3D Arab Prince
Tragic pasts not well set-up
Clippy’s the bad guy
Wow, this episode was scattered. Instead of nothing really happening, everything happened at once without the setup, hang-time, or pacing that it would need. We largely drop the Ex-Arm Auction after a conversation between our lead and Skeletor where the latter, after a “Join me and we can rule together” sort of offer reveals that he’s not Beta. Alma is still missing, but the main character’s mind returns to his brain after refusing the bargain.
Then we get a scattered sequence,
where, of value, we learn that Police Girl’s family was killed in a
terrorist attack in 2023. We then learn that there was an important
terrorist attack in 2023 and the Arab Prince sort of auction attendee
(no longer a jpeg) might have been responsible (yes, it does sort of
come out in that order) and she breaks her fairly controlled
character to go confront him. Main character, in webcam form, goes
along to make obvious comments.
Once she meets up with the arab prince
we get a very oddly segmented mass of backstory. He recognizes
Minami (Police Girl) as one of the two survivors of the attacks. He
initially takes responsibility, giving a long-winded history of his
family and nation, regarding religious extremists and drone-based
assassinations slaughtering the rest of his family.
Then, one of the other groups turns off
the sound and sends an assassin to kill mister arab man. His clothes
vanish between edits, and he successfully takes on the
afterimage-leaving killer and his budget-saving stealth technology
through the power of Arabian shounen magic.
After his clothes rematerialize, he
says that he wasn’t responsible for the attack, blaming it on the
nebulous defeated religious extremists from his past, while he blames
his suffering on the Yakuza boss that the police are currently
protecting. He then reveals that his weird second is, in fact,
Minami’s long-lost little brother and the other survivor (in a sense,
he had to get almost totally cyborged) of the 2023 attack.
Minami still tries to talk them down
from vicious revenge against the criminal old man (and his
granddaughter) that the cops are protecting because cloak and dagger
bull that doesn’t make sense with the degree we’re building the
emotions.
The old man and gang are attacked by
one of the other groups, with a metalbender Ex Arm user who gets
choked by the big visor guy, and a little girl with robot bees who
gets taken out by Ygg’s unexplained physical presence.
Meanwhile, with Minami, main character, and the Arab Prince, it turns out that Alma (now wearing a black outfit that’s probably supposed to be sexy) has been reprogrammed to be their minion, as they go for revenge and Minami hesitates about having to shoot at her long lost brother that we never heard about until this point. End of episode as they get out with Alma defending them.
At the end, a strange emoji-being talking with baby talk appears, commenting on the situation before introducing itself as Beta. This thing, which seems to basically be (^_^) combined with Clippy, is now our villain. I kind of took Skeletor more seriously.
None of this is set up well enough to
pay off. Things just happen and we have to kind of role with it.
There is no hope left for this show, we just need to see how bad it
gets.