Speeches everywhere
Friendship, revenge, blah, blah, blah
Pacing is a lie.
This episode is mostly focused on
getting Alma back. The fight in the tunnel is as badly choreographed
as ever, while the writing goes… weird. In the audio commentary, I
talked about it feeling a bit better, at least back to the
inoffensive level at the first couple episodes when the animation was
the worst part of the show, but in truth it’s not exactly the same.
The thing is, at the start, Ex-Arm’s
writing was generic. Here, it seems like they’ve pillaged multiple
generic sources and stitched together a Frankenstein’s Monster of a
script. Each individual emotional moment should have been a
climactic one, but none of them are. Minami manages to disable crazy
Alma because Alma is still acting in a manner based on the time
they’ve been partners for, suggesting a deeper bond that should allow
them to overcome the hacking problem, especially as Minami takes a
hit for Alma.
Then the Arab Prince guy reminds
everyone he’s on scene and gets an extra-strength speech from Minami
about their shared loss of their families to terrorist attacks in the
past and what it means to move on rather than being consumed by
revenge. He rejects it and there’s another moment of skirmishing
before he’s bested and given ANOTHER speech in the same vein by the
same character, only it takes this time.
Little Brother, though, rejects the
friendship speech, and meanwhile another attack comes in and the arab
prince takes a fatal hit for Minami, giving her a huge dramatic dying
speech in return for her redeeming speeches. Again, any of these
speeches could have been “the big one” but we’re not done yet.
We return to the arena (or did we ever
leave?) with Beta owning the Spider Tank and blasting the little
brother, who’s greatly reduced. But it’s okay, since he merges with
his Ex-Arm (the Deadpool/Black Panther guy from earlier who seemed
neutral) giving another big revenge speech, prompting a villain
speech from Beta about how they should join forces against the world.
That’s still not our episode end or
climax though. We get the Ogre finally called in with a plan to have
our main character control it in an unhackable way (involving
plugging his brain physically into the machine mid-skydive. It’s
stupid.), but before the plan is fully revealed and enacted, we get a
lot of villain monologue gloating from Beta. Hearing him monologue
with that twangy lisp is bad enough, but he’s also not shooting them
with his spider tank.
And the Ogre’s landing, finally, is the
end of the episode. I guess it still feels like an ending, but after
all the other places where the episode could have stopped, it doesn’t
quite feel earned.
It’s strange. At the start of this
show, I didn’t mind the talking bits, but the action was terrible and
I wanted to get it over with. Now I’m hoping for mindless
explosion.gif moments because at least they don’t hurt as much.