The BETA are still coming and with the Stasi in full control we now have rebels working to overthrow the Stasi. All the while West Germany watches from the sidelines as it tries to figure out which side to support. To make up their mind they send Kirke to East Germany to survey the situation because of her relationship with the Schwarzesmarken team. You remember her? The girl who first treated the team with utter contempt but somehow off screen became BFFs with them? Another character who was negatively affected by the time constraints. Anyway I found the little bit of humor they threw in about her “Wiping her own ass”. Crude humor tends to work me sometimes. With her coming the rebels decide to use Theodors plan to make use of her as bait to lure the Stasi into an ambush. Which works like a charm thanks to the Stasi squadron commander being a complete imbecile. Lise tried to warn you guys but you brush her off with a “Your brother is with the rebels so your opinion is worthless” I suppose without Beatrix there to whip some sense into them and Lise is too preoccupied with her brother to give a damn what happens to the rest of her squad. I love the way she jumped out of the way of a bullet, letting it hit her comrade behind her, it shows that she truly has no love for her Stasi comrades. One particularly grisly detail about this battle is that the rebels didn’t evacuate the town before fighting in it. Which meant that quite a number of civilians got caught in the crossfire. That’s sort of a glazed over part of mecha anime though chances are a Gundam explored it. When you have giant robots fighting all about the place then collateral damage is a guarantee and while Kirke wasn’t in favor of it, at least the team saw it as necessary. After all they couldn’t orchestrate mass evacuation without alerting the Stasi of their ambush.
So Lise is dead. I don’t even need to know if Theodors gunshot hit her to confirm that. With the amount of shrapnel lodged in her body you can already tell that she was done for. This acts as a nice parallels to the start of the series, where Irisdina shot one of their comrades after she was horribly wounded in a BETA attack after sacrificing herself to save another. Even the delicious irony that Theodor originally hated Irisdina because she apparently shot and killed her brother. Yet here he is, putting a bullet in his sister. She had it coming and I am glad that Theodor actually had the guts to do it instead of a third party jumping in to save him the trouble. Lise was too far gone, too broken to salvage. All that was left was to give her the death sentence but at least she got it from her brother. I still state that Lise is far from forgivable in what she has done but it is disheartening to see her reach such a tragic end. Her will and love was beaten and defiled till it was twisted to help her best serve the Stasi. Even on her last words she was speaking of how stupid it was to oppose them, for she knew all too well what they are capable of. After all the torture; having her mind,body and soul twisted beyond repair to save the one person she cares about; her final reward is a bullet to the head. This may be the only character moment Schwarzesmarken got right though it did get a tad overly melodramatic. Still we know the history between the two, a complicated relationship of family and lovers, and it certainly must have been excruciating for Theodor to pull that trigger.The final shot was reminiscent of a certain scene from Madoka Magica and I liked how you had to really listen to hear the gunshot. With Lise out of the picture or heads turn to our new main threat, that being Beatrix and her werewolf battalion. We don’t have much left to the series so she won’t have much time to shine. Still I would like her to have a nice climactic fight with Irisdina at least, considering that they seem to have history.
