The “edgy teenager” energy is strong with this one, but that is at least its own kind of entertainment.
The episode starts with the vehicle chase we ended the last one with. It turns out that the members of the Ken Doll’s cult aren’t chasing Empress, but rather a terrified girl on foot. Empress intervenes (dragging the others in to support her) and saves the girl. We learn, from this, that she was one of a batch of sacrificial maidens to be offered to the Ken Doll, and that she wants Empress’s help to save her friends.
The Ken Doll gets the news that one of the Maidens has escaped, and impresses the severity of the situation on the smiley-face-mask follower who delivered the news (I put it this way because this episode provides some hard evidence that the smilers are masked human or maybe cyborg cultists, not pure Artemis robots). He regards himself as the “Chosen one” of Artemis and laments having yet to find a worthy woman with whom he can progress the evolution of humanity, so he’s not about to take a minus one to the count of opportunities, and has his minions scramble a heavy defense for the train transporting the rest.
While waiting to ambush that train, Empress gets sniped, blowing off one of her arms. The injury doesn’t bleed at all and she doesn’t seem to register all that much pain, but the idea that there’s a sniper with the group in their sights isn’t a good one. The Sniper, it turns out, is Dead Master – another of the Hemitheos Units and, like Strength, now seemingly driven mad. Dead Master herself plays a very Yandere/Yangire “Love you but want to kill you or love the idea of killing you” line, and comes off as a little more flat and less conflicted than Strength.
While hiding from the sniper, it’s revealed that Empress can (of course) regenerate her wounds – over days as it is now, or almost instantly if she has materials to absorb. Because of this, the train raid is still on, with the idea of using the first line of enemies they take out there as spare parts.
The train job is the episode’s big running battle, with Empress and her friends engaging the train’s escorts, and Empress and the Colonel in particular hopping the train to seize the rearmost car that has the girls. During the fight, Dead Master intervenes, mostly taking out anything that would threaten Empress, but also tangling with Empress herself, giving her fairly succinct “love you kill you” motive rant. Eventually, Dead Master is engaged by a real big enemy unit, which causes her to lose track of the train and Empress.
Empress and the Colonel board the train, take out the guard robots, decouple the car, and say hello to the captive maidens, the one who escaped catching up to greet them as well for a happy reunion. However, some of the creepy kewpie doll decorations in the train car seem to be both spy cameras for the Ken Doll, and remote bombs he can set off out of spite when it looks like the maidens are going to be rescued rather than delivered for their death-by-rape. Empress notices before the bomb goes off, but too late to do more than shove the Colonel out of the door, the bomb exploding as she reaches for the earlier rescued maiden, ultimately leaving her spattered with blood and holding one severed hand that’s all that’s left of any of the girls.
In the last little epilogue scene, we see that a tormented Empress is sleeping off her traumas, while the Colonel and the weird lusty engineer lady discuss whether or not she’ll be okay after having to witness something like that. They drive on into the night, but Dead Master is stalking behind them on her bike, presumably for next episode.
So, right now we seem to be staying the course from the previous episode, where the show has a certain juvenile brutality that’s enamored with what it can get away with in terms of violence, sexuality, and disturbed characters. It has the excess of the later Mad Max movies, often recalling Fury Road in particular, but doesn’t have the same sort of pathos and intelligence. Even Waterworld (same rusted-punk-scavenger-apocalyptic-hellhole vibes, different humidity) had at least a little more wit and grace than we’re seeing here.
But, for all that, you could do a lot worse. As I commented in the first episode writeup, if you just showed someone ignorant of all the other interpretations the original Black★Rock Shooter illustration, I think there’s a fair chance that it would come off as just that kind of self-indulgent edge. But it must be noted that it’s at least a fun kind of edgy. This isn’t Elfen Lied or Magical Girl Site that’s trying to be dark and pretentious because it thinks that being miserable is how you become meaningful, it’s what that one metalhead you knew in high school was sketching in his notebook – intense for the sake of intensity, brutal because brutal is “cool”, possibly intended to be meaningful (at which it failed) but certainly intended to be entertaining (at which it succeeded).
Seen through that lens, I think the show is doing… okay. If it keeps on at this same level it’s not going to win any awards from me, nor a particularly good grade, but I don’t think I’d hate it either.