Bloody two-part arcs, making me eat my words.
Not that that’s unwelcome, exactly. But I said last time that this would be the decisive episode and… it kind of wasn’t. We still aren’t clear on what the show is going to be going forward from the battle against the Fuji Primary Pillar, mostly because we’ve only passed the first phase of what’s sure to be a multi-phase combat. This is because, in what I consider to be a positive turn, the episode was more concerned with setting up character arcs and motivations than with simply throwing us into combat.
In particular, the episode was largely
concerned with Sono, her past, and the struggle she’ll face. This is
good, because unlike Azu, Miko, or Claudia, Sono hadn’t really gotten
much exploration.
We still, oddly enough, do it without
her to an extent when we get the history between her, the Commander,
and Amatsuka. Two years earlier, Amatsuka flew a critical mission
and, before it, sabotaged Sono’s plane pre-flight in order to stop
her from going out, having had a terrible feeling about what would
follow. And, sure enough, everyone who was involved in that battle
was shot down, with Amatsuka surviving but losing her status as a
Named in the process (though exactly how Named status works is fairly
unclear – she still has the skills, so does Odin choose? What are
the limits and qualifications? Complicating this, we learn offhand
that Sono is a Named candidate). Amatsuka believes she did the right
thing because she wants to protect Sono, while Sono feels intense
guilt over not having been able to fly, clearly believing that she
either could have changed the outcome or should have tried,
especially when she lost people she cared about.
On other fronts, we briefly see some of
the extra Valkyries from the intro, and also meet the severe old guy
from the intro, a ranking general who gives the troops a rousing
speech. On a scale of 1 to “Today, we are canceling the
Apocalypse” it’s probably a 4 or 5 big dramatic speech scene, but
it’s fine. Then, more interestingly, Odin steps up to give a speech.
His remarks are brief, essentially just offering his blessing to all
involved (even sending the message throughout the base over PA,
rather than just to the room with the troops), but it seems to whip
everyone who hears it into a frenzy. The pilots chant his name and
the support crews go into overtime, excited that Odin is with them.
Some of the senior Valkyries, however, look… disturbed. They’re
playing the “potentially sinister Odin” card pretty heavily, to
the point where you start to question whether this shota troll is
Odin rather than Loki. But for now, the best we’ve got is that Odin
is Odin.
The Valkyries and their air support fly
into battle. The Primary Pillar is inactive, but that doesn’t mean
it’s undefended. The massive squad fights off some Secondary Pillars
that resemble dragon-prowed ships crossed with dragonflies, and
fairly easily at that, giving the girls a chance to show off. An
extra Named, from England, appears and puts a big hole in the Primary
Pillar, which the main girls and some support fly into.
The Pillar is bigger on the inside, a
graveyard of ruined planes representative of those killed by the
Pillars without being guided to valhalla. Odin warns that the dead
are coming, but his alert, low key muttering that it is, is more for
the audience than the Valkyries, who soon see themselves being
assaulted by unknown planes… including the Hero Wing belonging to
Sono’s friend who died flying with Amatsuka two years earlier.
If the ambush by the damned ghosts of
fallen allies wasn’t bad enough, the core of the pillar appears to be
a zombie giant with a huge hammer, a figure that Odin identifies as
Thor. This is why I wanted to float the “Odin might not be Odin”
conspiracy theory: if one of the other Aesir is at the heart of a
Pillar controlling the fallen to battle, why is Odin where he is?
Ah, but the intricacies of the extremely loose Norse mythology theme
is hardly the biggest concern.
So, next episode Sono and Amatsuka
alike will have to face the undead incarnation of their regrets and
past choices, while the group as a whole has to deal with… whatever
it is that Zombie Giant Thor does in this setting and context. And
then we still need whatever the fallout from the Fuji Primary Pillar
Battle I was speculating about last episode actually is.
This is a short write-up this time
around, but it was a good episode. Honestly, I think Warlords of
Sigrdrifa is trending more towards a “pass” than it is a “fail”
– not that it hasn’t stumbled along the way, but if it can hold
together the level of quality we saw this week, it will manage to
pull out something of a win, even if it’s not great. If it goes up
from here, it could actually end up being pretty solid.