“Sense Emergence”

Sundays in Japan only because this will NEVER BE LICENSED

The crew arrives back on Voldor but is quickly discovered by the Aerial Knights. Freyja and Hayate encounter the conflicted Qasim and sit down to talk. Mirage and Mikumo find the ruins and spark a battle when Mikumo begins to sing.

Jel’s thoughts

This was a much better episode than last week and yet I feel like we’re going a little too far with the “music is literally magic” angle. Between all the naked space floating and Freyja shooting magic wind tentacles out of her hand, it’s kind of hard to take it seriously. That said, I guess you can write all of that off as attempting to make abstract concepts interesting to look at and the general tension as we get closer to the climax works well enough. At least there were no cat puns.

Love Triangle
They’ve been laying it on thick with Freyja’s crush lately so it was nice to get a bit of a break from romance this week. The conversation with Qasim continued to hammer home that Freyja is an old spinster by Windermerean standards and that a relationship with an Earth human would be pretty rough. Of course after last week’s revelation of Roid’s (Lloyd’s?) ultimate goal, I have to wonder if they are going to pull out some sort of magic that makes the Windermereans live longer. On the one hand I could see it not happening since it’s what the bad guys want, but on the other hand they have kind of set it up so poetic justice demands it. It would almost seem too cruel for Freyja to lose to Mirage AND go on knowing she only has 15 years to live.

Pop Music
I’m still having trouble telling most of the songs apart, but of the samey-sounding songs they chose good ones this week. Most importantly, we got to hear Mikumo kill it on a lot of songs, including doing “Giraffe Blues” better than everyone and singing so forcefully that it actually felt like it could shake the entire galaxy. The new ED was pretty good too. Frontier switched EDs quite a bit, so I wonder if it will stick around or if they just pulled it out since Mikumo was sort of the center of attention at the end of the episode. Her flashbacks have gotten more interesting, particularly the shot of her looking up at a roomful of doctors. Is she a clone or something created for the purpose of unlocking the ruins? Maybe she’s a copy of an ancient singer from the original protoculture? Hmmm.

Streaming Missiles
By traditional standards this dogfight was pretty lame as it was dominated by all the music magic. It was really just there for dramatic shots of Hayate saving Walkure and to set up the naked space floating. As for Roid’s (Lloyd’s?) plan, it seems likely he’s using Walkure at this point to put as many people with space magic singing powers at the ruins as possible. Does he know who or what Mikumo is? The plot thickens…