Have I mentioned yet how this thing seems to be on cruise control? Because this episode is, once again, very much on cruise control.
We do get one little interesting note,
as Odin affirms what had already been hinted, that she’s actually his
daughter and special among all valkyries/humans, offering to bring
her onto his side. Of course, it’s not a great pitch because Odin’s
motivation, in the end, seems to boil down to grand delusion,
thinking he’s harvesting fallen warriors for some future Ragnarok,
playing out the cycle of battle and doom in his mind… or something.
It’s clear that the first Ragnarok broke him when he survived, and
that he’s not acting in a particularly rational manner.
And honestly, fair enough? I normally
don’t like “Just nuts” as a motivation, but under the
circumstances I’m kind of fine just sort of checking out when it
comes to emotional investment or intellectual curisoity. There’s
nothing left this show can do to surprise me, so it might as well
just serve up some alright action on its way out. That’s all it’s
really good for, and that’s OK.
And serve up action it does. We get
the required beats of gearing up and having a sendoff. We get a
little speech from the commander that’s the generic phoned in version
of Aragorn at the Black Gates or “Today we are canceling the
apocalypse” or the one from Independence Day or any other time in
any media where a heroic military leader gives the big rousing speech
on the cusp of the grand final battle. It’s utterly forgettable,
though sets up the human forces kind of owning the idea that this is
to be Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, but it fills in the
checkbox for having that speech because you’ve got to have that
speech.
We also get a really out of place
ultra-heavy fanservice “Suiting up” scene. Warlords had its
share, but it goes above and beyond to push the girls in your face
there for a moment.
Finally, the valkyries and soldiers fly
into battle. The main characters are kept in reserve while the
generic tertiary characters cut through phase after phase of the
Pillar’s defenses, preserving the four leads to engage as deep as
they can. Odin looks on like a smiling game master as he does his
best to win by deploying all the exact same reactions he did last
time, only to be surprised when Azu’s plan (which this explicitly is)
already accounted for them. He even misses the command structure
with the big Thor lightning shot by about 90 degrees because they put
it in a different place.
Honestly, I can’t complain about this
sequence. We see some of the creative enemy designs from earlier in
the show again, we get a couple instances of fancy flying and
shooting. It’s not high art but after the first ten episodes of
Warlords of Sigrdrifa it’s about the best you could hope for in #11.
Odin even shows up in realspace, in little boy form but decked out
like the Mario to Marvel Loki’s Luigi (In that he’s short and dresses
in red) next to some sort of big silly monster that he’s clearly
going to use when the time comes for him to wade into combat
personally.
At this point… I really was just
hoping for the big silly monster. I started Warlords of Sigrdrifa,
back in episode 1, with some hope, but all of it slowly and steadily
bled away. At this point, the complete insanity of Episode 4 is the
high point of the production, not strictly in quality but in concept,
because at least that did something different and memorable. The
rest of this show I feel like you can forget pretty quickly, fading
into a haze of suffering Magical Girls and mecha monster-fighters,
just with something about a biplane rammed in there. It’s kind of a
shame, because I love effective shows of either sort and when Norse
Mythology can be done a little justice, but that’s just the way it
is. I’m at a loss for things to write about because really… it’s
nothing to write home about.
At least after next week that should be
the end of that.