A penultimate episode, that’s for sure.
So, this episode we get a showdown between… just about everyone. Eden fights Grauphon and wins, being tasked to stop Silvia. Rouge and Naomi follow the badly acting Giallon, who gets stabbed by Silvia. Silvia and Rouge then fight, and Rouge gets her ID taken. Like Eden before her, this isn’t immediately fatal.
Naomi flees, and with some help from a still-not-deceased clown, gets to the reactor control room. She’s meant to blow the whole place in order to stop Code Eve, but has a crisis of conscience and ends up running back for Rouge, as a friend, rather than leaving her to die. She lends her own ID to Rouge, which will presumably enable Rouge to go for round 2 and win. Eden is there too, along with Aes, so it’s basically Silvia alone against everybody. We confirm that whole “Eden is Gene’s dad” thing, so there you go.
Meanwhile, the puppetmaster babbles some more, masks up Cyan, and says it’s time for her moment on stage. We also get some incomplete lines about the Puppetmaster’s true face and his copy of Code Eve, the former of which pays off in the episode’s final moment when he reveals himself as the doctor who was supposed to have been killed to kick this whole thing off.
In all honesty, it’s not really a surprise at this point. There’d been a fair amount of conservation of detail in this show, so when the cop says he recognizes that face, you know it has to be a human we know and not something like “OMG one of the aliens”. I mean, we see Usurpers too, albeit distantly through the weird assistant, but that wouldn’t make a lot of sense with the reactions.
With one episode left to wrap this up, I think I can comment on Metallic Rouge. Part of me wants to save this for the real end, but there’s a good chance my last review will be delayed, so there are some things to get out now.
Metallic Rouge is a visually wonderful show, it connects to a vast library of classic scifi and strongly establishes a world that feels very well-built. But on the other hand, I was predicting this to be two cour before we knew, and it really does feel like a classic 24 (or more) episode show was artfully but still imperfectly crammed into a 13-episode framework. We have a long leadup of worldbuilding, and then when things hit the fan we don’t really have much time left for the character aspects. We don’t have none; the episode involving Cyan was a nice breather… but that was it, one episode that was mostly focused on a character we hadn’t really met and would shortly pretty much lose.
If Metallic Rouge had been one of those big classics, it would have needed more plot beats, that much is true. You usually can’t just double the running time and provide only the same stuff. But I don’t think it would have needed double the beats since it certainly could have benefitted from more plot and atmosphere. The stretch of the show about dealing with Verde and the brewing resistance on Mars felt like it had the right time and weight to it, but once it’s done we rather blindly hurl ourselves into this climax.
That said, I am presently thinking of the show more fondly than not. It just has to stick the landing and it will be fine, even if it could have been more.