Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to dive back into Star Driver, as we dispense with school festival theatrics and surge onwards towards our grand finale. As expected, our last episode featured the cast’s long-awaited festival performance, which turned out to also serve as the vehicle for conveying the Southern Cross legend which set this whole Cybody situation in motion. There were tragic betrayals, heartfelt declarations of love, and even a brief appearance by what seemed to be an actual alien, here briefly controlling Sarina in order to ask Takuto the essential question: will he use the power of the Cybodies for selfish, destructive means, or only for love?
These revelations were certainly dramatic, but frankly, they also fell perfectly in line with the story as articulated so far. There was always going to be some spark of the supernatural that gave Southern Cross this power, and even across the stories of Toshio and Sugata, we’ve already seen how the tale of the Cybodies is an eternal, circular conflict, each generation weighing the responsibilities of tradition against their personal desires for power or freedom. This is also far from the first time Enokido has tethered thematic or contextual revelation to the theater; frankly, after his work on Utena and FLCL, I’d have been surprised if this play didn’t offer some kind of narrative bombshell. As fellow long-time collaborators with Kunihiko Ikuhara, Igarashi and Enokido both understand how theater and anime are adjacent art forms, each serving as ideal vectors for heightened emotions and imaginative aesthetic pageantry, each asking us to find the human and universal in the fantastical and melodramatic. With the stage now set for Takuto to craft his own legend, let’s see where this story goes!