Space Brothers, you are awesome!
No, seriously. This episode had a fantastic premise. Just grab a bunch of characters, and have them talk to each other. I’m a fan of good characterization, and this episode was just absolutely perfect for that. Why has no series done this before?
?This show is also THE proof that you don’t need a big budget to be an amazing series. I mean, this episode was literally just characters talking to each other.And yet: this episode introduced something like ten new characters. And at the end of this episode we already have a very good feeling of who they all are. This episode broke the ice in such a wonderful way and it just had so much life in it. It wasn’t just Mutta who was amazing to watch, there were a ton of othrer characters who were in their element.
Some highlights were conversation between Kenji and the old man, both fathers, between Mutta and that obnoxious yet observant guy, and those two guys who just sat there next to each other without saying anything also said a whole lot about their character. But really: just about every short conversation added something here.
This episode took a set-up that shounen-series sometimes like to pull by having characters face off in a fight, and reduced that to its essence: getting characters to interact with each other and showing this in many different ways that would not be possible normally. And this wasn’t even the end of it: the next episode promises to become even more interesting because every single one of these fifteen people will rank each other. This means that we get a lot of time devoted to seeing how everyone thinks about each other.
Rating: ***+ (Amazing)
IF YOURE LIKE TALKING THEN TLUCKY STAR ITS ALSO A SHOW
Don’t even joke about that
Shounen-style “tournament” without the shounen, what more can you ask for?
Going into this one, I was thinking of two other favourite shows with ‘astronaut-training psychological hijinks’ in them – Planetes and Twin Spica. Which is a really really great gambit. Wouldn’t you love a show like this to play out over four seasons? Anyone know how its popularity is doing?
Come to think of it, Twin Spica is another show that’s all about training, rather than getting off the earth –
I really loved the training bits of Twin Spica
I seriously wonder if all 15 are actually applicants. Isn’t it possible that they selected 8 of them and the others are people paid to do this?
The whole thing is a psychology test so… That would be pretty fun 🙂
I actually thought they would have to write down something about each person at the end rather than rank them.
I loved the whole mood of this. Yay for pyschology tests!
Like someone else mentioned before, Twin Spica had this as well, and I remember how good that section was.
I had assumed that most of them were plants, chosen to test the social quirks & limitations of the actual astronauts, but it seems that most believe that they are real applicants. It’d be really cruel to dupe them into being part of the testing process by pretending they actually had a chance. And yet, wow – some pretty poorly adjusted astronauts in there.