Short Synopsis: It’s the day of the performance of Misaki’s play.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
And it’s finally happened. Finally Touya said something that… you shouldn’t say to another girl when you have a girlfriend. It’s now just going to be a matter of time before he breaks up with Yuki, though the interesting thing is that Misaki is now completely out of the picture and hooked up with Akira. The girl has been just one big red herring, whose part only was to break up the relationship between Touya and Yuki, and increase that gap as it went along. It’s now going to be up to Haruka and Rina to finish things.

It’s going to be very interesting, because I think it’s clear now that Rina doesn’t see anything special in Touya, while Touya seems to fancy her, while Haruka is clearly longing to spend more time with Touya, but Touya doesn’t see anything special in her. Now that the Misaki-arc is over, it’s time for the finale of this series to start, and at this point there are so many interesting possibilities for the ending to develop into.

But PLEASE, was it really necessary for Mana to suddenly kiss Touya from out of nowhere? That really had like… no build-up whatsoever. I’ve praised this show for being realistic, but that was about the complete opposite. In fact, that’s going to be a big potential pitfall for this series if it continues to pull these plot twists like in this episode. It’s not bad for now, but if every single girl is going to end up in the hospital (or something similar) due to a random accident, then it’s going to be a bad thing.

In any case, it’s also interesting how Misaki didn’t just force to characters apart from each other, but at the same time she also brought Touya and his father closer together. I’m not sure whether the creators are going to use him some more in the end, but it would be awesome if he would. At first I thought that they hated each others’ guts, but there seems to be a more subtle reason why he kicked his son out of the house. But then again,

Short Synopsis: A certain character thought to be dead returns.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Seriously, I so want to hate this series, and yet this series doesn’t let me. And I so want to love this series at the same tie, and that too is something I’m unable to do with this series. There are so many good things about this series, but there are also so many bad things, and this episode again was no different.

Especially Louise got on my nerves more than ever, now that she finally has the chance to kill Nena. Especially the incredibly exaggerated screaming was just pointless. I personally believe that this series would have been a lot better if she had simply died when Nena killed her in the first season. In that case, Saji would indeed have angsted for a lot of episodes, but at least he would have gotten over it, and their relationship wouldn’t have turned into the whine-fest that it is now. In fact, I’m beginning to like Saji whenever he’s not thinking of his former lover.

But yeah, there was lots of good building up in this episode, which is always welcome. While it’s a bit strange for Wang Lui Mei and Hong Long to still be alive, and how four centuries into the future, people still haven’t invented bullets that have enough force to pass through a human body, I am glad to see that they do succeed in telling the CBs about Veda’s location.

And FINALLY, it becomes clear what Aeolia Schenberg intended to do with his plans from the beginning: turning every human into an innovator. That’s what it meant to change the world, and that’s why the GN Drives had to be constructed through such a difficult process. But here I have to wonder: what’s the point of being an innovator anyway? All I’ve seen in the past few episodes is that they have glowy eyes, weird hair and get to pilot fancy mechas. I guess the only thing is the telepathic powers of these guys, but I can’t see how Aeolia would start such an incredibly elaborate and complex plan, just to turn a bunch of people into psychics… Just imagine how people can be able to misuse these powers by intruding into others’ privacy.

Right now, my biggest problem with the second season aside from the obvious Saji and Louise is that it’s a story that could also have easily been done in thirteen episodes. There was no need to drag this on for this many episodes, unless the creators were very consciously building up for something in the end. The finale of this series can really make or break it for me. With such a large amount of build-up, the finale really needs to give this series a solid and satisfying conclusion. If it can do that, then my opinion about this series will very likely become much higher.