Uchuu Kyoudai – 42

Holy crap, Space Brothers, what are you doing to me?

Oh my god, the cliff-hangers just get more and more aggravating with this series, especially now that Hibito’s life is on the line. And here this episode comes and makes things even worse. Not by picking the cheesy route by making things escalate even further. No, Space Brothers is evil. It uses the fact that it takes twenty minutes for a buggy to arrive at his place. And puts in another Brian reference at the end of the episode. Holy crap, you are so evil, space brothers.

Also, I didn’t think it was possible, but it happened: Space Brothers will continue past 50 episodes! In fact, it’s getting moved to a Saturday evening timeslot. That’s prime time there! I don’t know who the producers are who made this possible, but whoever you are: you rock! Heck, this means that there is a very good possibility that this series will end up with a hundred episodes. And it already was one of the best of the airing series when it started! I can’t believe that there will be another series with that kind of length, that isn’t a shounen series.

The disadvantage will be that it’s a very intimidating series to watch. But heck, 100 episodes of Space Brothers, consistently delivering heart-warming and nail-biting episodes. This will make sure that the creators can really take their time. The danger of dragging on of course still remains, but I think that this has been wonderfully balanced so far. Even this episode: the reason why it rocked was because it kept dragging on the fate of our two astronauts. That’s how you make use of slow pacing. This is not like the series is padded for the sake of padding, it really adds something.
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)