The more I watch this series, the more I’m convinced that it’s one of the big powerhouses this season. Even taking Darker than Black and Aoi Bungaku into account, I still keep edging to this series as my current favourite of the Autumn season, and this episode only made this show even more intriguing. It’s going to be awesome if the creators can keep this up.

This episode provided a lot of answers. We learn who the mysterious woman that appeared in the visions is: Shiron Byacornise, a girl who could foresee the future. She predicted the arrival of a major disease, however she was used by some sort of group of evil people. The reason she got hung is that she finally retaliated, and got herself hung as a sign of repent.

And I must say… the plan of the “bad guys” to get rid of Hamyuts Meseta is actually quite ingenious: they’d predict whenever she’d get near her weakness (typhoons), poison her with a deadly disease and then try to attack her. Finally we have these bad guys who don’t come up with these wimpy plans that involve sending a bunch of weak goons!

It’s also interesting: the previous episode had been setting her up as a villain, while this episode did the entire opposite: in a strange act of mercy she let a surprisingly self-conscious Meat live, and turned him back into a human. That Meat of course was Colio. She’s also a completely different character when she discovers that she becomes the hunted instead of the hunter, and starts becoming entirely nonchalant as to what’s going to happen to her.

Then there is that mysterious book guy, who still is pretty much of a mystery at this point. He just keeps handing out fragments of Shiron’s book to random people, but for what point and purpose? My guess would be that foresight comes into play again: we’ve already confirmed two people who have somehow the power to look into the future (Shiron and the mysterious guy who predicted the way the storm would travel), so why wouldn’t there be more? It looks to me like this guy is trying to change the future, and Shiron’s memories somehow are the key to it.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Summer Wars is the latest highly anticipated movie from Mamoru Hosoda, the director of Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo. As expected, the movie comes with a lot of ideas, attention to detail and really attempts to innovate. It’s a very nice movie, however I didn’t like it as much as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

The movie basically focuses on two things: slice of life around a really big family who has come together for the birthday of its oldest member who owns a huge mansion. The other focus of the movie is some sort of science-fiction story in which the Internet has evolved into some bizarre world called “OZ”. This eventually gets hacked, and it’s up to our teen-aged lead to save the world from this threat.

And I’m sorry, but as a student computer science I just could not buy this premise. It’s utterly ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever. While I agree that it achieves new heights in the fantasy-ish portrayal of hacking software, and I know that there’s something as artistic freedom, but this movie went completely beyond my suspense of disbelief as it turned the teen-aged leads in this movie into somehow the only ones who were able to save the world. Especially the finale hung together in a string of Deus ex Machinas.

I know I’m harsh, but this is a big-budgeted movie. Take Real Drive, released last year. It’s vision of the future of the Internet was much more creative, realistic, believable and explained, even though it also used a bit of fantasy in its premise. I appreciate the attempts of the director, you can see that he really tried, but he was too torn between creating a good story and appealing to the mainstream in this part.

Okay, so that was the bad part, now the good stuff: the slice of life. What I absolutely loved about this movie was the way the family was portrayed. Every single character was behaving realistically, even taking the ridiculous setting into account. The cast is incredibly large, especially for a movie, and the creators actually developed all the characters a bit throughout the movie. I especially liked the chaos in which a lot of things happened at the same time and everyone was doing something at the same time.

You’re definitely going to recognize the art style from Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, and Madhouse really made sure to breathe life into every single character with some incredibly good and realistic animation. This slice of life makes this series really fun to watch. But yeah, compared to Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, it just isn’t as powerful. The soundtrack is less impressive, and it really gets hampered by that ridiculous setting and superficial climax.

As for the shows I’m not going to blog:
- Sasameki Koto has some interesting points, but after two episodes it looks too much like it’s going to turn into an endless “will they won’t they” storyline.

Anyway, the reason why I didn’t blog the first season was simply because it aired in what I consider the best season ever: Spring and Summer 2007; it was simply overshadowed. For some reason, I also didn’t like it when it first started out, but reading back some of my past comments, I have no idea what the heck I was thinking back then.

I watched this episode with AoShen’s subs, but I wouldn’t exactly recommend them. Their translations are way off at times and in one scene they make Hei look like a rapist. They’re really those obnoxious people who think they’re funny, but ultimately aren’t.

In any case, I really like the second season so far. Darker than Black’s premise is so rich that it can create a ton of different and interesting storylines, and that’s exactly what they did here: instead of continuing with the tried and true formula of the first season, you can see that the creators are currently exploring new territory, and yet they don’t forsake the things that made the first season so enjoyable.

The most controversial difference is of course that there are now teen-agers present, but Suou is pretty likable. She is impulsive, but this episode showed that she is in a good way: she’s willing to take action to get herself out of problems, instead of continuously getting saved like a damsel in distress. Especially in a setting in which she’s surrounded by contractors, she’s a very brave kid.

The fights in this episode were again well done, and I still love the concept in this series in which the smartest are the ones who usually win their fights, and the penalties are a very nice touch to balance these powers out, like in this episode, in which that woman needed to kiss men (yes, KISS, not “sexually interact”) in order to use her powers.

The whole mystery behind this series seems pretty interesting at this point. Shion should not have been able to walk if he indeed was a contractor, and yet he walked. My guess would be that his penalty as a contractor was just something else, and he pretended to have lost his legs in order to fool people, but the why and how is still a bit of a mystery.
Rating: ** (Excellent)