This series is seriously tearing me up as I watch it. I remember wondering at the end of Birdy the Mighty Decode 2 whether or not the rest of 2009 would premiere a series that would match its brilliance. I’ve finally managed to find a contender. It’s amazing considering how much this series has already done in only FIVE EPISODES so far. This episode lacked any action and didn’t have a rebellious Mirai, but it left me as an emotional wreck afterwards.

This episode first showed Mirai’s old elementary school (she seemed to have had to travel quite a distance to reach it), which leads to an anecdote in which Mirai tells about how her mother embarrassed her at her graduation ceremony. The rest of the episode shows the three lead characters as they spend the evening and the night in the shelter camp that has been set up at the school.

I loved how this episode didn’t just tell the story of Mirai, Yuki and Mari, but also that of the school, the people who lost their loved ones, the old couple who lost their grandsons, the girl who had a mental breakdown due to the aftershocks, the guy who seems to have suffered from a sunstroke, Megu, one of Mirai’s classmates and heck: even that couple sitting next to each other and staring at the wall that only appear in one frame. Seriously, you don’t see many series in which the creators just pull out a random classmate, give her less than a minute of airtime and yet manage to make you sympathize with her with a believable back-story.

But yeah, this was the episode in which the chaos settles down a bit and the emotions pop up even more. It’s in a way similar of getting an injury during sports or something else: in the beginning the adrenaline is still rushing through your body and you’re still too bewildered to really get what’s going on. Then a few minutes later, the seemingly endless pain really starts. In this episode, it really starts to sink in that people have died here.

Really, while watching this episode, I kept wondering whether this really was only the fifth episode of this series. It feels like much more episodes have passed for this series, and yet there seems to be no end to how amazing this series can be. It’s really going to rank among my favourites of 2009 if the creators can keep this pacing up throughout the final six episodes.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

This episode was really there to add more depth to Oz: Eliot’s rather rash words have hit him hard in this episode, and even though it probably wasn’t that special for Eliot, it really gave Oz the opportunity to reflect on himself. But yeah, there are only six episodes left for him to show how much he learned. Second Season Where?!

Through Lotti, we also came to learn a lot more about Jack Bezarius and his past. It turns out that he wasn’t anyone special when he was still alive: he just happened to be best friends with Glen Baskerville, the instigator of the Tragedy of Sabrie. Glen turned out to be far from the evil overlord that I imagined him to be, and something must have really screwed him up to have ordered that tragedy. Not to mention that it’s still unknown what Vincent and Gilbert were doing there.

On a side-note: the first DVD for Pandora Hearts seems to be doing pretty well right now in the sales, being the only one aside from Higashi no Eden and K-On (which were bound to appear there anyway) to appear in the top 18 of DVD sales in the past week. Here is a surprise success for Xebec.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Agh! What is up with those bloody recaps today?! I’d be more patient if Basquash didn’t just pull the exact same thing. Blegh.

Oh, and on the few minutes of new material: ZOMG CAL!!
Rating Recap: — (Blegh)
Rating Non-Recap: *** (Awesome)

Blegh. The second half of this episode was mostly recap. A really weird place for this show to start recapping, but at least you can see that it’s building up. My main annoyance right now is that there is no way of knowing whether this build-up will come together in the end. With Shoji Kawamori, you’ll never know.

And wtf… Coco has been on the moon all this time?! That’s definitely something I didn’t see coming. I guess that that’s why she’s been out of the picture lately. I first thought that it was James Loan’s younger and wilder version that hung out with her and Dan when they were little, but it turns out to have been Slash. It turns out that Coco used to be much more spirited and talented than Dan when she still had her legs, and Slash turns out to have recognized this talent and promised to take Coco to the moon as soon as she found her groove. After losing her legs, she took a while of calming down, but instead ended up promoting the Basquash through the internet, hence why she ended up at the moon. The question is whether or not she’s going to have surgery to restore her legs. I hope not, but yeah… this is anime.

The first half of this episode consisted out of a bit of development for Sera. But I must say that the basketball matches are starting to get rather boring right now. There was character-development in it (Dan finally stopped trying to do everything himself), but the action scenes didn’t really interest me. That brings me back the start of this series again: the action-scenes of the first eight episodes simply were much better and well done. After that, it really dulled in aside from episode 11 and that part was a filler.
Rating: (Enjoyable)