The big date that isn’t so big.
So, this episode is along two, arguably three lines, and doesn’t actually resort to violence meaning that we get out of the hot springs resort stop without a battle.
The A-line is Akira going on a date with Yuugure, where we see her efforts to be more considerate and Akira’s efforts to draw her out to be more herself. By the end of it, while he may not have agreed to marriage, we see that Akira clearly has a positive opinion of Yuugure, and might be coming around on falling for the being that, you know, has the face of his lost love and if not outright similar mannerisms at least some of the same energy. We also confirm that Yuugure is an “Outside Series” created to fight for humanity in the AI war, and imply that she might be the embodiment of Towa’s support AI.
The B-line is Amrou, hanging out with the ex-OWEL scholar and the OWEL commissioner who was Ehlsea-ed with the innkeeper. She works out her jealousy regarding having been talked down by Yuugure to not be a pest on the main plot date, which also lets the B-team here work out the commissioner’s issues: evidently this whole area is slated for development, and she’s kept her OWEL job despite how much it causes her to fight with her partner because she’s trying to block it.
Later they say she’d be charged with treason if she kept that up, but surely there must be some legal procedural red tape she can use? Ah well this is a travelogue; it’s not like her side-story is actually important and it’s pretty unlikely we’ll follow up on it.
After the routes converge with the end of the day, the gang heads onward. They pick up the scholar as a guide and with him head to Sendai, which is evidently OWEL’s hub of knowledge, a city full of libraries and scholars.
Naturally, they hit up the massive public library first. They strike out with what’s on the shelves for the public, but the scholar puts the moves on the librarian and, perhaps more importantly, seems to have picked her pocket for the key to the stacks, meaning the team will have a window to access restricted texts.
Storytelling logic says that they aren’t going to find everything they need here, since the last chance will be OWEL’s headquarters in Tokyo, but perhaps we’ll get a tantalizing clue out of it. The next episode preview promises Amrou, violence, and at least one of Yuugure’s sisters though, so two out of three isn’t bad.
Yeah, on the whole I’ve been enjoying this show for what it is, but Amrou has been… a bit on the annoying side. She would seemingly be our window on the modern world and its mores, but we keep meeting these one-off characters who do that job just fine, like the gangsters or the hot springs inn couple or the scholar. Because this is a more conventional travelogue and not an action-adventure-archaeology sort of affair in which we wouldn’t meet a lot of relatively normal modern folk, the “window onto normalcy” role doesn’t feel needed.
I wouldn’t mind so much if Amrou had an interesting persona. She has a lot of building blocks you could spin into it: tortured artist, former slave, repentant backstabber, child of insurrection (seeing as her parents’ picture book was so “bad” as to warrant widespread destruction and creator execution. Kind of have to wonder with the content was and what its makers taught their kid.)… but the role that she plays, the persona she has for pretty much every scene since she’s joined the party is “Lovey-dovey third wheel”.
Maybe getting an episode where she’s in the spotlight could help. I’m not opposed to the idea of developing Amrou, I just doubt that it’s going to be done to satisfaction at this stage. More likely, keeping the camera on her just boosts her stake in the “Ehlsea versus Marriage versus Towa” race to keep it competitive after this episode with Yuugure.
I am fairly interested in seeing more out of Yuugure’s sisters, though. The exploration of Yuugure has been some of the best stuff in this show so far, even with her being dramatically human-like in her mannerisms, so having a couple more data points to contrast the thought processes of super-advanced human-like AIs as they exist in this setting would be nice.
But I can only speculate so long. We’ll see how this pans out in the next episode. There might be some significant delay in when that episode write-up goes out, potentially even being a double feature with the one after, but we will get to it.