And here we have it; a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. In its ending, Warlords of Sigrdrifa isn’t insultingly bad, but it does fail to really deliver any substance or have any greater meaning, so there’s not a lot of point to getting through it.
I’ll get this out of the way, the
flying action is… fine. It’s not actively great or anything, but
it works entirely and passes muster. The action sequences, which
most of the episode is built entirely around, are choreographed well
and shot nicely and have a few moments that keep the viewer engaged.
It’s just a sad state that I can’t say the same about the story.
Odin is the big focus of the episode
and also the big problem. I’ve had issues up to this point trying to
understand his motivations and actions, but there had been a couple
options that would at least mostly work. Warlords of Sigrdrifa had
to pick one, stick with it, and own up to it.
Instead, the show doesn’t, instead
throwing a fistful of possible motivations at Odin, as well as
putting him through a sequence of events that doesn’t make much
sense. He gets in the robot at least and fights with Claudia for a
bit. During this, he screams at her about why her spirit isn’t
broken. He tries everything here. Getting her to give up because
she’s alone, getting her to give up because she will be alone,
getting her to join him as he’s her real father… he’s screaming and
hoping something sticks. Claudia says he’s just a lonely old man,
and maybe that’s the motivation the writers are going for, but it
doesn’t make any sense. Why all of this? Why any of this? Nothing
Odin does seems to further any sort of endgame. He has no plan and
he has no reason for his actions.
In an aerial duel in some weird mind
space, Claudia defeats Odin by first shattering the illusion of
herself, and then charging straight at him which causes his spear and
big robot to shatter as she says goodbye like she’s destroyed him.
Outside, Miko takes on and destroys Thor, with the three stooges of
the shield squad sacrificing themselves to get her there, while Azu
goes for the core of the Pillar.
At the core, Azu finds Odin, sitting in
his throne. This is weird, given that Claudia already seemed to have
killed him, but he says that Claudia is gone and acts morose while
challenging Azu with a new round of stupid, random “give up”
speeches before Miko bursts in and repeats the “Bail and melee the
core with her sword” thing she did in episode 2, but this time with
the Fuji Primary. It doesn’t immediately do its thing though, giving
Odin time to tantrum some more and ultimately let Azu shoot him from
her plane, which is heard but not seen. I guess this kills Odin,
though I’m not sure how the whole jousting with Claudia wasn’t it.
The battle is won, Fuji Primary
vanishes, the other Pillars across the world go silent, and everyone
important (the loony guys really weren’t that important) survived to
have a final sequence introducing a couple of the background extra
valkyries to Tateyama base as clean-up operations continue.
And, in all that, I don’t really care.
That’s probably the biggest issue with
Warlords of Sigrdrifa: there’s nothing to really get invested in
because it’s all too scattered. Claudia got a little bit of good
growth at the start, with Azu getting a little towards the end and
Sono more, but none of them really had full consistent arcs, and
nothing about those arcs held the show together. The villain is all
over the place, and in a way that’s even worse than having alien
monsters with no motivation. It robs us of any sort of general sense
of what the threat is or why we should be invested in the struggle.
And yet… I can’t exactly bring myself
to hate this show. It did have a few good emotional moments,
including a majority of the girls. It did have some solid action.
It was just lacking the connective tissues and consistent themes that
would make it really work as a narrative. It delivers individually
entertaining bits, and the way it’s wrong is just that it falls flat.
For that, I have to rate it at a C-. There’s no reason for anyone to ever watch or rewatch Warlords of Sigrdrifa, but all the same I can’t muster the caring to really warn against it. If for some reason you want to see it, go ahead… just don’t expect very much of it.