Short Synopsis: That scientist isn’t willing to give up that easily, and prepares for a second attempt to zap Tokyo, while keeping Chiko and the others out of his way.
Highlights: Excellent aftermath, apart from that climax perhaps.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Really, this series has a strange idea of the concept of hiatus: it stops, right after the climax, only to show an aftermath instead of starting a new and fresh arc. I must say that a lot of spring-series share these themes of fooling the viewer: Kaiba first advertised itself as a tragic love-story, Real Drive first seemed a Ghost in the Shell-clone, while it was actually a strange combination with slice of life and science fiction, Himitsu ~ The Revelation at first seemed to be a series about its stories, while the characters turned out to be its main focus instead. But the king of these games obviously is Nijuu Mensou no Musume, where you can absolutely not predict what path it’ll be heading into for the next arc. And of course its very misleading ED also counts.
In any case, I’m glad to see that the previous arc merely served as build-up for the final arc of this series. In a way, this episode was more intriguing than all the four episodes of the previous arc combined. The creators seemed to have gone for the thriller-approach to end this series, and there’s a lot of potential. What I especially liked about this episode was how every member of the cast seems to have his or her own agenda and troubles. A lot was going on in this episode and it was a lot of fun to see how everyone reacted to that beam of light in the previous episode. The angry mob also was perhaps a bit clichéd, but it did portray the anxiety of the general public, right after the war, and their fears for more casualties perfectly.
But please. Did the creators really have to end the episode with that flying airship? It’s not the fact that it’s an airship that bugs me, but out of all the possible ways that the creators could have introduced it, they went with a Deus ex Machina, and a pretty blatant one at that: you know the scenario, the hero is cornered and at the last possible moment a saviour comes from out of nowhere. I mean, the creators could have at least shown Ken as he arrived at the airship, and as he took off, he suddenly saw Chiko jumping around on the roofs.
twenty faces appearing and disappearing is becoming very anoying… creators choose: he lives or he dies… but STOP making him pop up suddenly!!!
Ken is an unnecessary character – he gets on my nerves every time I see him.
It’s not whether he’s dead or alive. He could actually have experimented on himself or cloned himself or whatever to explain why he keeps living through those situations. I guess it’s left for the ending.
I still like the show very much and I hope the ending in the anime is satisfactory and at par with how this series started.
Her friend (forgot the name) and Ken definitely are weak characters to the plot due to lack of development/direction/purpose, but not so much so that it ruins the rest of it… yet.
Honestly though, the plot is very similar to that of Pumpkin Scissors where the main character(s) go around cleaning up leftover war experiments in a time when the war is over.