Short Synopsis: Porfy goes along to the salesman’s home and wrecks a potential marriage.
Highlights: The pacing really gets faster and faster as the show goes on!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Well, there you have it. A few episodes ago, I wondered whether the soundtrack would change, now that Porfy’s in France. And here you go: this episode starts playing the accordions; I should have known.

In any case, the salesman grabs Porfy firmly, but he does offer him a ride to his house. There, it turns out that he has a daughter and two sons, who are living in a rather poor house. They offer him a couch to sleep on, and when he wakes up, the two sons have drawn a moustache on it. The salesman has already left for another job. Porfy then goes with the two of them (after having washed his face of course) into the town, to ask for Mina. He then finds out that they too don’t have a mother. When they look at one of the cars at the local toy store, he decides to make one from wood for them.

Back home, it turns out that Cecile, the daughter, is quite similar to Mina. She’s gentle, and likes acting and movies. She also dreams to become an actress, but she knows that she’s never going to make it. She even recites her favourite movie in front of Porfy just like Mina did. When she does, however, the owner of the house they’re living in pops up and tells her that her father is three months behind on rent.

A little while later, Porfy’s done with the car, and the two sons are very enthusiastic to see it, especially because it’s modelled after their father’s truck. Cecile offers Porfy to stay for as long as he wants, but Porfy leaves immediately after he realizes that he’s taking food from a very poor family, especially after the little sons start complaining that they haven’t had enough dinner.

We then see Porfy as he walks across a (beautiful) lake, and he sees a boat there. The only problem is that his money has finally run out, so he just goes there to look. He there meets a couple that’s about to marry, though the guy is telling a bunch of lies about his supposed family in Greece that was struck by an earthquake, in order to get some money from the woman, Matilda. Porfy, coming from Greece and having endured that earthquake, unknowingly exposes these lies while worrying about them, and Matila slaps the guy. But as it turns out, Matila was the one who was rejected because of Porfy’s meddling, and not the other way around. Matilda actually liked how he was nice to her.

Still, Matilda ends up buying a ticket for Porfy. (At this point, we don’t hear Porfy telling about his sister anymore, so I assume this gets omitted from now on). Matilda asks him what he’s going to do next, and so Porfy says that he needs to work for a bit of more money, and she happens to know someone who can hire him. The episode then ends as the boat arrives at yet another beautifully drawn town.

That beginning of the episode was really a nostalgic moment, which anyone will probably recognize from their childhood. That “oh, I screwed up and he’s going to punish me”-feeling, while the salesman just kept silent. He’s quite an interesting character; he hardly said anything and just accepted that he was fooled by Porfy.

This is also a thing that only took me so long to realize, but the pacing of this series just keeps going faster and faster. The series started off with a very sloooooooow slice-of-life arc that took up 12 episodes. The disaster-arc was also pretty long. Then came travel-arcs from three to four episodes, until Rome, after which the show became episodic. And now, as the series enters its final quarter, the stories become even too short for individual episodes, and every episode shows Porfy as he meets two different places. The only exception was when Porfy met the car mechanic and the woman in the abandoned city, but if you consider those as one standalone arc, then everything falls into pieces perfectly. Let me just say that this definitely ISN’T something I expected this series’ finale to turn into!

At this point, I consider Les Miserables to be a bit better than Porfy no Nagai Tabi, but that’s only because of the longer travel-arcs. Not only was their pacing slow, but their writing was just way too sloppy for this series, whereas Les Miserables was very thoroughly built up through its entire story, and had some very effective climaxes because of it. I don’t expect Porfy to become better than Les Miserables in its final quarter, simply because Les Miserables surpassed itself in just about every aspect for its final quarter, but it’s nevertheless getting interesting where the creators will be going. The pacing will definitely something to look forward to, as it removed just about the only flaw of this series out of these travel-arcs: the incredibly slow pacing. The creators have also shown that they’re masters at building up, so really… what the heck could they be planning?

Short Synopsis: A number of people get killed after hearing the cries of a baby.
Highlights: Makina and Kagami
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I think we’ve got ourselves a record here: it’s episode three, and the male and female lead still haven’t become a couple. Sure, they might meet each other a lot, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the bond between the two, but rather that cat which keeps pulling the strings from behind the scenes. The two of them are being fleshed out pretty nicely overall, with this episode giving a cold for Kagami to deal with. It’s also nice to see that his whining actually was justified in this episode, where the baby actually wasn’t the culprit. That removes the one-sided part about their relationship, where Makina was the strong one and Kagami the weak one. I believe that they’re going to grow nicely so that they can complement for each other’s weaknesses.

What I also like about this series is that apart from Makina and Kagami, there are actually lots of different and more characters. These first three episodes have introduced a significant amount of returning characters, even though we’re talking about episodic stories here. The cat and the strange guy who killed this episode’s bad guy, what are they plotting? This series is especially going to be interesting if the creators manage to give everyone on Kagami’s brother’s organization his and her own identity (the unimportant ones still feel too much like one single character at this point: replace them with one guy and you’d never know the difference).

I must say that with this, Gainax has clearly shown that they can make more than brainless action-shows, which I like a lot. What it needs to pay attention to is that male lead, Kagami. So far, he hasn’t been that annoying, but the FACT REMAINS that he’s an angsty teenager. The guy needs to develop quickly before the angst gets annoying.

Short Synopsis: Casshern meets a man who travels alone.
Highlights: Subtle drama rocks!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that the series with the most original and appealing character-design of the season is a remake of a series that came from the 1970’s? In any case, I really liked this episode. It’s a quiet, yet very powerful one. The past few episodes have shown us nothing but robots, and yet at the same time they suggested that humans were still alive. In this one, Casshern finally meets a human, and the episode is basically a character-study of this human.

He’s basically a human that continues to run away from the robots, and is critical of his own existence. He already has a bad health (probably due to that nasty apocalypse Casshern caused), and I guess that at that point, the company Casshern can offer the guy is like a godsent. He dies of his own accord, at the end of the episode, and yet the coincidence of which it happens only contributes to Casshern’s nickname of “Death God”.

It’s also a great episode for Casshern: we’re only at episode three, and the guy is already developing. This episode was really meant to silence the emo inside of himself, which is always appreciated. What was up with the dog, though? Why did it suddenly have a change of heart? That was a downside of this episode.

Then there’s that ending theme, which I’m certain that it’s got some double meaning. Why exactly does it show the little kid and that woman together, and ends with the notion that Casshern is gone? It could be pulling off the same thing Soukou no Strain did, where the ED was basically a well-camouflaged aftermath of the series.