Summary: With Ao now in the clutches of the Allied Forces, will Fleur and Elena be able to overcome the sudden tension between them quickly enough to rescue him? The answer is who cares because GOD look how awful it all is.

Dragonzigg’s Thoughts: For much of its run Ao has been teetering between interesting and boring, but with this episode the show really decides to go for it and takes a running jump right into flat out breathtaking incompetence. Seriously, it’s been a while since I’ve seen an episode of any TV show that was quite so appallingly executed.

The last episode ended with Ao giving himself up to the Allied Forces, convinced that the Quartz Gun was too powerful to be held by Generation Bleu. This seems pretty stupid in an in-universe context, but is an acceptable narrative device. However, this entire episode he mopes and moans about this decision and given the very first opportunity, he jumps ship and joins back up with Pied Piper again. The show tries to sell this as some sort of cathartic moment of understanding, but all I see is an episode which basically accomplished nothing. The moral of the story might as well be ‘Screw responsibility, instead do what you want to do’. Ao is useless, whiny and stupid and can’t live with the consequences of his actions. The indecision might work if this was an Evangelion style attempt to show realistic psychological reaction but it’s so far from that it isn’t even worth getting into.

Not that the female characters fare at all better. Fleur has never exactly been the deepest of characters but here she’s reduced to cardboard cutout angsty girl 101, desperately ineffective and morose. Her moping would be more believable if she and Ao had ever had any sort of chemistry at all, but as it is she might as well be missing a block of wood. Meanwhile the writers seem to think having Elena quote more anime jokes and then turn into a nutty psycho again is enough to make her something more than a paper thin excuse for a character ( it isn’t ). Then there’s Gazelle, who acts like a jerk, emotionally bullies a depressed child and then reveals it was all a ‘plan’ to provoke her into action in the display of supreme dickishness you’d expect from him.

It’s painfully obvious at this point that the show is desperately adrift, lacking style, substance or any sort of guiding hand, and I get the impression the writers are almost as lost as I am.  There’s the sense that they’re desperately scrabbling for the loose ends of the plot and the show increasingly feels like a zombie assembled from segments of other, better shows. Dreams that the show might be able to rediscover a sense of drive and purpose in time for its finale seem distant now. The most Ao can aim for now is a painful limp towards the finish in the hope it can end before completely disintegrating.

Random Observations

– The art is TERRIBLE in this episode. It seems to be constantly struggling to stay on model. All of the major characters suffer horribly but the Allied commander is particularly rough, and Fleur occasionally looks like a different character altogether. It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

– When Pippo implied Gazelle should ‘comfort’ Fleur I think I threw up in my mouth.

– Don’t you think you should stop your emotionally conflicted teenage pilots if they’re about to FLY OFF AND START A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT?

– Lots of creepy, entirely inappropriate fanservice in this episode, as if I needed another reason to hate it.

– Noah’s candy eating antics are by far and away the best thing this week.

– It looks like even the ‘next episode’ narrator has given up. Despite my obvious disillusionment, I’ll be back next week.