A ramen dinner helps temper the anxieties the students have over their arrival at the Holy Spring.
What they Say:
“Episode 6 – The Holy Spring”
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers).
The young pilots reach their destination, the Holy Spring, and are left in awe of the water flowing up into the sky. Unfortunately, according to the words of a captured enemy pilot, anyone caught trying to enter the spring itself will be shot down on sight. This trickles down to the townspeople, and eventually the students start hearing about this “rumor.”
As festivities commence, it turns out that the students have a pretty successful restaurant business in their hands. With Ari’s recipe for “Ari-men,” her specialty pork and noodle soup, customers come from far and wide to throw money at them. When Ari needs to tend to Claire’s injury after she drops some ceramic bowls, it’s unclear which of the remaining students has the skills to keep the noodle pots going at full power. It turns out that the quiet Ignacio fits the bill, and the day is saved. Which is good because even the instructors (and Admiral Luis visiting in disguise) can’t deny that the Ari-men is heavenly, especially when it’s on the house.
After the dinner rush is over and things start to cool down, it leaves time for personal anxieties to begin to flourish among the group. Their reasons for becoming pilots are as varied as they are. If there’s anything they all wish for, it’s for the ability to fly with one-another for as long as they can.
With the previous few episodes dealing with a lot of very intense moments of character development and the relaying of a lot of pertinent pieces of in-universe history, it’s odd that this episode seems to avoid most of that in favor of some light food-related comedy. The way in which the episode is cut implies something very intense is about to happen; the pilots’ approach to the Holy Spring is both beautiful and foreboding. Yet, the atmosphere of the episode is celebratory and light aside from the undercurrent of rumors and speculation about what the consequences of breaching the spring might be (there’s surprisingly little discussion of this despite there being an entire military force of people dedicated to protecting the spring from outsiders).
One very positive aspect of this episode, in my opinion, was the time spent with some of the more minor characters, namely Mitsuo and Chiharu, whose budding romantic feelings (at least, that’s how I interpret them) perfectly seemed to take the little bits and pieces of probable danger and unknown consequences of approaching the spring and boiling them down into a set of very representative anxieties. Their conversation with one-another outside on the swings is bittersweet; as they pledge to fly together forever, I can’t help but think that one or both of them can’t possibly be long for this world
I’m still having a difficult time getting a proper read on Ignacio. Always on the sidelines, always popping in at random times, never quite apparent with his motives or emotions, this time he saves the day by… cooking noodles properly. I’m speculating a bit here, but I suspect that his observational skills, proven by his ability to learn how to cook the noodles simply by watching Ariel, will come into play at some point. I refuse to believe that he’s not an important character. As of now, though, he hasn’t done a whole lot beyond just observing.
In Summary:
After the last couple of episodes seemed to really be building up to something large, it was interesting to have such a relatively quiet, inconsequential episode shoehorned in. Though there’s certainly an undercurrent of tension that peeks out from time to time and it’s pretty clear that this is meant to represent the “calm before the storm,” there’s not really a lot that happens during this episode that couldn’t have been incorporated into one of the earlier character-building episodes. This being the midpoint, I would guess that most of the audience is hungry for more drama and confict, so to dial it all back so dramatically seems a bit incongruous to me.
Episode Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: Acer P235H 1080p LCD Monitor connected via DVI input, Logitech S220 2.1 Speakers, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
