Strong emotions. They are always difficult in anime, and it’s so easy to just overact these things. Yet it’s also crucial to nail them in the parts that need to be serious, otherwise you’re just going to end up looking cheesy. An added difficulty is that it’s usually just incredibly difficult to watch people lose control of their emotions.
Having said that, the creators did a pretty good job on Pico and Vince. Space Brothers is a master of subtle emotions, but here they needed to be big. Vince needed to be just completely shaken up by what happened. In this episode, you couldn’t just have pulled the usual “let’s not show our biggest emotions”, because even though he’s completely stoic, he was a child once. We needed to have seen his development.
I think that the backstory could have been done in one episode (especially with around three minutes of bloody recap for both episodes!). And don’t get me wrong, the slow pacing also had its set of big advantages. Because of that the creators could just dedicate so much time to two side-characters to make them really memorable. They especially used the silences really well to build up atmosphere. This episode may have had characters break down, it still was subtle: there were so many scenes in which nothing was said, but instead the creators just let the images do the talking.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)
