The world is adjusting to the unbalance and Ao is feeling a lot of it himself.
What They Say:
After his desperate stand against the swarm of Secrets, Ao finds himself in a world that is familiar, yet different in disturbing ways. As he tries to figure out what happened and how he might fix it, he makes a startling move.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With Ao having gotten back in the saddle in a firm way in the previous episode, it pushed him in a lot of ways and the end result, the main takeaway for me, was that we got some decent action out of it. Ao’s world is one that has been a state of flux and chaos since things first happened to him in Okinawa and nothing has felt like it’s gone right for him ever since. Or made sense either. With the world now in a new state due ot the amount of Scub Coral that’s out there and the kind of revolts, protests and more that’s going on, everything just feels wrong in a way and people are grasping at anything they can. And Ao fits into that pretty easily, even if Generation Bleu doesn’t feel like it’s right either.
There’s some curious bits that comes from this, from seeing some people going about their lives as normal to dangerous elements on one of the Coral as someone is killed through protest, accidentally when you get down to it, but is revived due to the Coral and its connections. It ups the mystical and supernatural side of things which can make changes in how people view what’s going on in small ways. And those small ways can have a huge impact along social lines. We also get Ao exposed to an alternate history, i.e. our real history, and this helps to flesh out this alternate world more to see what kinds of differences there are from the arrival of the coral back in 1908 to the wars that went on and population numbers as well. All useful stuff that should have been in here a dozen episodes ago in clearer form.
In Summary:
The episode does throw a bit more action into events, including an interesting segment between Ao and his mother about what happened to her since leaving with the Quartz, but it’s again a piece where we have so much information but not the right information combined with superficial characters at best. I continually struggle to feel invested in this series even though it contains characters that I know, or at least know of, and yet find them to be constantly acting in ways that don’t feel like it’s in their character. And then you have those like the Secrets who just seem to exist to cause friction with their own agenda rather than actively doing something, appearing out of nowhere and leaving just as quickly when the situation changes. There are some neat moments in the episode, but as a whole it conitnues to show a series that just doesn’t work on a weekly basis at the very least in its structure and narrative.
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.
