Recap

Tiger’s Eye puts Naru in his sights and attempts to seduce her, before using her as bait in order to trap Pegasus. Predictably, both his seduction and his trap fails miserably.

Artemis’ Thoughts

This is the fourth episode of Sailor Moon SuperS, and so far the season isn’t shaping up to be a particularly good one – especially following on the heels of the wonderful Sailor Moon S. With Chibi-Usa continuing to take center stage and even the inner senshi being relegated to the sidelines, the tone has shifted quite dramatically from dark and intense to fanciful and mostly comedic. Episode 131 pushes this trend even further, forcing me to wonder whether or not SuperS is even taking itself seriously, much less trying to get its audience to do so.

The first half of this episode is entirely taken up by the Amazon Trio, who luckily are idiotic enough to make ten straight minutes of dialogue fairly amusing, if not exactly compelling. Tiger’s Eye decides to target Naru, reasoning that a pure but completely ordinary girl like her will be all too easy to captivate, and indeed, this seems to work for at least a few seconds; the only person more overcome by Tiger’s Eye’s beauty than Naru is Tiger’s Eye himself, who can’t seem to stop examining himself in every reflective surface he passes.

However, it is Naru’s very purity that gets in the way of Tiger’s Eye’s plan. Even when he spins a ridiculous tale of woe about how he has only three months to live due to some unspecified illness, making much of the fact that his only wish before he dies is to experience love for the first time, the gullible Naru still can’t bring herself to date him. Her burgeoning relationship with Umino continues to be foremost in her mind, and in the end, Tiger’s Eye has to give up his attempted seduction and simply invade Naru’s dreams by force.

The battle between Tiger’s Eye and his minion Remless, and Sailor Moon and Chibi-Moon, is basically a non-event – there’s maybe thirty seconds of actual fighting, while the rest of the scene is taken up by juggling antics, a handy dandy distraction by Tuxedo Mask, and the appearance of Pegasus, who simply flies through the cage designed to trap him as though it isn’t even there.

If there’s any highlight to this episode then it’s without a doubt the Amazon Trio, who make for far more interesting characters than anyone else in the show right now. They come across as more silly than threatening, but their wardrobe, which seems to channel a combination of 70s aerobics workout routines and 80s pop music videos, might just make the whole season worthwhile. The voice actors knock it out of the park too, with the result that the Amazon Trio, and especially the hilariously vain and self-centred Tiger’s Eye, looks and sounds more like a bitchy drag queen than a credible villain. One who likes to read books with titles such as ‘Cherry Boys’, apparently.