RD Sennou Chousashitsu - 05
This episode was… strange…
Here I was, expecting a serious story about some freakish killer that was on the loose, after watching the next-episode preview of the previous episode. What I got was an episode that was way sillier than I expected. Episode five seems to be a popular time to insert a bit of silliness: first we had Macross, then Code Geass, and now Real Drive as well. Still, out of all three, I believe that this episode did its job best.
Shortly summarized: Haru is absent in this episode for a medical examination, as an android that’s meant for wrestling goes out of control and attacks everyone who comes into his sight. It wears a bunch of sunglasses that seem to be the latest fashion, though at one point these glasses break. It then runs into an unfortunate Minamo, who just bought an exact same pair of glasses. I guess that his internal AI switches to item-retrieving-mode, as it tries to gently get its glasses back without breaking them (Minamo should be lucky that she actually wore these, otherwise she’d just have been beaten up). At the same time, Souta laments the fact that he isn’t strong enough.
I should be getting angry at the coincidence at which Minamo bought her glasses, but at least this made this episode surprisingly fun to watch. I also liked how the creators showed how the android wasn’t completely fine-tuned: when the lights went off, he suddenly lost his target, he’s completely useless when he needs to take something from someone without hurting it (I guess it was never programmed to retrieve items that could escape, being a wrestling-android and all).
One thing I appreciate of this series: it’s diverse. Every single episode so far has been different, and that will really work in its advantage for the future episodes. Series that often take place in the same mood for episodes after each other have a bigger tendency to get boring when compared to series like this one. It helps keeping the series fresh, and series like Bokura no showed me how successful these techniques can really be if they’re handled well. So far, Real Drive has managed to be diverse and yet it kept advancing its story and introduced new things. This episode showed interesting insights in how androids are built and used, in relation to the metal.
In this episode, it was quite fun to watch an android, trying to do something it wasn’t programmed for. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a thing in anime tackled like this, but I of course have yet to watch the Ghost in the Shell-series. ^^;