The obligatory hot springs episode.
The crisis the previous episode left us off on is resolved pretty quickly. Akira, it turns out, does still bleed, and took that fairly needless bullet for Yuugure. He manages to croak out that he doesn’t want her to kill before she goes too berserk, but she still puts some nonlethal holes in most of the goons and beats the mob boss down so that the heirs are free to handle matters as they see fit.
Yuugure also seems to have some unknown healing power. She doesn’t explain this but when she waves hands over the wound and we see sparkly green light, we know what’s going on. It’s probably nanobots or something.
After a week, Akira wakes up, and we’re able to get on to the plot, with the grateful younger generation of the mob providing quick transit to the next stop on the road trip, a hot springs resort. There, since Akira doesn’t know the meaning of “not my business”, he sticks his nose in an argument and gets slugged by accident. Which, since the one throwing the punch was the proprietress of the resort, scores Akira’s party a free room. The encounter also means he meets up with an odd scholar, who knows a thing or two due to being ex-OWEL.
By talking with this guy, Akira is able to get the abridged history of the AI War, an event that broke out shortly after his time and was, as you might expect, the typical AI uprising where machines tried to kill all humans. The world was saved by none other than Towasa, who created the “Outside Series” of loyal androids to fight the rebel AIs. We’d previously heard that Yuugure is (or might be) Outside Series herself, so now we know what that means. After that, she evidently helped found OWEL along with the “Six Sages” (I guess that makes her Zelda?) and then… vanished without a trace. Common sense still says she’s probably not around 200 years later, but Akira naturally holds out hope seeing as he’s still around 200 years later.
It’s interesting that a futurist like Towa went and made an order that seals off technology and history, but it’s possible both that OWEL is in at least a somewhat degenerate state due to, you know, power corrupting, and that the fact that we see a map and there’s a big ol’ honking hole where most of Japan used to be might have caused Towa to change her tune some.
That exposition cleared, we might as well talk about the emotional aspects of this episode. Most of them belong to Yuugure. In the wake of Akira taking a bullet for her, she gets a good deal more flustered than she once did, no longer talking quite so boldly about marriage and finding that his presence has an effect on her that Amrou diagnoses as love. Yuugure protests that she’s always loved Akira, but from the point of view of the audience something does seem to have changed, with her emotions possibly becoming more human-like. This actually leads to a really good conversation between Yuugure and Akira before Amrou interrupts.
In any case, this show does seem to be continuing more as a travelogue than the action show it might look like from the opening or even the first episode (ish) of material. It’s not that we don’t still get action; Yuugure has kicked ass every stop we’ve made, and with the innkeeper’s estranged Elsie partner being an OWEL stooge and offering to take Amrou somewhere because it’s on the way for somewhere she needs to be “for work”, I’ve got a bit of a worry that this one isn’t going to be an exception. But that’s not what we’re meant to care about, and not what takes up a majority of our time. Which, when Yuugure can pretty much curb stomp anything the world can muster except perhaps her sister units, who so far have only shown in a single moment (despite being all over the OP), is pretty good. Having her go super and take out that first OWEL goon was awesome, but it’s not the sort of thing that stays awesome forever if you repeat it.
The slow pace so far does make me wonder if this is really going to wrap up by the time we hit Episode 12. It’s certainly possible for it to resolve, since we’re largely doing “sidequests”, but we also might be looking at a second season… or the dreaded “setup for the second season that never happens” if we’re unlucky.
And a small programming note, I have used “Elsie” for the show’s group marriage concept so far, following the spelling in the ad copy I first found. However, the subtitles mostly use “Ehlsea”, which I will probably switch over to for the sake of my sanity.