Recap: Up against two cruisers, the I-401 uses the environment of a broken world to bring about victory.

It’s easy to see the real purpose of the Mental Models after this episode. With every single shot of Kirishima exploiting her… angles so to speak, it was honestly a little jarring to see them basically whored out on screen. It’s bad enough in the OP that every Model gets a full screen shot of her bust before her introduction even comes out, but this was something even worse. This didn’t get any better in the end, when inexplicably Haruna’s jacket gets ripped off and apparently reveals her double life as a voyeur. Even with the flimsy excuse of needing bodies to understand human tactics and values, there’s really no reason for them to all be so funny looking and/or sexy.

At least the fight was very entertaining to watch, which was really all I wanted out of this episode. Some of my favorite military stories are how the victor used his environment to turn an outnumbered outgunned position into an advantage. There’s something really cool in the idea of using sunken cities as artifical reefs to figure out how the water currents would put them favorably on target. There were some great surprises which also really do a good job at integrating the full breadth of the I-401’s munitions in a way that doesn’t seem like a total infodump. The best thing a fight can do is end on a way that’s surprising but also foreshadowed well enough to be predicted. With such awesome power at their command, we knew that hubris was the only way they would get a clean win, and the execution was fantastic.

With the apparent death of Kirishima it would appear we finally can see the devices behind these bodies. I’m going to assume some hard light shenanigans as to how they can feel authentic, but it still is weird that their cores basically look like old fashioned holographic devices or something. Knowing Haruna’s reactions this episode as well as having nothing but her physical appearance left of her, I imagine she’s now firmly in the good guy camp. Good to see the little girl plot not taking too long to resolve itself, although Idno if I would be as calm about finding a girl who appears to have been flung through a wall so hard her clothes fell off. Now that they have fended off another threat, will they take the attack to the Fog, or will they continue on their way and continue their guerrilla fight?