In case you didn’t know this series was made by Shaft, this episode has left no doubt. As our heroes walk through a forgotten Madoka set piece to find the latest master. I admit that this may be a change of formula that I was hoping for last episode, though the two episode Master of the week setup remains. Visually it’s a busy episode with Shaft flexing all it’s muscles in providing odd locales but storywise it’s rather barren. It honestly seems that when I approaching a point where I can make sense of what is happening the story just suddenly veers back into what the hell territory. Something which has become quite annoying now as we are halfway through the series and I am so disjointed from the plot to bring myself to care about it much. The majority of this episode consisted of Nero,Rin and Hakuno just walking through the area while Rin throws down some exposition only to lead to Hakuno meeting Alice who proceeds to lay down more exposition. Today’s topic is cyber ghosts which is basically means that people can died in SE.RA.PH and still survive in digital space with just their mind and soul.
A convenient topic as the master this week is a dead girl who happened to become a floor master. Alice gave some background on herself this episode but allow me to elaborate because somebody’s got to set thing straight here and this show certainly isn’t going to do it. Alice was a English girl who was gravely injured in a WWII air raid and left in a vegetative state, however it was discovered that he body had magic circuits and she was kept alive for research purposes. She spend a few years in continual pain and suffering before he body finally gave out and died. Seems her mind was connected to the net when she died(Trying to make sense of the net existing around WWII) and she was left a cyber ghost wandering around till she found the Moon Cell(Big old supercomputer that runs Virtual world SE.RA.PH) SO she strolled in and made a contract with the Servant Nursery Rhyme which took on her appearance and became her only friend.
I told you the servants in this one get weird and Nursery Rhyme is a weird one indeed being a heroic spirit that represents childrens rhymes. Her real form is a book and she only takes the human form of her current master and it seems she can even have a different class or stats based on who contracts with her. In this case it seems they have made some weird floor reality marble with is like an Alice in Wonderland like paradox where up is down, left is right and time is all over the place. A neat idea and made all the more troublesome in that the world can essentially reset itself if the servant doesn’t like where it is going. What’s more it seems this place causes masters to have flashbacks to previous memories though here we mainly get cryptic nonsense from a girl called Amamia. Once again we get evidence that this has all happened before as Hakuno recalls memories where he oddly has a different command spell and of people he has yet to meet.
It would be quite interesting if Hakuno didn’t respond to that like a lethargic doll and I think that really is a problem with this series, the character simply not reacting much or responding to clearly bizarre events. Point is that if Hakuno, the one whose in the middle of all this, can’t bring himself to care about his own situation, then why should I? Once again the setup here is excellent as we have a world that writes its own rules, with a master whom you lose all memory of if you leave her and can have past and present merge together. Maybe if the cast was more interesting this could be an exciting prospect but so far our current enemy master has proven herself to be more interesting than the main cast. I do at least wonder how they will win when the rules are so turned against them and I hope the solution doesn’t come from Rins convenient access to the script.(How did Rin know that the Floor masters servant was Nursery Rhyme? There is no way in hell anyone could conveniently guess that)
