Recap

Dandy and Meow arrive on a world ruled by giant, sentient plant life

Zigg’s Thoughts

What a wonderful episode. Seriously, I appreciate that it may not be to everyone’s tastes, but this is why I’m a huge fan of Space Dandy’s largely unconnected episodic drift. It basically means the production crew have a new blank canvas every week onto which they can scrawl something different. That might mean we get a show of vastly inconsistent quality (check out last week) but it also means we can get stuff like this, which couldn’t be allowed to exist anywhere other than within an (already budgeted) TV show.

The net result is basically an arthouse short film ‘in disguise’ as a Space Dandy episode. Checking the credits reveals that Enyoung Choi, one of the key animators on Kick Heart, directed this episode and indeed those two projects share a lot of visual similarities. While we get a little QT at the beginning and a barely-there subplot with Meow, for the most part this is all Dandy. And Dandy isn’t really Dandy in this episode. There’s no smartass remarks, no faux-cool quips. He’s here as a proxy, to allow us to experience what he’s experiencing, but he isn’t really allowed to be himself. That’s fine here, as this episode’s a tonal piece and his usual braggadocio would upset the atmosphere.

What an atmosphere it is too. With the plot basically being an irrelevance, Choi (and Shinchiro Watanabe, who wrote this one) instead on conjuring up the most abstract, dreamy experience they possibly can and it works wonderfully. It’s obviously a visual feast, painting out a wonderfully odd, multicoloured world with considerable artistic, lingering on long and slow shots of bizarre landscapes and architecture. It’s the most ‘alien’ the show has felt yet and in an entirely different vein from the bug-eyed freaks who have shown up to this point. When combined with the strange, chilled out music it creates a terrifically dream-like feel around the whole experience. They even manage to tug the heart strings at the end, despite the fact that we’ve had only the very vaguest sketch of a story and characters (though there are wonderful hints of an extended narrative that we only glimpse at). It’s one of those occasions where what’s happening is less important than the way it’s happening, and they combine music, visuals and sparing dialogue to form a memorable sendoff.

The net result is something lovely and unique and super interesting. Would I want the show to be like this every single week? Absolutely not. But I love the fact that they took the risk, indulged themselves and made something special and personal and full of artistic talent and heart. It seems you never know what you’re going to get with Space Dandy, and that’s absolutely a good thing.