Tamaya!

*erhem* sorry, but I couldn’t resist. This episode had so many Ooedo Rocket-vibes. Heck, you could nearly say that this is Ooedo Rocket, condensed into just one episode, with the samurais removed, it’s almost scary to see how many similarities there are. And still it doesn’t feel like one of the two ripped off the other.

Seeing as I loved Ooedo Rocket, there’s no surprise that this was probably my favourite FREEDOM episode up till now. This episode had everything: fun characters, a great storyline of trying to create the rocket, a bit of background on why Ao was the one on the picture that Takeru found (her father once tried to go to the moon as well, but he failed. Ao was forced to forget everything that happened, and so she started to get really involved in the local space program). Blue Earth was of course the Akai of Ooedo Rocket. In this case, he was supposed to go to the moon along with Ao’s father, but chickened out at the last moment.

One point of criticism: it hardly feels like two and a half year have passed by. Characters still look the same, which is especially suspicious since we’re dealing with a bunch of teenagers here. I really wonder whether Freedom can pull off a good finale. Heck, what kind of finale is it going for anyway? At any case, I do hope that the creators won’t go for something too epic, especially since Freedom has been so delightfully down-to-earth up till now.

This episode also reminded me of why I love Yoshihiro Ike’s soundtracks so much. To be honest, he’s my favourite musician, along with Yuki Kajiura. Yoko Kanno’s work is excellent, but in my opinion she’s not the best.

OMG! WTF! When I started watching this episode, I had totally forgotten that this series comes from the same production-company as Shigurui. This episode was utterly incredible, but let me put up a warning: if you can’t stand gore or are female, then stay far, far away from it. God, that was disturbing. Here I was, believing that this series wouldn’t go beyond the incest and homosexuality of episode three.

I don’t even want to fully understand this episode. Even without knowledge about what was being said, the themes and messages are rock-solid, and they hit you incredibly hard. I refuse to spoil things, but let’s just say that Madhouse is an animation-company that doesn’t care about censors. Really, even Shigurui didn’t freak me out this much!

God, I love this series.

And so the climax of Kurenai has started. The OP and ED feel even more out of place now, but it also becomes apparent how much the building-up of the previous episode is paying off. The second half of this episode was really good, and I’m eager to find out what the creators have in store for us for the final three episodes.

As it turns out: Murasaki indeed is a legitimate child of the Kuhoin, but she was just never registered. She was just there as a tool for inside breeding, to keep the Kuhoin-family as pure-blooded as possible. In other words, brother and sister make children together. I recall having read somewhere how a child of a brother and sister has a larger chance at a personality-disorder, and looking at Ryuuji, I can indeed see why this Kuhoin-tradition has continued on for ages.

What surprised me was that despite Shinkurou’s godly power, he was easily beaten by Ryuuji’s body-guards. I guess that that female bodyguard never really gave Shinkurou the chance to show that strange elbow of his, suggesting that she’s been really well-trained for her job.

This episode somehow reminded me a bit about Sword of the Stranger, and there are actually a lot of similarities between the two: a powerhouse takes care of a small and innocent child that’s somehow vital to the plot of the bad guys, and as the story progresses, they get to know each other more and more. Now that I think about it, there are many more series who use this formula (Seirei no Moribito, for example), and it works surprisingly well. :)

Thankfully Macross Frontier is back on track with this episode. Okay, the question remains whether it’ll stay this way for long, but at least I’m glad that this episode turned out pretty nicely. For once, the focus is on the side-characters, and it’s about time that they too got a bit of development. It’s about time that especially Kuran got some attention, because I’ve hardly seen anything of her in the past few episodes.

If I understood things correctly, then Mikhael lost his parents when he was young, and then continued to live on with his sister. is sister then got killed in a friendly fire-accident when she was a pilot of some sort. At the time, Kuran lived with them as well (suggesting a possible love-relationship between the two for the future-episodes of Macross Frontier).

It’s good to see an episode focused on giving background to the characters. This’ll definitely be useful for future episodes. The fight scenes were also pretty entertaining, and it’s here where you can really hear the greatness of Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack. At the same time, Ranka continues to do very random jobs, and showing that it indeed does take a lot of work to become a popular idol.

Also, who was it, spying on the meeting of the Macross Frontier leaders?

Hmm, for the first time in the second season, an xxxHolic episode disappointed me a bit. It surprises me a bit, since this episode goes back to Kohane’s arc, but somehow this episode felt off and among the least interesting episodes of xxxHolic, along with the one about superstition.

I think my biggest problem was with how it just felt that Clamp tried to shove down it’s message through the viewer’s throat. The usual subtlety in this series was gone entirely, and instead we get an obvious story with an obvious message: “Here is Kohane! She’s hated and disliked by both her viewers, colleagues and mother! She receives death threats and gets beaten up! But she has special powers, and she’s always right! Now feel sorry for her!” Sorry, but I’m not buying it.

One series that I can think off that successfully dealt with the topic of psychics and the media was Ghost Hunt. Okay, Ghost Hunt had its own problems, but none of those lied in its themes and messages. The arc about the spoon-benders was really good at showing the relationships between kids who claim to bend spoons and the media, and the people who watch it.

I really hope that the next episode will offer a clever twists to the whole story, because I really know that the creators can do better than what they’ve shown here.