I don’t understand why people actually claim that the second half of Death Note sucks. This episode was great, and L’s absence didn’t really hurt it. In fact, the Yotsuba-arc was far more annoying than the current one.

The focus of this episode was Light’s family. His sister may not have been physically hurt by the shots, fired at her, it did destroy her mentally. Because of this, Light’s father especially is put in deep thoughts. When Light then comes with the plan of revealing himself as Kira, after having found out Mello’s location, and give the police a second Death Note, so that they can make the eye-deal and kill Mello by only having to look at his face, he just feels obliged to be the one to do it. He really had to find a way to become useful, and this was the perfect way, even though he’d die himself. It’s quite interesting how he turned out.

His death alone wasn’t really spectacular, but everything around it was. Yet again was Light incredibly close to killing off his opponent, but just like Misa got caught before Light could reach her, Light’s father went to depend on his morals, and tried to arrest Mello, instead of killing him. Because of this, Mello could act back and kill the guy. Light wasn’t happy at that point.

On his death-bed, Light also lost his cool for probably the first time in the entire series in front of others. I’m not sure whether this was because he just was angry that he missed an important chance of murdering a threat, or that there was a tiny bit of sentiment in this.

It’s quite interesting, Near is now left with only two assistants, while Mello, or Mihael Keehl is all alone now, now that his former companions are either dead or arrested. I assume, though, that he’ll get them out of jail soon enough. I mean, if he can take over a plane, busting into a prison would be nothing for him. It’ll be interesting for Light now, this quite possibly is the first time that he actually knows a name, but not a face. Apparently, the drawing of the guy isn’t enough for this.

Meanwhile, we’ve still got Near as well. This means that if Light does kill Mihael at one point, he has to do this very carefully, or Near will find out that Light could have been the only one to do this. But then again, it’s quite possible that while he did know that L possessed a death note at one point, he probably never heard that Light was the main suspect of being Kira.

Also, what was up with Shidoh? He really surprised me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved his part in this episode, but I really expected him to have a really dark role in the future episodes, in which he would help Mello get even closer to Light, but in the end, he only had two roles: remove one Death Note from the game-board (this just leaves Ryuk’s original Death Note, still with Ryuk, Rem’s Death Note, now with the police and Misa’s Death Note, who now continuously touches Light in order to prevent him from forgetting everything), and the second role is to inform Mello that Kira has actually messed with the Death Note and added two fake rules. This will probably be used in the future.

Seriously. That was AWESOME! The first half probably has to contain the funniest scenes I’ve seen for a while. At times, I nearly fell off my chair from laughter, this episode definitely proved that it was a good idea to keep watching and blogging this, as this episode was just HILARIOUS. Someone really needs to sub this, as it definitely is one of the best series to come this season. :)

There were only two things that needed to be added: a new character who looks more ridiculous than all the other characters combined and acts like an oversexed macho, and sake. Seriously, Sora actually gets drunk at one point in the episode, with hilarious results. It all starts when Sekichi and Sora are in the forest, trying to find a place where they can just quietly experiment with fireworks, without destroying nearby objects. Sekichi, though, has been really demotivated after the previous episode. After all, when fireworks explode in the middle of the air, they don’t make the safest forms of travelling.

Sora then mentions Kaguya-hime. I looked things up a bit in Wikipedia, and it seems that Kaguya-hime is a fictional character in a 10th century Japanese folk tale. This particular folk-tale is considered the oldest Japanese narrative. The tale goes as follows: Kaguya-hime is a mysterious girl, discovered inside the stalk of a great bamboo plant by a bamboo-cutter named Taketori-no Okina when she was a tiny baby, and she’s said to have come from the capital of the moon.

Kaguya-hime then grows up in the care of Taketori-no Okina, and she grew into a beautiful girl. Then, five princes went to her to ask for her hand in marriage. Kaguya-hime didn’t want to marry, though, so she thought up impossible tasks for these men, that they had to accomplish in order to be able to marry her. This works, but after a while, even the emperor went to her, and fell in love with her. Kaguya-hime rejected as well, but the two of them did keep in contact. At one time, though, Kaguya-hime had to return to the moon. When that day came, a bright light took her away from the earth, leaving her foster-parents and the emperor in tears.

Ooedo Rocket made a few changes to this story, when Sora claims herself to be Kaguya-hime. Apparently, she never went to the moon and she also wasn’t found in a bamboo-plant, but she just came with a space-ship. Obviously, Sekichi doesn’t believe a word of this. ^^; Then the craziness begins when the strange oversexed macho appears and has the strangest conversation with Sora ever. He then introduces himself as “Hinanawo Tetsuju” (not sure about the first part). What follows is the guy setting up a bar with some strange raccoons that appeared, with Sora and him both enjoying some alcohol. Sora is so funny when she’s drunk. XD

Lots of hilarious scenes later, and it’s time for a bit of plot development when it seems that Tetsuju also makes fireworks. It seems that he did find a way to keep fireworks from exploding, and demonstrates this by sending himself off into the air. I think it’s now up to Sekishi to go into the height, it seems as Tetsuju only managed to disappear out of sight, only to come down in a sort-of frozen state. I wonder how he found out about this, though. I couldn’t really pick that up.

And surprise, surprise, finally a romance between two characters is actually developed properly! A drunk Sora first has to puke and leave the room (hilarious scene, by the way), and Tetsuju uses this moment to convince Sekichi that he won’t be able to send Sora off to the moon. Sekichi never really made any progress, while Tetsuju’s rockets are already able to achieve quite a height. Because of this and Sora’s absence, Sekichi tells his feelings a bit too honest, and while Sora comes in again and hears everything about his confession. He was so cute when he got embarrassed like that. :)

Really, I do hope that all the other episodes in Ooedo Rocket are going to be like this one. It was hilarious, though a bit too much on the wrong side at times. ^^;