If you have trouble following what’s going on this episode, I think that’s intentional.
So, the general loadout of the episode is that after the last one Rouge was taken by the carnival folk. They have her in a creepy pod where she’s put through a hallucinatory trip through her thoughts and memories. In this we learn that her “brother” blames the Immortal Nine for the death of his/their father and as said man’s negative legacy, so Rouge has to go kill.
In realspace, the master of the carnival, who is actually one of the Usurper aliens or at least strongly associated with them, messes with Rouge’s head and gives her a hard to follow philosophical speech. And then he… just sort of lets her do as she will. Which is fitting with his espoused philosophy I suppose. He makes it a little harder by trying to take off and skedaddle to another planet, but that doesn’t seem particularly targeted. Naomi infiltrates their ship with the mysterious dude from the bus episode and starts to get Rouge out, securing Verde’s core in the process. On their way out, they’re attacked by a circus lady who wants the core, and Rouge manages to get out of her stupor to defend Naomi and fight back.
This leads to a large battle with the usurper war machines, during which a black fighting Nean, later revealed to the audience to be that rogue character, intervenes and takes out many of the machines, allowing Rouge and Naomi to escape with their prize.
This episode is, essentially, an experience. You’re here to go through the trippy madness that is Rouge experiencing her past by way of the pod. It’s true that not a ton happens or is necessarily told to us, but I don’t feel like the episode time is poorly utilized. It creates atmosphere and establishes our themes and environment.
And, to be fair, Metallic Rouge is doing a lot of that. It feels like a show that won’t be comfortable if it’s kept to twelve episodes. Sure, we’ve been moving through the Immortal Nine at a fair enough clip for that, but I somehow don’t think this is meant to be a basic manhunt where we get all the items on our hit list and call it a day. We currently don’t know in an official capacity how many episodes this show has, whether it’s going to give us a standard run, a longer run, or some sort of split cour like Kamierabi
After the last two episodes this show is feeling a great deal like the second coming of Ergo Proxy, in that it’s got a very strong and thematic science fiction background with a real desire to explore the psychological end of the genre. Both shows deal with identity and artificiality, but they do approach it in different ways: Ergo Proxy was about a reason for being, while Metallic Rouge is talking the same amount of talk about freedom. Obviously the environments and characters are very different, but the methods of storytelling and the themes do seem similar to me.
Perhaps, given that this is Bones’ big anniversary project, I should more compare it to something Bones did: RahXephon. RahXephon was also very much in the psychologiucal and philosophical bent, and kept going long enough with its cinematography and the way its vague talk seemed to come together that it felt very smart for most of its run, the writers just clearly didn’t know how to really resolve the mess they’d made. Again, that was a story about identity, where two kinds of people could be said to be different in either superficial ways or in absolute and irreconcilable ways depending on what perspective you were taking. Red-blooded humans and blue-blooded Mulians; natural humans and artifical Neans. It’s meant to be undlear whether or not the inhuman side is truly “other”.
For the time being, I’d say Metallic Rouge is looking and sounding like it has the makings of a good show. Which makes sense when I’m likening it to RahXephon and Ergo Proxy which were good shows even if they had their faults. It could fall apart pretty easily, if it turns out to be smoke and mirrors, but I’ve got high hopes.