Shoukoku no Altair – 05 [The City of the Lighthouse]

After a three-week break, Shoukoku no Altair returned today with an episode reminiscent more of its first three than its last. If you’ve been reading these posts for the last couple months, you’ll know that’s not a good thing, at least from where I’m sitting. We were awash in exposition and timeskips again this time around, and looking at the off-model characters scattered throughout the episode, I suspect it may have been outsourced (or else MAPPA is spread too thin with Kakegurui and Bahamut also airing this season). Still, the show’s weekly barrage of new characters, nations, and locales lends Altair a briskness that makes it easy to blog. You know the old saying: when the show’s too thin to analyze, suck it up and summarize.

Actually, there was one theme at work in this episode that I felt was rather effective, and that’s the struggle between realism and idealism within Mahmut. When we first met him, he was tactless and naïve, despite his military status – he spoke without thinking, abandoned his city to help his friends on more than one occasion, and was regularly taken aback by the machinations of enemies and political rivals. His do-gooder streak remains, as we saw this week when he refused to leave Phoinike even after they declared war on the Empire, but he’s becoming more pragmatic and self-aware all the same. The decision to sail for Venedik and gain their support was motivated not by emotion or instinct, but by the fact that if Phoinike falls, the Empire will have Mahmut’s homeland of Turkiye surrounded. The former Pasha was also able to recognize a display of overconfidence in a friend, flashing back to his own trust in Ibrahim, who betrayed Turkiye just a month ago. I don’t expect that Mahmut will transform into a battle-hardened cynic before the series concludes, but the nuance is appreciated.

The man who will facilitate the aforementioned departure for Venedik is the newcomer Kiros, who you may have recognized as one of the riders flanking Mahmut during the opening theme. Kiros is another one of Zaganos’ spies, although his idea about what constitutes an effective disguise might make him ill-suited for the job. (Seriously, what’s with the Jack Sparrow cosplay?) His acquisition was handled by Suleyman Bey, who preyed on Kiros’ hatred of his politician father’s two-faced greed in order to bring him into the fold. This flashback was among the more interesting scenes of the episode, as it depicted the grittier side of espionage. Although Mahmut actively seeks out the company of intelligence gatherers, it might be a while before he gets his own hands dirty, so for now I’ll make do with the backstories of shadier men.

Konstantinos is the other significant character who made his debut this week. Though he appears friendly at first, he quickly reveals himself to be a dead ringer for Zaganos, who will use whatever (or whomever) is handy to achieve his ends. Konstantinos invites Mahmut to a government meeting in a fancy amphitheater, where the Phoiniken senators are set to debate whether they should allow the Balt-Rhein Empire to use their ports. Rather than allowing his guest to voice his opinion, however, it becomes clear that Konstantinos has only allowed Mahmut to attend the debate as a symbol of imperial defeat. With the support of both the people and his fellow senators, he declares war on the Empire, and what follows are a series of bloody conflicts along the wall that presently keeps them out. Altair’s politics are about as complicated as a mud pie, but its battles are much more interesting – Lady Lelederik is back, with a plan to scale Phoinike’s crystal cliff and infiltrate the city for the first time in 1800 years. Now it’s a race between her troops and the reinforcements Mahmut hopes to bring, and though the victor is all but assured, the contest may be compelling yet.