Oh great, another Setsuna-episode. Still, the guy has been getting better, and he’s not as annoying as he was at the beginning of the series. Still, he remains pretty stupid and seriously needs to talk more to people. Here he is, in a middle-eastern country, undercover and all, and he apologizes like a Japanese. No wonder that the guys from the Union saw right through him.
Also, I know that language-issues have always been tricky for international series like this one, but please, at least try to be a bit believable. What the heck happened to the Arabic language? It’s a shame, you can see that the creators did research for this series, and I appreciate that, but still small details like this continue to slip by.
Ah well, at least the episode built up well enough. The civil war in Azadistan is progressing along nicely, and indeed it’s not that easy to just change an entire nation, even though the leaders have no intention to fight. I do wonder how the creators are planning to solve this, though, but I guess there’s only one way to find out.
Now that the first quarter of the series is over, we should be seeing a bit more of the direction where the creators plan to go for with the rest of the series. It was at this point that Code Geass really began to decline, with its pointless emo-scenes, and I really hope that the creators for Gundam 00 don’t try to do the same and instead just continue with what they’re good at: politics.
As it happens, Azadistan is quite a boring name for a country. “Azad” means free in Indian languages (coming from the Arabic).
Image if Great Britain were known as Great Country 😉
“…and he apologizes like a Japanese. No wonder that the guys from the Union saw right through him.”
I definitely agree with your comments about this episode. I’m really excited (perhaps too much so) about the next episode, though – gratuitous Sumeragi fanservice aside, the preview looked excellent. And the idea of Graham, Patrick, Soma, and Sergei finally getting to meet up makes me very happy indeed.
kudos though… they’ve put multiple reporting news channels and newscasters, unlike most animes’ single-channel-worldwide-broadcast.
I’m not sure if this has turned out to be true after all, but I recall reading a translated summary of an interview with director Mizushima, where it was stated that Kuroda himself only wrote the screenplay for the first quarter of the series, before conflicts emerged between him and Mizushima.
At the very least, this probably means there’ll be some changes in direction from this point on, whether it’s an improvement or not.