Grade: C
Streamed By: FUNimation
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.
