On one side, I am actually impressed – I have never seen so many death flags raised in such a short time as happened in this episode. But, let’s start at the start, with the battle for Fuji Primary Pillar.
Naturally, it doesn’t go well.
Everyone is shaken to be fighting their undead former allies,
especially when a fallen Named shows up. We get some aerial dog
fights that, honestly, aren’t as good as they could be. They’re not
terrible, but there have been better flying battle scenes both in
media and even in this show; it seems like Warlords really burned its
budget and creativity in the first two episodes. Eventually in all
of this the heroes manage to actually hit Thor and antagonize him,
which prompts a response: calling in Pillars from distant parts of
Japan to defend the Primary, which prompts high command to order a
full retreat.
That order seems to come just in time,
as High Command itself (with some of the lessers like our Tateyama
base commander already having left the building) gets obliterated
when an angry Thor swings his hammer and conjures a cohesive
lightning laser that carves through the countryside and erases the
command station with both the general and Odin inside.
We cut to Sono waking up from injuries
she sustained in the Pillar, discovering that our main cast is all
alive for the time being but that the situation is still pretty dire.
Odin is presumed dead (though frankly I don’t believe that for a
minute) and morale is at an all time low. Most of the Valkyries are
helping manage evacuations of the greater Fuji area, which is now
swarming with Pillars, but Amatsuka has another mission: go back in
and rescue the Valkyries that were left behind.
This idea struck me as kind of odd,
since I would think they’d be written off as dead with somewhere
between hours and days intervening, but the show treats it as a
realistic goal (if an extremely dangerous mission) so I’ll just sort
of take that. She has a good talk with Sono about old times and
their feelings, making for the one subplot in the show that I’ve
really found myself connecting with. Of course, then they get into
talking about the upcoming mission and the death flags start going
up.
It is one after another after another
relentless death flags. Pretty much every line from a certain point
on is one of those “Well, she’s a goner” sort of lines. It gets
laid on so heavy that you almost start to consider the possibility
that it might be a double-bluff, like she’s not going to die because
the audience is too primed for her untimely demise.
But of course, at the meeting spot,
it’s a wounded rescue Valkyrie who retruns and not Amatsuka, and
she’s bearing with her a locket that Amatsuka was carrying, saying
that’s all she could recover. I’m not exactly sure how the logistics
of this rescue went down, but one way or another it’s clear that
we’re at least supposed to believe Amatsuka to be dead, satisfying
the massive number of flags.
Time will tell if she (and/or Odin)
returns to the show. My personal bet would be “yes” for Odin
(because seriously, come on, that’s not going to kill off a god who
knew it was coming so easily) and “at least not as an ally” for
Amatsuka, given that we’ve seen fallen Valkyries return in the enemy
ranks.
And the show has still effectively put
off the question of “where do we go from here?” At this stage,
there’s not going to be another act; we started off with enough time
to have the disaster and learn something from it to move on to the
next level, but now, going onto episode 8 without a concept of what
that’s going to be? It’s clear that they’re pacing the show to just
turn around, have the characters pick themselves up and dust
themselves off, and go for round 2 in the finale.
That’s fine, I guess. Warlords of
Sigrdrifa, in its decently solid first three episodes, had me hoping
that we were going to get a big story, with real movements, and maybe
even a compelling mystery to the what and why of the Pillars.
Instead, we’re getting a serviceable but unremarkable “Humans
versus alien invaders” setup. It doesn’t have the passion or
grandeur of the better examples, but at the same time it’s also not
the lazy and failed existence that is, say, Hundred. On the whole,
my instinct right now is to say it’s cruising for a C.
I guess we’ll see just how on cruise
control we stay next time.