I can’t believe how awesome Sakura was during this episode! Even though this was another filler, it does an amazingly well job of fleshing out Sakura’s character. Seriously, this was an excellent episode. ^_^
The case is like this: Syaoran and the others land in a large, gloomy city. The feather is being sold in a shop, for a rather high price. The only solution for our protagonists is to work to get enough money to buy the feather. The only problem: the city has a huge rate of jobless people, and there are almost no jobs to be found in the city. That’s what Syaoran, Fay and Kurogane find out when they try to find a job at the Employment Center. They spend more than half a day in a fruitless search for a job.
Sakura, meanwhile, was told to stay in the hotel room, as the city is rumoured to be rather dangerous. Still, she goes out on her own, and she actually manages to find a number of jobs. I loved the little dose of realism tossed into this episode, as a lot of things go wrong for Sakura. During her first job, she works at a mobile distro, though then vehicle breaks down, forcing the owners to close their shop for the day. The second job involves driving a few logistics equipment, though that doesn’t seem to be right job for Sakura. Still, I just loved how she went and tried anyway. ^_^
Then with the third job, Sakura found herself a nice little cafe, in which she has to act as waitress. The reason the job was vacant was probably because the customers looked rather scary (which they absolutely are not, by the way), and the fact that the owner is being bothered by a couple of familiar punk guys. Still, Syaoran, Fay and Kurogane haven’t been standing around either, and they found a job at the same cafe, hired to scare away these punk guys. I also loved how the chair Kurogane broke actually had after-effects, as in that Sakura had to work longer in order to pay the cafe owner back for that particular chair. You don’t see that many times, do you? Most of the times, whenever a random object is broken, it disappears from existence. In the really lazy stories, you can just blow up a building and notice nothing of it in the aftermaths.
Sakura also absorbs two feathers this episode, and they contribute greatly to Sakura’s struggles in order to get money. When she was young, her brother used to take her to the market one time. Even then it seemed that Sakura liked to do challenging things on her own, as it seems that she asked a local market saleswoman whether she could work for her for a while. The way this also was presented in the anime was done brilliantly.
And a rather nice detail, I loved Kurogane when he referred to the woman they sold their small items to as someone from the information bureau, which indeed refers back to the Outo-world, where she also appeared. A rather nice use of coincidence.
The first half of the episode also was one huge chunk of atmosphere. The piano-music and insert songs worked perfectly, combined with the overall mood of the country they had landed in, and the extra touch of realism. Really, this was such a great episode. ^_^
