In which a show that I was entirely prepared to fail continues to attempt its own redemption arc.
We start this episode with the same flashback that started episode 1. This time, though, we see a little more, how Empress continued to do her best to fight back against Lunatic.
The present is mostly consumed with fighting but, frankly, it’s fairly decent fighting. Maybe I’ve just had my brain abused by too many really pointless light shows, but here there’s a push and pull of the battle and the characters at least take advantage of their 3D rigs to move pretty well. Empress manages to subdue Charlotte and put her unconscious, after which she’s loaded in the tank (recharged via Empress, who can replace the dead battery that was the problem) to have her Hemitheos alterations removed.
Meanwhile, Lunatic plays with Dead Master and Strength a bit before letting Smiley have at them. They lead Smiley on a bit of a merry chase, finding their weapons don’t have the firepower to damage his ultimate form, but ultimately end up cornered.
Empress fights the Educational Institution goons alongside the generic soldiers, and feels deeply conflicted when she realizes the trouble her compatriots are in. Ultimately, though, she’s able to leave it to the colonel, and races off to face Smiley. Doing so, however, requires her to use a very dangerous overdrive system, which Black Trike says she can only really hold for ten seconds.
While discussing whether to use it or not, Empress reveals she got her memories back and shows us the rest of the flashback. Lunatic taunted her with the crucified and insane forms of Strength and Dead Master, and then Empress used the overdrive to fight off Lunatic and save her friends. They were still brainwashed, though, which required her to force reboot them, explaining why they were so lost and confused when introduced to the show. After that, the burnout from having used overdrive caused Empress to start literally crumbling, and she made it to the tank she woke up in back in episode one without a limb to spare.
With the ten second limit, Empress launches through Smiley’s forces, arriving to pick up Strength and Dead Master before he can get to the raping. This leads to a running battle with Smiley while, at the same time, Charlotte is removed from the tank and (still crazy) has a nasty standoff with her father. The battles come to a head at similar times. Empress initially gets thrashed by Smiley, but what he can dish out she can take, and she both rejects his ethos and, once Dead Master and Strength return to the scene to give the assist, shoot him with a BFG that sees him burn in blue flames until he turns into a kewpie doll and then finally is wholly disintegrated. On the other side, the Colonel tries to reach Charlotte, but is interrupted when the Smiley fight the next mountain over causes a rockslide, and he dives in to protect his daughter. He both shields her with his body and gets stabbed for his trouble, saying how he regrets his failures as a father and how if Charlotte has to kill him, at least she should make his death the last. This finally traumatizes Charlotte back to her old self.
Afterwards, it seems like the Colonel is tough enough to take a rockslide and a stab to the gut with some bandaging (and at least they comment on this) and Empress returns with Strength and Dead Master, who also seem to have recovered their full memories, meaning that everything is set to take on Lunatic and her space elevator for the last two episodes.
In all seriousness, I was kind of done with Dawn Fall, in a mental and emotional sense. It seemed like it was dark unpleasantness for no good reason and without anything worthwhile to show for the effort. All that started to turn around the episode after the first Smiley fight (the one where I thought they killed him off), and as of now… this is still a show that’s written with a certain appreciation for edge. It still has Smiley, constant swearing, Empress being hauled around by a blade impaled through her eyeball in the flashback, all that good stuff. But at least now I can say it’s in service to a decent story. Not an amazing story, maybe not even a good story in all technicality, but one that has clawed its way up to basic passing. Even Smiley, who seemed to be just creeptastic for the sake of the edge, is given more interest and development this episode, when we see that his obsession started at the suggestion of Lunatic (who is basically his god) flippantly telling him how to deal with the pain of being alone as a unique existence in the world. Not that I really had a choice, but I am glad I stuck with it, in a sense.
It still has to stick the landing, though. Providing a fitting climax to the story isn’t impossible, but it is challenging, and while the show has now been on a somewhat sustained upward trend, I’m still not confident that they can manage. I’m no longer confident that they won’t, but we’ll just have to wait and see what actually happens.