So, anyone who’s followed this blog for a while probably knows that I was… not a fan of Star Driver. For those of you just joining us, the long story short is that I found it to be a very pretty show that was done no favors by its cardboard heroes, confused villains, and flashy but very poorly choreographed action scenes. It wasn’t all bad, but for a show about protecting a girl from an evil organization in possession of a host of alien mechas, it was surprisingly boring, and I’ve often brought it up as a model of what not to do in an action show, as all the visual spectacle in the world couldn’t polish the structure that was underneath.
My first time through Captain Earth, I was eerily reminded of Star Driver. They used some shared conceits, had some similar elements of their story and episode structure, and a couple characters who at least looked the part of outright clones. And, it turns out, there’s a reason for that; Star Driver and Captain Earth were made by, essentially, the exact same people. The studio, the director, the guy on the script… all the same. Four years had passed (Star Driver releasing in 2010 to Captain Earth in 2014) but it seems like the band got back together to tell basically the same show all over again. The question is, then, did they learn from their mistakes or did they just reprocess their old work and slap a new name on the masticated remains of what already didn’t work?
Well, let’s start right away with our special youngster. This time he’s named Daichi Manatsu. He’s the son of an astronaut who died in a mysterious accident years ago, who in his youth befriended a mysterious boy named Teppei (who himself possessed a strange magical power to conjure a rainbow halo in his hand) and together with him found a strange bubble in a restricted section of the JAXA base (Well, GLOBE base, GLOBE being the fictional organization that handles all the space plot stuff) they lived at, which contained an even more mysterious girl, Hana. After seeing a news report that displayed an eerily familiar halo rainbow (large scale now), Daichi returns to his old stomping grounds just as, unknown to him, a crisis hits.
This crisis is the arrival, or rather return of an enemy called the Kill-T Gang, an alien mecha that obliterated humanity’s moon base before and, after a dormant period, has returned to potentially consume all life on Earth the same way. As the Kill-T Gang approaches, a mysterious figure (you may begin to notice that there are a lot of “mysterious” characters in this show. This is mostly an artifact of the opening just throwing you in the deep end, which works well enough) gives Daichi a gun called a Livlaster, which allows him to pilot a hidden mecha called Earth Engine that, in a rather long sequence, launches into space, combines with extra parts while flying through the hollow center of a ring-shaped space station, and ultimately deposits Daichi in front of the Kill-T Gang to fight for the survival of Earth itself.
This is, by the way, the first episode. I’ll actually give the show credit for this – while Star Driver’s episode 1 was also stocked with a lot of crap to remember, Captain Earth manages the experience better. It doesn’t really try to introduce Teppei or Hana, and instead follows Daichi on a somewhat strange and uncomfortable journey that leads him to what appears to be his destiny (or something like that). These two are far from the only shows that just give you a load of madness in episode 1, and it is generally better if you feel something, because you’re not going to understand.
This gives me a chance to talk about what I think the biggest upgrade from Star Driver to Captain Earth is: the tone. Star Driver was a little inconsistent. At times it went melancholy or philosophical, at other times it went for zany fun, and at still other times it got so nonsensical that you could swear it was trying to be a parody. Captain Earth quickly establishes a tone with Daichi’s circumstances and movement through the opening. It’s hard to place in a single word, but if I had to I’d say it’s somewhat nostalgic. That is both that it’s got the odd happy melancholy of “the good old days” going in and of itself, and that it’s trying to hack the brains of its viewers to feel like a more venerable icon than it is. For direct contrast with Star Driver, Star Driver had a sort of forced market-product cool a lot of the time, and part of it being such a potpourri of tones and emotions comes off as desperation to have the viewer feel something, anything, at some point. Captain Earth knows what button it’s trying to push. It wants to be that show that you swear you watched when you were a kid, except it’s actually a new show. It’s trying to be something like Gunvarrel (link is to the April Fools review; the show doesn’t exist) is in Robotics;Notes, except this one actually has to exist, which makes it much harder. The other word that comes to mind is “theatrical”. It’s not quite big enough for “operatic” (yes, despite Earth being constantly on the line), but it does have a sense of scripted pageantry to it.
Still, there is a degree to which Captain Earth’s look and feel is damnably convincing. Before researching the production history, I was sure it was an older show than Star Driver, because it seemed like the kind of thing that would come out of the 90’s or early 00’s. The color, the music, the art, the storytelling… they make deliberate choices, even perhaps deliberate mistakes, to try to feel more nostalgic than they should be. I feel like getting the viewer lost off the bat is part of this, since it puts said viewer off-balance and erodes somewhat the cynical and analytical mindset because things are happening in a way that doesn’t leave a lot of room for analysis, at least without outside help. You have to experience Captain Earth before it lets you start really thinking about it. Whatever else the creators learned, they certainly became better able to manipulate in the four years between Star Driver and Captain Earth.
In ant case, Daichi faces off against the Kill-T Gang, and with a little help from a hacker who’ll become our fourth main character just as soon as she gets a proper introduction, wins, and returns safely to the Earth to meet up with Hana and Teppi, who are in the care of the local authorities, most notably a close friend of Daichi’s father.
The first arc involves integrating the kids – Daichi, Hana, Teppei, and the hacker, a self-proclaimed “magical girl” named Akari who is the daughter of the base’s commander and his estranged ex-wife who now commands GLOBE’s space station – into GLOBE forces. During this phase, the Kill-T Gang consists of two members, Amarok and Molkin, the former of which caused the death of Daichi’s father, which was a heroic sacrifice to stop the Kill-T Gang attack rather than the accident everyone was told.
It also happens that Amarok and Molkin have human forms; Amarok basically looks like a clone of Head from Star Driver while Molkin plays something of the oversexed femme fatale. They make an acceptable villain duo, but despite being the highest order baddies initially on offer, it’s quite evident that they’re not the ones we’re supposed to be most worried about, as they come off as kind of threatening, but also goofy enough to run a food truck and sell crepes in order to get close to our heroes. So, naturally, and because it’s true of all the big mecha shows, we get multiple factions of villains including out-of-their-league schemers and political insanity to act more threatening in the moment.
The first of those is Macbeth Enterprises, led by its CEO, a man named Kube, and his AI supercomputer PAC (clearly meant to be “Puck”, in order to tie in with the fact that this show has a random Shakespeare theme with particular focus on Midsummer Night’s Dream). Kube is, on the advice of PAC, backing Amarok and Molkin, though it’s unclear just how much he understands about them. While he certainly seems sinister, and PAC sinister as well (what with its flagrantly false “PAC never lies” catchphrase), the Macbeth side of things is mostly in the background to explain where Amarok and Molkin get their otherwise inexplicable offscreen villain supplies.
More pressing is a faction within GLOBE known as the Ark Faction, with their subordinate organization Salty Dog doing a lot of antagonist work for them. The basic idea is that while the main group at the base (the Intercept Faction) wants to save Earth, the Ark Faction has a plan to instead abandon the fight and send a small population of humans out of the solar system. In order to make this happen they’ll stop at nothing, with a particular interest in sabotaging the Intercept Faction’s defense initiative…
Yeah, if this sounds familiar it’s probably because you’ve been following along with the blog and remember Alternative V was, basically the same exact thing, right down to the inter-faction rivalry in a multinational organization that’s supposed to have humanity’s best interests at heart. There is a big difference between Alternative V and the Ark Faction, though, and it’s that the Ark Faction bozos make a lot less sense.
You see, in the context of Muv Luv, Alternative V kind of made sense. True, it could only save a couple hundred thousand migrants out of one billion remaining population, making it properly a horrifying finish for the war on Earth that the protagonists rightly wanted to avoid, but at the same time Humanity had been fighting against an implacable swarm of alien monsters for about thirty years, and in that time hadn’t scored a ‘fair’ win, so you can kind of see why the idea would take off to just get somebody off this rock and bomb the BETA to hell on the way out. The extreme and even violent antagonism between the Alternative V supporters and the Alternative IV side made sense as well; the world had been on the brink for a long time, resources were scarce, and the allocation of funding and materials to other projects would take away from evacuation efforts.
Here, not only is a less-screwed world all set to go with fewer people, but… they’re more or less all set to go, with many colonists already in cryogenic storage. They do need some supplies still, but it’s fairly evident that their plan (called the Kivotos Plan) doesn’t need a monopoly on Earth’s production or space launch capacity that’s being taken up by the Intercept faction. They do seem to need (or at least want) Hana for some reason, but there’s no reason given and no easy guess that is both sufficient to explain their efforts to acquire her and sensible for them to expect to get after kidnapping the girl like they do. Further, we’re told that the Kivotos Plan colonists have no destination, and are set to be on ice for centuries or even millennia as their ship searches for somewhere to revive them and rekindle the human race. That’s… not much of a rescue plan. At least Alternative V had a clear goal, an Earthlike exoplanet around Barnard’s Star that they could, evidently, reach comfortably in a human lifetime. And that’s not even mentioning the biggest kick in the teeth: if a Kill-T Gang touches Earth, we are told that all life on Earth will be more or less instantly devoured. In other words, you lose. The Alternative V people could risk harming a defensive line, because at worst humanity would lose ground. When the Ark Faction does it, it’s like they don’t realize they need the Intercept Faction’s work, which is never shown to detract from their Ark-building, as necessary until they actually launch, because the “everybody dies” consequence is immediate. The Ark Faction does try to use automated intercept craft once late in the show, but that fails miserably meaning they never do present a viable alternative to the big robot plan they keep screwing with.
In any case, get used to these idiots, because while they’re perhaps most pronounced at the start, they are going to be a constantly recurring source of antagonism through essentially the entire show. Even if you don’t have Alternative V as a touchstone to compare them to, they’re without a doubt the weakest link in the show’s plot, and a case where the illusion necessary to get away with trying to make the viewer feel something rather than trying to produce a logically consistent fiction wore thin.
So, aside from Salty Dog trying to control or kidnap Hana, we do still have the Kill-T Gang to worry about. Daichi alone isn’t great at repelling them, which leads to a huge revelation out of Teppei: he’s the same kind of being they are, a member of the “Planetary Gear” with his own Kill-T Gang style alternate body. However, he sees himself as a human and wants to defend Earth, and thus manifests his big magic robot self in orbit in order to help Daichi in a couple of desperate fights. Naturally, some authorities are rather suspicious of him, but the good people of Tanegashima Base offer Teppei the care and support he needs
In the second one, in which Amarok and Molkin attack at the same time, Teppei makes a choice, both defeating the pair and sealing his own fate by sacrificing the part of his ‘self’ called an Ego Block.
An Ego Block is, essentially, a small cube that is the “core” and “true” body of the Planetary Gears, preserving them as immortal existences. The blocks are fairly indestructible to current human tech, hence why Amarok and Molkin can just try again every time they get blown up, but Teppei shatters his own, in the process losing access to his Kill-T Gang form and becoming a fully mortal human with no way back to what he once was. Amarok and Molkin, for their part, are both defeated yet again and deeply disturbed by this turn of events, essentially seeing one of their former comrades commit suicide in favor of a human shell identity, and thus they decide they need a change in strategy, kicking off our second major arc.
The core of this arc is that the other Planetary Gears members exist on Earth, unaware of their true identity as life-consuming immortal aliens because they were incarnated into artificial “design child” human bodies (Blame Macbeth Industries and PAC, again for unclear motivations). However, they each possess a special ability, similar to Teppei’s rainbow conjuring, and give off energy that Amarok and Molkin should be able to track down and find. As such, they intend to awaken their compatriots to push forward for the assault against Earth. At the same time, the Intercept Faction forms our main characters into a new unit called the Midsummer Knights and tasks them with tracking down the Planetary Gears on Earth, using the signal sent off whenever one uses their weird machine to manifest a Kill-T Gang and some general Star Trek tier science stuff in order to find out where the members might be.
There end up being a whole bunch of complicated rules: Amarok and Molkin have to make contact in order to awaken a Gears member. After they do, that Gears member can begin an attack by getting into a pod known as a Machine Goodfellow. For three minutes, they’ll be vulnerable on Earth, but able to fight in a sort of custom mecha here. If the Machine Goodfellow isn’t suppressed before that timer is up, the Ego Block will shoot to orbit and a Kill-T Gang attack will begin. If at either point the Planetary Gear is defeated, their Machine Goodfellow will be rendered at least temporarily inoperable.
Thus, the heroes have three chances to stop each attack; by collecting the Design Child while they still see themselves as human, by beating their mini earthbound mecha within the three minute timer, or by beating the Kill-T Gang in orbit. Shockingly, not only does the second option actually see successful use, with Daichi in his own mini core mecha beating some of the Gears before they have to face Teppei (now a mecha pilot like Daichi) in orbit, but the first one even gets some legitimately close attempts where there’s enough drama that it’s believable this one might be ‘rescued’ from awakening.
All in all, this arc is essentially Captain Earth’s version of what took up the vast majority of Star Driver, dealing with the Kiraboshi Order of Fruity Antagonists. Each episode is, in essence, centered around the villain of the week, and ends with a mecha showdown that usually has a long lead-in animation exactly like all the other long lead-in animations, during which the villain of the week shows off their special power and is then defeated, unable to challenge the heroes again until the next plot twist.
But, while I’d be generally inclined to say that this sucked in Star Driver, I think the real problem was that Star Driver was just this, a long run of doing the same thing over and over again without much variation. Here, as opposed to with the Kiraboshi Order of Innumerable Goons, there are only eight original members of the Planetary Gears. With Amarok and Molkin already awakened and Teppei rejecting his blockness, that only leaves five times that we can loop through the same events. And, in those five times, we get about as much variance as Star Driver gave us in an entire show the length of Captain Earth.
What’s more, one of the big problems with Star Driver is that the Kiraboshi Order of Alleged Evil didn’t just have their own separate themes and personas. Having different themes and personas across different enemies is good. The problem was that they also had different apparent motivations, leaving the audience unable to really parse why we were supposed to care about their overly-complicated evil plan. Here, the Planetary Gears all have the same evil endgame: touch Earth as Kill-T Gang, eat all life on earth via mere proximity, end of plan. As cartoonish as the “save the world” plot can come off, at least we can follow it, so that we know that all the Planetary Gears are legitimately dangerous bad guys even when they’re being metaphorically (and literally!) colorful scenery-chewers like the Kiraboshi.
The first recruited Planetary Gear is Zin, a boy working as a casino dealer who kind of hates everything around him and thus we can assume was already open to becoming his “true” self before being awakened. Daichi manages to beat him in Machine Goodfellow form, with a fairly impressive stunt at the end to boot, albeit largely thanks to advice from Akari. After that is Ai, a pop idol who starts out as cheerful but kind of nervous. After Amarok and Molkin awaken her, she takes on a new persona that’s downright vicious, and frankly more of a Femme Fatale than Molkin herself. The other Gears kidnap Akari to force her to hack the orbital defenses and bring them down, but Daichi manages to win without Akari’s help and, while she does temporarily disable the orbital defenses, manages to get herself released by using the massive amount of nukes she’s tapped into to hold Earth (as the Planetary Gears need it to consume) hostage against her release.
Third comes Lin, a biker girl with a need for speed and a fierce competitive streak, who is friends with a rather sketchy doctor woman. She gets awakened and largely keeps her personality, resulting in a fight in which she’s too fast for Daichi and makes it to the three minute mark and the orbital assault. Teppei manages to get launched to go up and fight her, and pulls out the win, leaving the villains frustrated that there seem to be two capable Earthlings rather than just the one they knew about.
We then get something of a breather episode, in which the suspected Planetary Gear (a sweet girl named Setsuna, who’s in the care of the sketchy doctor from before) evades Amarok, Molkin, and the protagonists for the better part of the episode, briefly making friends with Hana before running off to be properly resolved later.
The fourth Planetary Gear to be the center of attention in this phase takes two episodes of his own to resolve. This is Baku (or Bugbear, in his Planetary Gear name), a young man stuck as a prize-fighter in an underground Yakuza fighting ring. He has a very complicated relationship with the organization he’s in, especially the daughter of the crime boss, who seems to have a deep and reciprocated affection for him. He blows off Amarok and Molkin when they try to approach him, and they aren’t able to force the matter either. However, strange things seem to be happening centered around the crime boss’s family, including the sweet young lady who’s the daughter of the house having horrifying dreams of her own demise.
Eventually, it’s revealed that she and most of her family actually died a year earlier as she sank their houseboat to stop the child trafficking business, but Baku’s power of illusions brought the girl he loved ‘back to life’ (along with her family around her) in a false existence that had persisted since then. The girl returns to oblivion in Baku’s arms, leaving him stricken with enough grief to join up with the Gears just to burn the whole wicked world down. In the resulting mecha battle with Daichi, though, his heart still isn’t quite in it (fighting to destroy rather than for someone he loves just hits differently I guess) and he gets beaten properly.
Whatever else the show does or doesn’t manage to do, Baku’s story is an effective, tragic sequence. The girl gets a surprising amount of development, so that you can really understand the bond between her and Baku, and Baku himself stands out among the Planetary Gears as someone who actually has agency worth noting, both in his initial refusal and ultimate acceptance. And the twist about the Yakuza family, particularly the girl’s ultimate return to death, is like something from a gothic tale: twisted, psychological, and with no right answers to be found in the pain. If the Planetary Gears arc is equivalent to dealing with the Kiraboshi Order of No Investment, Baku’s story is the equivalent of dealing with Mizuno and Marino.
It also marks the end of the arc and that particular pattern. Six episodes, one Gear dropping off the map, one space battle, and three extremely different ground fights with different emotions, and the show recognizes it’s got about as much play out of that particular loop as it ought to and moves on. Add “enough of the bloody repetition!” to the list of things the creators learned since Star Driver.
The next arc starts with things being peaceful for the heroes, which the audience should know means things are about to go to hell. We get a mini arc in which Hana has admitted (particularly to herself) that she’s in love with Daichi, but starts avoiding him because she’s afraid he’ll reject her if her true nature (a creation of the Planetary Gears) is revealed to him (as would happen if they kissed, since Gears share thoughts/memories that way as established with Amarok and Molkin awakening their fellows with said method). It’s unclear why she thinks this since Daichi is best friends with Teppei and found her in a mysterious magical bubble when they were kids, indicating that he’d probably be okay with her being a space alien of a sort, but give the girl her angst.
Meanwhile, Amarok and Molkin get chewed out by Kube for wrecking most of their Machine Goodfellows, and thus hatch a scheme with PAC to both remove their enemies and spite their backer by crashing his very expensive Kivotos-Plan-Related satellite right into Tanegashima Base. This is stopped by Hana, awakening a higher level of her potential power by activating the sunken alien battleship Blume and using it to shoot down the satellite. Because she had to do alien magic things, she feels less human and thus angsts more and runs away from everybody.
This leads Hana to run in with Setsuna again, and then the two of them to run into Amarok and Molkin. They aren’t quite able to get away, though, and Setsuna is awakened as not just the last Planetary Gear, but their true royal leader. She seems much more mature than her human self, but also not quite as eagerly wicked as most of the Gears, seeming to regard their life cycle as a grim necessity rather than a pleasure. Amarok and Molkin get in their Machine Goodfellows (no juice to go orbital, it seems, but enough to fight on Earth) and face off against Teppei and Daichi with Hana as a hostage. As the boys get beaten up, Hana manages to once again summon up new power, conjuring her own Livlaster and shooting it with great power and homing mode to drive off the two Gears. Thus, she’s reunited with the team and finds that, surprising no one except her, Daichi likes her and accepts her for who and what she is.
This also marks the start of Hana’s run, brief though it may be, as a proper mecha pilot, since she has a Livlaster to power one of the engines, getting a new one to her specification. I’m not exactly sure how or why Globe just has more Livlaster-driven super robots hanging around to do their unnecessarily dramatic gearing up routine with, but that’s the sort of thing that you just have to take in stride just because it’s a mecha show and there’s a degree to which mechas inherently don’t make all the sense in the world. She’s even next up to go fight Kill-T Gang in space, owing that Daichi and Teppei got a bit wrecked before she chased off the Planetary Gears.
Speaking of the Planetary Gears, how are they not in something of a dead end? Well, it turns out that if you thought Kube was kind of worthless in the grand scheme of the show, you didn’t know the half of it. He starts to get savvy to the idea that PAC might not have his best interests (whatever those even are, given his inchoate scheme around the Ark project) in mind and confronts the supercomputer… several moves too late as PAC is prepared for this and goes ahead and body snatches Kube, overwriting the CEO’s mind with a copy of itself that gets busy banging the secretary and helping out the Planetary Gears, so that they now get as many rebuilds of their Machine Goodfellows as they want.
In any case, Hana gets to cut her teeth on an intercept, and then while she’s still recovering on the cool orbital space station, Molkin and Zin come knocking which means that Teppei and Daichi deploy as well. This is also where we see Salty Dog use a drone to try to intercept, but Molkin effortlessly hacks it to do her bidding instead, making the fight harder on the leads.
We then get a sequence focused around the usually “happens between episodes for free” bit where the team has to get back down from space. This time, Salty Dog decides to do evil things for the reason that they want Hana like she’s going to actually use the Blume for them if they kill her friends and abduct her. And like it wasn’t just proved that their alternative to the hero team sucks. (again, not a well-thought-out plan). They redirect the deorbit to Australia, and we spend an episode having to fight Salty Dog’s goons across the Outback in order to snag a transport shuttle back home, and then another mostly running from a Salty Dog hunter-killer drone (aboard said hijacked transport, which the drone seems a little too gung-ho about shooting at given that even in their madness they need Hana alive.) before ultimately making their way home to Tanegashima.
With that sequence done, we enter the endgame. The Powers that Be have now drawn up a plan, dubbed Operation Midsummer, to truly defeat the Planetary Gears. In this plan, Hana would use the Blume to get everybody to Uranus, where the Planetary Gear Mothership, Oberon, is in orbit. Please, nobody tell the people who made this that Uranus actually has moons named Oberon and Titania… I think they know, but are banking on you not knowing that.
This leads to a massive battle in and around the GLOBE space station as Salty Dog again attempts to kidnap Hana (though at least they have a reason to dislike Operation Summer, since it’s set to potentially use some of their rocket supplies in orbit) while the Planetary Gears attack the inside of the space station with Ai the “visiting idol” to gain intel and the outside with a barrage of space debris. This leads to Daichi having to choose between protecting the mission and sparing Teppei, which ends up unlocking new levels of power to not have to choose.
The mission is launched, with Salty Dog outright attacking yet again. The effort of fighting them off leaves Daichi taking a bad hyperspace trip so that the Planetary Gears are able to try to manipulate him mentally, showing him a normal life with the lot of them as his friends, which Daichi ultimately breaks free of.
Out in the far end of the Solar System, the group (Teppei and Daichi in their robots, Hana driving the Blume in what’s built up to potentially be an act of self-sacrifice, and Akari on the support ship bridge), they face off against Baku and then, at the core of the Oberon mothership, the entire membership of the Planetary Gears alongside PAC’s true form as the core of the mothership. While there, PAC outright backstabs the Planetary Gears and gives the big megalomaniac speech about how it’s going to take over the galaxy and… do you really care? The details of PAC’s master plan aren’t important. It’s every lunatic evil overlord plan ever devised. This results in the (Remaining) Gears and the Earth team fighting together against PAC, even though PAC/Oberon is necessary to their normal life cycle, a conflict that sees all of them either sacrifice their ego blocks to do damage to the boss or have the blocks destroyed by some attack or another, meaning that the epilogue will be leaving them as a pack of normal humans (or at least as normal as Teppei).
Though PAC’s core takes some hits, the AI has a last play to make: PAC bodysnatches Hana, declares itself to be the perfected “Robin Goodfellow” (Told you the name is supposed to be Puck) since through her it can tap the infinite energies of the Livlaster and… again, the specifics are not important the way Captain Earth is written. Defeat the bad guy, rescue the damsel in distress, save the (still imperiled) world. Everybody who’s still active helps Daichi break into Robin Goodfellow’s giant mechanical body as it tries to descend upon the world, ultimately reaching the heart of the Blume and Possessed Hana, recovering her with the power of love, and metaphorically giving PAC the finger when it tries to pull the “PAC never lies” line to entice them to work with it when they all just saw it backstab the Gears. Thus, PAC is destroyed (in all his forms, including Kube), the threat of the Kill-T Gang is ended, Hana and Daichi are an item, Teppei and Akari are an item, the Planetary Gears have to live as humans when some of them like Molkin, Setsuna, and Baku already had sympathies along those lines, and all is well that ends well with (in one last similarity to Star Driver) basically no epilogue to let us know where anybody goes from here.
So that was Captain Earth, how does it stack up?
Well, it’s leagues better than Star Driver, that much is certain. Of course, in my estimation Star Driver didn’t exactly set a high bar. It’s a very relevant comparison, even aside from the shows being related, because there are a lot of similarities. It may not seem like it, but the character design choices and the general but incredibly specific choices of conceit and terminology (alien mechas conjured via space magic tech that will drain earth of life force, referred to as Libido in a lot of cases and Orgone Energy some times) do have a way of providing a continual reminder of their relation despite the differences.
It’s important to remember, though, that while a few things about Star Driver were critically broken, it mostly died by being a little deficient all over. There were a number of places where that show could have been saved, at least early in production, and enough bits and pieces of value that I didn’t outright fail it for all that I dredge it up for its faults. If the action had been a little better, if the leads had been a little more characterful, if the villains had been a little more threatening, if the overall feel hadn’t come off as quite so fake… you get the picture. And the answer is, if you corrected all of that, you’d pretty much get Captain Earth.
That doesn’t mean Captain Earth is amazing. The leads are more interesting than cardboard and stick glue, but they’re mostly just okay. Akari is notably really fun, and I enjoy the heck out of her scenes and the episodes where she gets focal time, but Teppei, Daichi, and Hana are… okay. They pass muster. Daichi is mostly the nice kind everyman, but he has a couple notes. Hana is mostly the pretty girlfriend and living MacGuffin, but she has a couple notes. Teppei is… a little better than the other two but still spends a lot of his time playing the mopey brooding best friend, again with a couple of notes better than a minimal par. How are our villians? Well, the Planetary Gears are better than the Kiraboshi Order of Idiots but that’s not saying much. I guess Baku had a good introduction and Amarok and Molkin got the screen time needed to carry character development, but the group is still the kind of characters who would be a quirky miniboss squad in something else. They’re like the Turks in Final Fantasy 7, or the classic Team Rocket trio in Pokemon; you know they’re bad guys but they’re not the kind of bad in person that should carry a whole serious show, and it’s not always easy to connect their goofy and colorful antics with “literally gonna kill everyone.” I think Ai manages the balance best.
There’s a reason for this, of course; the show wants you to consider them redeemed at the end with a token resistance against a mutual enemy and the loss of their Ego Blocks (and any means of producing new ones). It’s not a whole lot, certainly weighed against their apocalyptic aims, so the ending kind of relies on the fact that they were fairly personable.
Instead, the hate-sink villains, the ones that are really responsible for maintaining not just threat but active menace, are Kube, PAC, and Salty Dog. These are all weaker villians. Kube was fairly useless; he had evil aspirations but more got in the way of the Planetary Gears than anything. I can’t think of a point where he actually caused trouble for the heroes that PAC in his body didn’t do worse. Salty Dog, I went into detail on before; they’re the idiot cousin of the Alternative V supporters from Muv Luv, with more face time as a present threat and none of the logic. Every time we finished an arc with them I wanted them to stay gone, but they hung on causing problems over their nonsense right to the end. PAC is mercifully a little better, but he spends most of the show (until he bodysnatches Kube in Episode 15/25) just sort of… reminding us he exists and telling Kube he should totally get it on with the secretary. We implicitly don’t trust him because he’s an AI that borrows from the HAL-9000 school of design and constantly feels the need to say that he never lies, but it’s not like PAC is actually doing evil things through that stretch or that we have any clue what his goal is.
Even after Kube is snatched, PAC is still pretty passive as a villain. There’s an interesting case here, where I think how you react to the last turn regarding PAC depends on just how genre savvy (or plot-prescient) you are. In some ways, it’s not set up at all. We know PAC works for the Gears, but they’ve presumably been through this loop countless times consuming other star systems, and we’re never let in on any reason why they shouldn’t trust PAC, so his betrayal is in many ways totally unpresaged. If you’re wise to reading between the lines, though, PAC’s screen time screams “main villain!” Even though there are no proper clues outside, at worst, the fact that the Gears don’t seem to know that Kube was bodysnatched, you can tell exactly what’s going to happen: PAC is going to betray them, they’re going to be out their ego blocks to be just a bunch of quirky loons, and PAC is going to take some kind of super form to be the final boss. For being something that should be fundamentally unpredictable, it’s shockingly inevitable.
That said… these villains mostly still kind of work. The Planetary Gears are always trying something new and are at least a little fun to watch, and PAC at least does have a sinister screen presence. I don’t have anything nice to say about Salty Dog, but that’s okay.
So many of the other elements of the show are like this. I could go on about what they do well relative to Star Driver, like the fight choreography and flow of combat, and then turn around and do a piece on how it still isn’t exactly good. It’s better in just about every category, but that doesn’t mean it gets to stand with the greats.
All that said, I’m going to give Captain Earth a C. It’s a C show that I’d actually recommend watching if you have the time and interest, but when talking about the technical skill and quality, C is about right. In some ways, I think that’s the grade the show actually wants. It’s hard to describe without clips or stills to point out details in, but this show clearly wants to hack into a sense of nostalgia for the positive, upbeat, high-flying Mecha anime we all know we saw that one time and would like to recapture. It wants to be Gunvarrel. And to that end, it has to be standard and it has to be average. If it went too far with anything, it would establish more of its own identity and wouldn’t be able to be that half-remembered dream-show you think you loved.
In that way, perhaps, the constant references to Midsummer Night’s Dream are weirdly fitting. The Shakespeare play ends with a famous speech, delivered by Puck, that breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly. It essentially says that, if you didn’t care for something, just write it off as a dream, we’ll make it up to you, go ahead and clap and forget. And frankly, while meant for my personal favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies, the same sentiments could be said to see off Captain Earth: it’s meant to be a dream and little more, so there’s no real point holding its foibles against it. And, because I love that speech, I’ll go ahead and put it where it belongs – here at the end.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.