Baseball. Comedy. Edge.
So, this episode I will give credit for at least trying to develop characters. I guess we just had a huge drag-out fight with Smiley and the Educational Institution, so we needed to set a new base line for rising action.
The conflict of the episode is that Black Trike can’t self-repair without some rare elements (oddly, legitimate ones like neodymium are called out), so the team has to go somewhere they can find consumer electronics to salvage the good stuff. Their target is an abandoned library that was owned by the military, where they meet a weird but friendly curator robot, ultimately get enough stuff, and see to it that Black Trike is fixed up to roll on. On the way, Empress also delves more into her own past, including hearing that Lighthouse 8 is apparently gone, at least according to official records.
The major motif, though, is the Colonel’s relationship with his daughter, Charlotte. We start with a flashback to before she was taken, when they were playing catch with a baseball, indicating she rather liked the sport. Throughout the episode, baseball imagery is used, including a tattered old ball being a big deal for Empress to mull over or the Colonel to brood over, sparking talks about Charlotte and how it might be possible to save her and so on. Even the curator bot gets in on it, as the little Wall-E sort of guy has a “family” of discarded toys he’s repaired, which he hopes to organize into a baseball team. The toys aren’t animate types, but the characters regard the robot’s clear psychological issues as… charming. Which it mostly is. The poor little robot is harmless. When they part ways, the Colonel even gives the robot the beat-up baseball, which is much better than the wad of paper it had been practicing with.
Since a happy parting wouldn’t be nearly edgy enough for Dawn Fall, Charlotte comes in some time after they leave and kills the curator robot as part of her new objective of hunting down everything Empress touches, so there is that.
Also discussed is the Trolley Problem. Specifically, it’s revealed that the problem was presented to Artemis early in its design, and Artemis pleased its human makers by saying it would reroute the trolley to the 1 person and then off itself as penance. Clearly, either Artemis is a very particular kind of crazy or learned to bullshit early in its existence. When Empress, who is the one who hears this, asks her fellow Hemitheos units about the problem, they give much less formulaic and much more human answers: Strength announcing she’d take out whoever thought of such a stupid question and Dead Master saying she doesn’t really care which unless someone she cares about is in harm’s way. This seems to put Empress somewhat at ease, perhaps because it shows they aren’t like Artemis?
We also get a little of the skanky engineer (who spearheads some of the search for parts, since she actually understands) and the Colonel’s late wife (who seems to have been a high-end scientist with specialties that sound eerily like she would have been involved with the Hemitheos units, Artemis, or both), so again… some development? That’s not the worst thing?
And so, we’re set up to… I don’t know actually. Right now, the show needs to introduce a new short-range plot. I guess we do have Charlotte hanging, but she seems more like an arc antagonist than something that’s going to be addressed right away, so the next lunacy that Empress and her friends get involved with on their way to the space elevator waits to be seen.
Lastly, this episode’s moment of “huh?”: Empress switches the display language on a computer she’s reading off from English to Japanese, establishing that while this whole thing takes place in the Americas and every character we’ve met should theoretically be at home in North America, they’re speaking Japanese not just for the convenience of the intended audience but in character.