天下制覇

However, not robot lactation.

Impressions:

A solid, if not particularly memorable episode. Casshern gets buried under a giant rock in the opening segment, so Friender goes off and finds some humans and robots living together, ebony and ivory in perfect harmony, led by the rather unfortunately voiced Jin, who somehow managed to fight evenly with Casshern after the latter finally busted out of his rock slab and took down every robot in the general area. Blah blah blah let’s all work together speech from Jin, and Bob’s your uncle.

Really, the only two things that bothered me about this episode were A.) Tomokazu Seki’s voice suddenly appearing out of nowhere, and B.) that music they used towards the end. Seriously, it was like Japan had reanimated Johnny Cash’s corpse, taught it Japanese, and had it sing Hurt while Seki waxed rhetoric on the value of peace, love, and understanding. The episode could have ended about four minutes earlier and I don’t think anybody would have really noticed much of a difference. I’m not even certain when I grew an aversion to Seki either, though I distinctly recall being irritated over him popping up in Kyouran Kazoku Nikki as well. He’s just been in so many joke roles for the last few years that I cannot take him seriously any more and his voice is so instantly recognizable that within seconds, my mind is already drifting to wondering how he’ll be the butt of the next joke.

Those are honestly pretty minor complaints though since the episode did do a very respectable job of moving right along, even if it didn’t really advance anything relating to the plot at all, and both action scenes were certainly well enough done, though I think I’m starting to get a little jaded with Casshen’s "jump kick the robot’s head off" move. I wish they had provided a bit more background or… well… anything with the first clan o’ humans that they’ve shown in this world, especially since they still seem to be breeding, or at the very least, giving birth. However, they were clearly never really meant to be the focus of this episode. Robot dogs, and love and peace were the focus. Even the guy who betrayed the little clan didn’t actually really do anything against them, just lost faith for a bit and wanted to eat Casshern (who doesn’t?) but then repented.

I’m also pretty sure that Casshern had more lines during the preview than he had for the entire rest of the episode.

Preview:

And right back to the harem building we go.