Short Synopsis: Haru’s letters reach Akiyuki, and a possibility for the two of them to meet pops up.
Highlights: Another building-up episode, but this time the Xam’d and humanforms got some extra depth.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Another solid and enjoyable for Bonen no Xamdou. I think that this is the pattern we can expect for much of the rest of the first half of this series: mostly fleshing out the characters and building up the storyline, with your occasional action-sequence like the attack on Sentan-island and the Xam’d going berserk. The question is now whether the second half of this series can effectively make use of all the time that was spent on building up in the first half, but we still need to wait a couple of months before we get the answer to that. In any case, so far the first half has been wonderfully down to earth, and that’s why I like this series so far.
In the meantime, Haru’s still very worried about what happened to Akiyuki. As it turns out, the Xam’d was killed relatively easy, but the real purpose of it going berserk was to show that it wasn’t looking for trouble, it was just a pregnant woman who wanted to live, and at the same time show a strange pillar in the sky that only the Xam’d and Haru could see. The question is obviously: why could Haru see it and everybody else not? It’s probably got something to do with Akiyuki.
I also wonder what Haru’s going to do when she finally meets Akiyuki. Will she continue to stay with the military? Will she desert it and join the crew of the Zanbani (that would be rather lame, by the way)? Meanwhile, Akiyuki’s little adventure alone reminded me of the time when Renton went off on his own in Eureka7, although their reasons are totally different. There hasn’t been any real tension so far between Akiyuki and the crew, unlike with Eureka7, where the crew of the Gekko-go kept teasing Renton over and over again. Bonen no Xamdou is much more a coming of age story for Haru than that it is for Akiyuki.
This episode also again blurred the line between the Xam’d and the humanforms. It’s like humanforms are a lesser form of the Xam’d. The guy that Akiyuki meets in this episode: we’re still not sure whether he’s a humanform or a Xam’d, since his symptoms looked exactly like Akiyuki’s. But on the other hand, when even these common people are able to at least gain their senses back after having been Xam’d, then why is Sentan Island’s military having so much trouble to deal with just one of them?
To be fair, Nakiami didn’t exactly get honors for her effort on the one Humanform that Akiyuki killed. I’d imagine this to be the same scenario – The people being so far gone that only their basic instincts remain and thusly making it difficult to reason with/restrain them, especially with such a big one as that red Xam’d. The people Akiyuki met mentioned that the transformed one he was fighting was a “weak soul” implying that some form of restraint is needed to keep them from completely losing it and ending up in a seemingly permanent monstrous form.