Recap: Mahiro spends half the time in a flashback episode before coming up with enough relevant material to make me have to review it. I was not pleased.

The Recap Episode. Anime has to be the only genre of entertainment guilty of this cardinal sin of laziness. Bones themselves are somewhat master artists at the trade, crafting just enough fresh material to make you have to cling to the scraps of a bloated corpse. They seem to have a penchant for placing these in dreams, whether it’s Hoenheim’s campfire recollection in Brotherhood or Mahiro’s fevered state of near death here in Tempest. Since this was basically half an episode I will treat it as such, thus this will be a much truncated review.

At the very least the scant new material they gave us was actually pretty relevant. It’s been a few months since the battle of the trees, and quite obviously the Genesis has won. It was interesting hearing Yoshino describe the tree’s new dominion on earth. Basically acting like an omnipotent RoboCop, the Tree kills with impunity anyone who would wish to disturb peace in the world. Even if areas have the threat of violence the tree swalllows the entire region, innocents with the guilty, in order to establish this peace. This creates an interesting scenario that I hope they elaborate upon, an interesting kind of dystopia where the ruler cannot be questioned. I do fear this show is being quite conservative with its body count though. Call me a pessimist, but of a 6 billion population world something tells me more than 2 billion are going to die if you take out all those with criminal intent. With Mahiro’s awakening, it seems new alliances have been drawn. Unless that entire dream sequence was a lie, it would appear there really is something different about Yoshino that would allow him to be killed, as the Tree is obviously not reacting to such a boldly stated assassination attempt. I will admit that I am very displeased with the recap segment that was the first act, but as Tempest always does, it gives you just enough breadcrumbs to keep you from leaving its path.