A decent fight scene
Some needless complications
No impact at heart
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 Soma 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.