Ooedo Rocket – 10

Seriously, the episodes for Ooedo Rocket keep getting weirder and weirder. Unfortunately, this also means harder to understand. The current episode focuses on Tenhou and Tenten (finally I know their names), when they search in Hezo’s house (that was his name, wasn’t it?) after Seikichi and Sora have been missing. It seems that at one time, they were street-performers, and quite good ones. Then, however, the law started to forbid them to carry out their practices. When they wondered what to do next, they got picked up by an official named Toyama Kinshiro (not to be confused with Ginjiro). They then started to work for him, to defeat criminals. Then they met Seikichi, and got inspired by his innocence, so they decided to watch over him. That’s why we’ve been seeing the two of them talking whenever Seikichi was in trouble. That was about the part that made the most sense. For a majority of the episode, we follow them spying on Hezo because of what he did in the previous episode, commanding cats and all to take back the flyers revealing the location where Seikichi always carries out his fireworks-tests. Furthermore, Seikichi and Sora have been missing, and they suspect the guy behind this as well. So, what’s his secret? Well, he’s got a machine that changes people into cats. The cats from the previous episode probably all were his servants who went into these machines. Seikichi and Sora went to his house for some Ohagi, got lost and accidentally ended up in these machines as well (by the way, seeing Tenhou, Tenten, Seikichi and Sora in cat-form were SO cute. Tenten with nekomimi also was just awesome ^^;). This episode also introduced yet another new character: Mizuno. So far, he’s unimportant, though he could play a considerable role in the next episodes. He seems to be Kinshiro and Torii’s superior. We see the three talk with each other for a bit, and that part was just impossible to understand, since they toss all kinds of big words at each other (most of which I couldn’t even find in the dictionary), not to mention that Mizuno explores new depths of the word “Giddy”. In any case, judging by the reaction of Kinshiro and Torii afterwards, though, he probably meant to tell them not to go after Hezo. Torii sends Ginjiro to go after Akai, who’s searching the guy’s house as well, while Kinshiro tries to find Tenten and Tenhou, but gets into trouble with the locals. This does result, however, in Tenhou and Tenten finding out about what Ginjiro has been up to and vice versa when the two parties notice each other. One thing that still puzzles me was what happened when the townsfolk found out about Kinshiro’s identity. It was probably filled with bad puns and references. Still, now that I wrote things down a bit, the episode makes much more sense. It really was a fun one, despite its strangeness. Now all that’s left to hope is that Shinsen will continue to sub this series for more than just one episode. Anyway, to close off this post, I got an interesting comment on the last entry I wrote for this series, by Bomber D Rufi, who claims that this series might actually take up 26 episodes. While the series looks like it’ll just finish in two or three episodes, things could get very interesting if this rumour turned out to be true. After all, the OP-single gets released on July 4th, which is after the anime finished.]]>