Another down, five “Immortal Nine” to go, and it’s time to send in the clowns.
This episode was the sort that feels short or possibly light, but that is in retrospect clearly doing a lot of lifting.
The spine of it is this: Rouge is held on suspicion of killing the free Nean leader. However, into the Nean ghetto come cops with orders to arrest or kill every member of the freedom movement, and after them Naomi and the investigator from Earth. In the process. Rouge breaks her restraints to try to protect who she can, and ends up on the run, while Naomi is confronted by the joker, acting his clowny best. On Rouge’s side, the doctor’s assistant is the one leading her, and this results in the doctor appearing and revealing his fatilistic self to be her target, Phantom Verde, who secretes mind-meddling neurotoxins in his full mech form, leading to a fight where Rouge is dealing with fog and illusions before hitting home on the real one.
All the while, that giant airship descends and reveals itself as the circus, and sure enough it seems the circus has more role to play as the last shots are once again on them.
So, it’s not a lot of plot, but in terms of theme, there are some really good carrying conversations. It’s clear now, as it wasn’t before, that Metallic Rouge is going to be a great deal about what it means for a being to be free. Verde firmly believes that death is the only release, thus his desire to bring to death those who strive for freedom, including Rouge, and his ultimate acceptance of his own demise. Joker, who is undercover as one of the freedom faction Neans at first, seems to revel in the idea of freedom as hedonism, doing whatever you want whenever you want… in his case meaning a lot of killing by implication, but in his brief talk with Rouge also meaning going against orders to do something like spare or save Viola, who it’s implied Rouge didn’t really want to kill.
Naomi and Rouge have to answer these arguments and… they haven’t quite found it. Naomi does at least make a saving throw from last episode by insisting she wants to help Rouge by her own choice and not because either of them is a tool of Alethea, so there’s some idea that they’re moving to a better place.
What this does most overall is that it means the fact the motives seem kind of weak? That’s intentional. Rouge is clearly struggling with the concept of her own will, and that seems to be a major theme of the show, so it makes sense to have her start out blindly following orders with an unclear purpose and basically no reason behind them, because she’s going to have to question that going forward. We start at the baseline with no will or purpose, and we build from there as Rouge begins to choose for herself what it is she wants to do.