A decent fight scene
Some needless complications
No impact at heart
https://youtu.be/oQJxhEMW4Ts
So, today’s episode of Ex-Arm had two major lines: Akira versus Beta and Alma versus Soma. Second one first. Alma’s battle with Soma’s super form is by far the most competently executed fight scene in the entire show so far. Compared to the fight between Alma and the maid, the maid fight had everyone moving slowly and smoothly like they were in water. The fight with Soma still relies a little much on matrix slow-mo still, but it also knows when to speed motions up. Compared to the fight between Akira/Ogre and the Maid in her mecha, the maid fight saw Ogre running down the same block over and over, with no structure or sense of continuity, while this fight hits the basic bar of visual storytelling where shots are consistent and you can follow a narrative of the action. Not every hit has weight to it, not every moment tells the story it should, and there are some moments that should be really visceral that aren’t at all, but especially with the still omnipresent limits of the animation and the dearth of anything resembling satisfying action elsewhere in the show, it stands heads and shoulders above the rest.
Of course, then that line repeats the sins of the previous episode. Alma gives one big speech (while not shooting Soma) about how she’s learned what it means to be human and is acting out of her own free will, while Ygg lets us know that her basic restrictive programming (stuff equivalent to the Three Laws in better works) has been disabled, making her perhaps the first AI who could legit claim free will. But enough of that. Soma breaks out of what should be checkmate, sacrificing his Ex-Arm mecha body and making a pathetically futile attempt to kill Alma again… only to have us get another even longer speech from Alma about gaining humanity and perspective before her long talk literally bores Soma to death (or, you know, his broken body runs out of life support). It’s totally redundant.
The show (and I say this on the live reaction) thinks that the longer it has one of these stupid speeches run, the more we care about it, when really it’s the amount of time spent setting up the character or motivation beforehand that gives the speech weight. Some great movie speeches are longer. Sam’s speech about the “Stories that really matter” from the end of The Two Towers is a little north of two minutes (depending on how you count), and is legendarily powerful. On the other hand, some amazingly good speeches are fairly short. Stacker Pentecost’s “Today we are canceling the apocalypse” speech from Pacific Rim is only about forty-five seconds, but it’s a good impassioned speech delivered by an amazingly distinguished actor at the proper climax of the movie it’s in. How long a speech is is more about what it’s trying to say than how much of an impact it’s going to have. Simple ideas get shorter speeches, while more complex concepts get longer ones.
Alma’s “I feel human now”/“I want to understand your human feelings” speech is way too long for what it has to say, and more criminally we didn’t have enough insight onto Alma before this to believe or understand where her speech is coming from.
And then Ygg and Team Cops (with knocked out Minami) excuse themselves from presumably the rest of the show. Alma does the same, leaving everything to Akira.
That gets us Akira versus Beta. Beta starts taking on the form of a big silly monster, building his giant weird head form out of unknown matter in the area and manifesting combat tentacles throughout the arena that only exist when it’s convenient for the action. Monster Beta takes a page out of the book of that weird dragon from Hundred or, you know, every boss of a video game with a turn-based combat system, patiently waiting for people to talk or even Akira and the Auctioneer (revealed to be his brother and then revealed to be some weird clone of his brother even though there’s no reason it couldn’t have been the actual brother) to have a massive long flashback about actually finally telling us where the 00 Ex-arms came from. One had Akira’s brain plugged into it by a mad scientist after his traffic accident while the other, Beta, is filled with weird alien goo that was discovered with the Ex-Arms.
This brings us to potentially asking why the hell there’s this connection between Beta and Akira about them being the same person when logically they aren’t (unless they decide to throw what little sense they have left out the window and have Beta-goo be somehow Akira from the future who returned to the past as the Ex-Arms). Akira also gets “all his memories” back, babbling about fighting Beta in Ogre before, in the 2020 incident, which comes right the hell out of nowhere. But enough about that, Auctioneer is stabbed by a tentacle and Akira faces down the monstrous Beta for the big final battle.
There are two episodes left. They can reasonably burn one with the final movement of the Beta fight. I guess the other might be denouement? The alternative is that either the fight is so bloated it takes two episodes, or that they throw us some new garbage twist that takes the last one. Really, I’d take the slow denouement.