No time for frivolities this week! Rui’s having a breakdown! Joe is in trouble! The ideas are brewing and the plot’s speeding forward and every character has had a dash of elaboration. Screw Titan, this is the adventure spectacle of the season.

Episode 5

0:09 – This is amazing.  Again, it’s so rare to see a show this narratively sharp and idea-driven still have such a sense of goofy fun

0:12 – Pai’s tiny chair is also panda-colored . This is also just a great domestic moment. They are a very silly family

0:16 – “Should we spend an episode having them discover the link between the assaults and the alien?” “Nah, let’s just have Hajime infer it in a few seconds. ”

1:13 – “Why are we hiding? What do we have to hide?”  Pretty funny how people were calling Hajime a dumb protagonist – her chipper, flighty exterior has the other characters fooled, but I don’t think her smarts are supposed to fly over the audience’s head

1:35 – I love how even her established default response  plays into her preference of empowering every individual as opposed to simply melding into a larger structure

1:48 – Pai casually draws the note from his panda-pants 

2:29 – D’s avatar also has great heels 

2:55 – “The broken child will finally reveal itself to us.” Finally. Rui and Hajime are gonna have the best talks

3:27 – Ahh, this OP. This show is so tightly stuffed with good craft and good ideas. It’s only a couple shows a season that actually impress me, but goddamn are those shows impressive

4:49 – Uh oh 

6:33 – That’s a nice sentiment,  but…

7:04 – “You want to get all the credit, don’t you?”  It’s interesting seeing Rui’s idealism be misunderstood by someone who fundamentally can’t understand his values (and instead speaks constantly in terms of who gets individual credit for accomplishments), but the real problem here is that GALAX being a truly collective power is an absolute lie, and thus Rui’s own values don’t really apply to it. I want to see him answer that complaint

7:43 – It is a pretty serious difference in worldviews 

8:29 – There it is.  He couldn’t have more disdain for this man’s perspective

9:05 – Are you having fun right now?  Shades of Hajime here. She brought up a similar (and similarly vague) interpretation of her preferred form of interaction at the scrapbooking get-together

9:36 – “It is a joy that comes from within, innate to mankind, unrelated to material riches.” We are getting some thesis statement stuff right here. So now the show’s taking a step up to mankind’s capacity to philosophize and imagine a better future versus mankind’s innate self-interest and emotional weakness?

11:08 – He will impose selflessness upon them whether they like it or not 

11:52 – “You think Rui’s the ideal angel here? Well fuck you,  here’s his opponent sharing a nice moment with his daughter. Rui’s not perfect, he’s just young enough to have never made a real compromise. It’s easy to embrace absolutes when you have nothing at stake.”

Man I love this show

12:53 – Can you carry it all, Rui? 

14:12 – Hajime finds it somewhat alarming nobody considered this 

15:14 – Hajime still seems to be acting as the “correct” viewpoint here.  As opposed to demanding connection from above, she creates it on the individual human level. This show’s ideas are moving so fast I can’t even guesshow they’ll complicate things for her, but having an actually didactic viewpoint in a show like this seems unimaginable, considering how much they’re complicating everything else

15:32 – “You’re acting all feminine, but you totally shoot guns when you have to, right?”  Jee, who else  do we know like that?

21:17 – “Aren’t there times when you find yourself taking action without even thinking about it?” Like her running to help before checking the mediating level of GALAX earlier – which, ironically, is probably the subconscious human goodness Rui wants to be harnessing

And Done

Oh MAN! DAMN that was great! I have NO FUCKING CLUE where they’re aiming this! That is an AWESOME feeling! This episode was largely “Rui’s ideals versus reality,” which resulted in some solid drama… but it’s not like Hajime’s values work outside of Hajime’s immediate vicinity, either. Her ideas of virtue only really apply to herself, since she is the only person like herself, and she is not an executable system. The writing is still incredibly sharp in this show, so I’m basically only concerning myself with the ideas, since they’re integrated and elaborated with incredible grace. Rui’s philosophy still seems contradictory, since collective intelligence and collective social consciousness isn’t really the same when it has an all-powerful ruler. Hajime still hasn’t made any mistakes, but it’s not like I want her to have an emotional breakdown or something – this show elaborates its characters efficiently, but making the story about their arcs would dilute the thematic focus, when the thematic focus is actually everything in this show. I dunno. It’s hard to put in words. This show is fantastic.