That totally looks like the face of someone who knows how to handle psychic powers.

Summary: Saki manages to restore Satoru’s cantus by imitating the purification ceremony, and the two escape. Satoru uses his new powers to slaughter entire legions of queerats until they reunite with Squealer and his tribe. The fellowship sets out to find Maria, Mamoru and Shun, but ends up being attacked by the Ground Spider clan.

Aqua‘s thoughts: Zigg is off to the Belpaese, so I’m stepping in to take over coverage of this week’s post-apocalyptic antics. A bit of an oddball episode this week, just like last week, with some very good ideas, and some very… strange ones. While this was definitely From The New World‘s most cantus-action-packed episode, the narrative structure seemed to falter a bit around the midway point, with a series of repetitive ambush scenes that served no real other purpose than showing off how awesome canti are. Nevertheless, it was great to see some of the strange creatures inhabiting New World‘s post-apocalyptic earth and the war tactics they use.

“Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” As if the tension between these two wasn’t creepy enough already.

Saki’s restoring of Satoru’s cantus also felt like a bit of a deus ex machina. The show clearly tried to justify this by making the scene in question very weird, disturbing and symbolic, but it did not exactly work. Would it been that hard to place the flashback scene were Saki learns Satoru’s mantra in an earlier episode? Satoru’s sudden leap in power and newfound cruelty confirmed his talent for psychokinesis and complete lack of respect for queerats shown all the way back in Episode 2, so you know how buildup works, From The New World!

These problems show that From The New World is starting to run a bit all over the place, and I am afraid it will eventually end up tripping over its own extensive canon. No need for doom and gloom yet, though, as this episode also had a lot of fantastic ideas in it that affirm New World‘s status as something unlike anything on right now. This episode managed to take Satoru’s defining character flaw (his cockiness) to its logical, tragic extreme and affirmed Saki as the messianic ‘human’ member of the crew – both by her reactions as her sudden strange visions and talent for restoring canti. Shun briefly appears in Saki’s vision, which further hints that he will play a very important role in the future (and Saki’s love life) and of course, Satoru is desperately trying to show off in order to make Saki forget about him. Suffice to say I’m interested to see where this is going. As a final note, a special mention goes to the music this episode, which brings From The New World‘s signature mix of UK garage and ethereal choral music to a glorious climax.

Let’s get dangerous!