Ancient moon people!
A boss fight with meat to it
Why’d this take so long?
So, in what was an absolutely shocking display, Scarlet Nexus put forward an actual good episode. Nothing really amazing, mind you, but something that has all the basic pieces in place and a more competent pacing than had previously been displayed.
Rather than leading off with more repetitive exposition, Kagero’s account is interrupted by a raid from Suoh. The group scatters but uses their telepathy to get more of the story out as they meet up and attempt to evade their pursuers. Kagero rather efficiently lets us know the whole truth (or so we believe for now) – how the colonists from the moon set up on Earth, but the Moon was then afflicted with the disastrous arrival of a comet dropping particles that would turn living things into Others. The moon civilization engineered a solution, directing the particles into Earth orbit (forming the Extinction belt) and bombarding it with DNA-laced materials to spawn Others and slowly deplete the Belt, at least in theory, sacrificing the intrepid colonists in order to preserve their own society. New Himuka was established for the isolated survivors, but one group, the founders of Togetsu, refused to give up on some day returning to the moon. Their leaders, like Kagero, passed time in cold sleep, periodically checking up on the world, until they realized that a conventional return wasn’t going to happen. Thus, Togetsu (Kagero silently dissenting when awakened for his watch, now working against the interests of the faction he helped create) determined to create the Red Strings and use the power of time travel to erase the world in which they ever left the moon (and presumably the arrival of the Others as well).
During this, the party is also traveling, and the explanation is interrupted a few times, including once when they meet a massive and seemingly invincible Other in the cavern they’re using to escape the mountains. The party hatches a plan to defeat it even though it can’t be damaged by their weapons, luring the creature to a large cave with a thin floor over a vast abyss, shattering the ground, and hammering it down by collapsing some of the ceiling onto it. It’s a complicated procedure and there’s a tight time gun, because the Suoh forces, hunting Yuito in particular, are closing in. The mission is a success, the party gets through the cave, the story is completed, Kasane and Yuito have a brief but effective talk where she apologizes for trying to kill him like future-him asked and has her insistence that she wasn’t his father’s killer accepted, and the two sides again go their separate ways, each planning to reveal Togetsu’s time erasure scheme to one of the cities in order to clear their own names and rally forces to prevent it. Finally, the last scenelet gives us a solid hint of another threat as Nagi is looking even more brainwashed and crazy than ever, on some sort of evil IV drip while he seethes and repeats Yuito’s name in a dark rage.
There! Was that so bloody hard? Why did it take us thirteen episodes that were mostly lackluster to poor in order to get one that had a solid grasp of how you pace a show with both action and mystery?
I guess we do know more about these characters as people than we would if Scarlet Nexus had hit the gas from the start, but I still feel like that could have been accomplished with a lot less just plain dead air. The fight with the indestructible Other in particular feels like the sort of thing we were missing before. Previous fight scenes, like the one on Kunad Highway that led to the creation of the Gate, were by in large not terribly well choreographed, and sometimes even had embarrassing animation failures. This one was… still not up there with action greats, but for an enemy that serves to just add some spice to not even half of a single episode it’s perfectly acceptable. There’s even a decent emotional moment worked in where Kagero, who has been talking about how ancient he is and also how this particular enemy has been blocking the cave route for ages, comments sadly to the thing that “Maybe we’ve both lived too long”. It’s a little on the nose and obvious but that’s still a lot better than what most of the show was offering up to this point.
I’m honestly both pleased that I got a decent episode and a a little frustrated that the course correction is coming so late. I guess when the show’s biggest sin had been that it was badly paced and not engaging, turning around after thirteen episodes is better than never turning around – if, mind you, this is an actual turn and not just a case of getting one competent episode out of an incompetent show – but it still leaves me asking that if the creators were capable of something so overwhelmingly adequate from the start, why did they only show us now?
I guess we’ll see next week whether or not this was a fluke.