Also the genius little girl who allegedly developed Medusa, now has to wait for Medusa to stop looking at jupiter otherwise she’s completely useless and can’t do anything? Keep eating those sweet genius.

Hebephiles and sexual favours why am I NOT surprised; if you’re a girl don’t go to prison in Japan.

Quite honestly the balloon thing almost made sense. Fine you have an “special” explosive that explodes when it meets alcohol releasing hydrogen. However consider this, hydrogen in the presence of oxygen is highly flammable, so it more than likely would have been consumed in the explosion burning everything.

In addition was the balloon actually big enough. Let’s say each girl weighs 40kg so that’s 80kg or 176 pounds. If we take into consideration their height (say average of 5 feet) as a measurement tool, then the balloon diameter at most is 10 foot and that’s being generous (taken from side view of them floating). Even if they were 6ft tall then the ballon is 12 ft in diameter at most - you’ll see where I’m going with this. Hydrogen exists as a diatomic gas so weighs half the weight of helium per litre at STP.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/helium2.htm

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1140392

If you use 32.3 grams lift per Cu. Ft for hydrogen, a 10ft diameter balloon will only lift 37.75 pounds you would actually need a 16.7 foot diameter balloon and that would only achieve equilibrium, therefore the balloon would have to be larger than that or earth’s gravity reduced. But hey maybe they invented stable monatomic hydrogen right? Sorry did she say she spent 3 days thinking up a plan that wouldn’t have worked - FAIL.

Lastly the brilliant thing of executing the prisoners in a tight circle. No cross-fire or chance of hitting the other guards right. Let’s not worry about anyone looking for them either, that whole visitor section was built just for Kuniko for Momoko to visit her.

After all the contrived crap we’ve seen crazy pseudo-chemistry, pseudo-physics and pseudo-biology. I mean throw in some occult and quantum physics and you’ll be laughing.

All I do know is the crazy writers for this awful series spent a lot of time making moonshine from fermented orange juice: that part was just about believable using a solar still except for the fact that 3 days to produce any alcohol is pushing it into unbelievable realms, what did they use some thrush or Candidiasis as a starter culture?

The eclipse is not a coincidence — it’s “the sun meeting the moon”. Ryouko chose this day for Kuniko’s “execution” (I think Ryouko was waiting for her escape, and was maybe curious about how it would come about) because it was the day of the eclipse — early in the episode she insists on how the execution must fall on this day at this particular time.

It’s not a hot-air balloon, it’s a hydrogen balloon, filled with the hydrogen used to create explosions in the logging operations, catalyzed by alchohol distilled from the fermented orange-juice.

Just about everything that happened in this episode was fore-shadowed earlier in the series or, at least, earlier in the episode.

On initial viewing, I was very disappointed in this episode, but after thinking about it, I’m increasingly impressed with how it was put together and how much was shown without being explicitly said.

Still, it feels like the seams show a bit, or credulity is strained just a bit too much. However, I think this series can survive this, and, this episode may come to seem much less contrived when viewed in the context of the entire series.

Dramatically, I do believe the massacre at the end was heavy-handed. We already know that Atlas is evil and Ryouko callous and cruel. The massacred prisoners is almost a manipulative cliche.

welcome to the reality for people in certain parts of the world: people who help others and kind hearted just get “picked off” like nothing.

I also think it’s time for Lady Ryoko to reap the whirlwind!! I suspect that it’s a bit premature, plot-wise, but I’d personally pull the trigger on her.