The animation
It burns! My eyes, it burns them!
Please, take it away!
Welcome to the Climax Episode! Not a
lot happens, so it can be summarized very quickly: Beta turns into
Grey Goo, spreading and assimilating much of the Tokyo Megafloat into
his ‘body’. Akira and Auctioneer try to run, but get swallowed whole
as Beta turns a building into a weird giant face. They could use the
Black Hole Ex-Arm to obliterate him, but it’s on cooldown so they
have to wait that out.
Somehow, Akira escapes, while
Auctioneer (aged to ancient) remains Beta’s prisoner. Beta gloats
about taking the Ex-Arms, but Auctioneer reveals that he used the
Time Stop Ex-Arm to attach all the Ex-Arms to Akira and allow him to
escape. This also meant using the living bomb Ex-Arm on Auctioneer,
causing him (after many overdone speeches) to blow up inside Beta.
This allows Akira and company to pinpoint where the core is in Beta’s
massive body and kill him with the one shot they’ve got. The giant
ugly monster Beta stops dead, Minami wakes up, Alma apologizes for
killing her brother (even though she kind of didn’t) and Akira flies
off into the sunrise hanging from a quadcopter like a dork. It
really feels like the end, but sources insist we’re going to get one
more.
That really is it: a basic plan to
defeat the big stupid monster, executed with perhaps a little much
pomp and circumstance, though it’s kind of okay given that this is
the big climax. The speeches go on too long, but they’re not as bad
as the ones in the last two episodes.
The animation, though, is tampering
with new forms of terrible. Imagine the unnatural motions of the
Gauna tentacles from the first season of Knights of Sidonia, rendered
on a Nintendo 64 or early-90’s PC. Outer Beta is made of glitchy CGI
ropes. Inner Beta is made of TRON fecal matter. Either way you can
literally see the pixels (except in outer-Beta’s freakishly good
dental work). They may have a few more cinematography basics than
they did in episode 1, but the renders are such a slap in the face
that I think this is the worst-looking episode of the show yet.
I think, perhaps hope, that years from
now people are not going to be able to believe that this actually
happened in 2021. There’s no year in which this would have been
acceptable to put on screen as a finished product, but it’s
especially embarrassing nowadays.