天下制覇

Flux Capacitor… fluxxing!

Impressions:

No matter whatever else happened in this episode, I started cracking up like mad when they ran the Back to the Future credits. Featuring Nancy McFly, played by Michael J Hox. That alone brought me more entertainment than the entirety of the ZnT season finale.

Aside from that throw away joke/homage, it was still a pretty solid ending, though really didn’t do too great a job of tying up the loose ends, especially… say… Akane or Kirik. Both of them stood around along with every other Tom, Dick, and Harry and just watched the hijacked show while revealing that Kirik had the Type-E powers artifically placed in him, but really… that’s it. They just sort of sat around and watched things play out, then both wandered off at the end of it. Maybe it’s a sign that Deen’s planning a third season, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Most of the first half of the episode was just deployment with the action, such as it was, saved for the assault on Hiiragi’s base. It was decently well done, I suppose, but until they made it to the Tachikoma knockoff, all the violence was against hockey pucks and gun turrets. Once Maori and her "invincible to the power nullifying doohickey" arrived though, it was pretty much all over but the pithy love power speech from Kotaro, which turns Hiiragi from evil to good for… god only know what reason. I’m just glad that they didn’t miraculously revive Melis in the last seconds of the show. I don’t even know her and I’m happier with her in a coma instead of being healed by her brother’s girlfriend for no good reason.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Well, I still feel like I’m missing a few important puzzle pieces here by having skipped past Code-E, but overall, it was rather enjoyable, though I certainly won’t deny that there were long portions where I completely tuned out. Like I said above, it does feel like the writers were a bit uncertain where they were going with a few characters, especially the villains. Hiiragi’s motivations were never really well put out that I can recall and Akane/Kirik were almost completely superfluous to the entire story. It would have been nice to have let the villains win a couple times too for a little extra drama. Maori and Chinami took down absolutely everything in their path with no problems at all until the Tachikoma appeared in the eleventh hour.

As for the rest, like I said, I don’t have the Code-E background, so I’m really reluctant to comment overly much on things like Chinami and Kotarou’s relationship, or Adol’s obsession with his sister. His relationship with Maori could have been a little better developed, it just happened a bit suddenly over the course of about one episode, but overall I’m okay with it. At the very least, it didn’t feel painfully forced or tacked on at the last second.

So, in the end, I certainly don’t regret following this and I’m pretty sure that I’d follow a sequel if they made one (assuming it keeps the power suits and electric tonfas), but I’m still not really excited for it. I won’t feel like there’s a hole in my life now that this show is over, but I’m not actively cursing its passing either. I’m not sure if that made sense to anybody outside of myself, but I don’t really know how to put it otherwise. Eminently watchable, but outside of the high action first few episodes, not really extraordinary.