What They Say:
Mutta has been assigned to the CES-62 backup crew, but his fellow members aren’t keen to work together. Will the arrival of Eddie Jay, their leader, turn things around?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Space Brothers made things pretty clear what’s going on with Mutta and the backup crew he’s been assigned with and it does admittedly make a whole lot of sense. While a lot of the previous episode focused on how management works in the way Chief Butler has put together the oddballs of the program with the hope that Mutta can once again be the catalyst to bring out the best of them, it was a really fun piece that made me enjoy that whole working the puzzle angle that every large organization has to deal with. But we also got some solid character material and background because it focused on Brian Jay’s older brother Eddie and that he was being brought back into the formal program again after never making it as far as he wanted to for a variety of reasons. A connection like that for Mutta to discover has so much potential.
Not surprisingly, the first days of training that everyone is going through together, sans Eddie since he’s still not introduced to them, is not going well. Everyone has such strong personality quirks that unlike past situations in the astronaut candidate training segments where everyone was focused on trying their best, we get people that are just being themselves. There’s dancing, laziness, hangovers and simply wandering around as well. Mutta’s trying to do his best but even he doesn’t seem quite so intensely motivated as he might have in times past. Through the time they all spend together, we get to see some of the quirks and personalities made clearer, though they were pretty much there from the first moments we saw them. Now we get to see how it looks when they’re all together and not really clicking all that well to say the least.
The catalyst for change is the arrival of Eddie Jay though, which is met with a lot of applause by all the people out there because of his near celebrity status among astronauts. This is a big positive to be sure, but it has Mutta worried because what he thinks the group needs is what middle school students need, strong and stern leaders rather than the friendly type that Eddie seems to be. And as we see the group going off on their next training exercise together, now complete, you see all the more that they’re just basically a group of individuals rather than a team. Which is to be expected, but there’s no real effort to become a team, which is something that even Mutta gives off a bit with the way he’s interacting with all of them since he’s becoming easily frustrated.
In Summary:
Space Brothers gives us our time focused entirely on the team at hand rather than side stories or background material and that’s wholly to its advantage. We get to see a strengthened look at what kind of disparity they have with each other as it’s clear they’re fully individuals rather than team players in a lot of ways, but that’s something that has to really be molded rather than broken. With the arrival of Eddie Jay as the team leader, it’s hard to say for a lot of it how he’ll work out, but we do get glimmers that his style may be the right one for this, contrary to what Mutta thinks. And that’s a big positive right there since even though Mutta is supposed to be the glue/catalyst, he needs to be wrong on occasion as well.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
