It’s a bit of a strange twist: the previous episode left off with a disaster of a robot that refuses to move because it lacks power, and in this episode some kind of awesome light ending literally drops out of the sky in order to help the cast.
But I guess that that’s one of the charms of Robotics;Notes: on one hand it is deconstructing the giant robot genre by showing what it would really take to make such a thing even remotely usable, and examinig what a challenge it would be to even build one. On the other hand it has mysterious AI girls and sparkly things that fall from the sky. It’s definitely using the former to build up for the latter, and that build-up is LOOONG. This really needed to be a 2-cour series, otherwise this entire effect would have been lost.
Regarding build-up though: the key is also being able to use it. We’re now nearly at this series’ halfway point (after next week there will probably be a big hiatus), and the characters so far are down to earth, realistic and believable. That’s good, however the pay-off of all this is also something that the creators really need to pay attention to. If it works, then it will be awesome. If not… then I get the feeling that I’ve wasted my time a bit.
Still, the series continues to drop good hints. The end of this episode where Mizuka with her defunct leg asked Airi to go away made a good impact: finally this show starts to delve a bit into the links between all of the subplots it has been creating.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)
Finally Aki is able to leave her dreams aside for now. I always wondered why she couldn’t come back after she’s gotten better or something. At least now we’ll see some real robot building action. The ending is… interesting. Build-up is not bad as well regarding the monopoles. Pretty good.