“The Winning Ball of Light”

Rosso discovers he has an important baseball match coming up when the manager announces his resignation. Aizen attends, steals the show and summons Red King, because he can.

Euri’s Thoughts

It was always going to be difficult to be impressed by a sports story after the phenomenal rugby episode we saw in Ultraman X, though I will say that this wasn’t all bad either. In particular, I appreciate that the show is still trying to add in a little humour, as we saw at the top of the episode with Rosso running about and pulling faces at the camera in dramatic fashion. I wouldn’t have minded a little more of that, honestly, as I found it hard to care about Rosso wanting to perform well in his manager’s last ball game when 1) this is our first time meeting the manager, and 2) Rosso was being a jerk about it. Aizen staring into an iPad and scheming during the match is exactly the kind of Dick Dastardly villainy I want to see from him, and seeing him summon a monster in full this time was a treat.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it a few more times before the end of this show, but Aizen appears to be the only one having fun here. If Rosso and Blu could be a little less stiff in future episodes and let a bit of their brotherly dynamic shine through, they might start to have a lot more fun too.

Red King sucks, but there were some interesting moments in the fights this week. We get a very by-the-books demonstration of how a single Ultraman isn’t strong enough to take down these monsters, forcing Rosso out of his baseball match in order to save Japan’s mountains. We also see Red King very deliberately targeting the pitching arm of Rosso, which you have to assume means that Aizen has figured out who the Ultramen are. At the same time, it doesn’t shine any lights on his motives. Perhaps he has a grudge on their mum and is taking it out on them, but who can say. If he has a not-evil reason for summoning monsters, he wouldn’t need to do it during the baseball match unless specifically confirming the identity of the Ultramen. Guess we’ll see!

Random Observations

• Rosso and Blu keep swapping their coin books outside of battle and I’m not sure why. Surely it’d make more sense for Rosso to always have access to the red coin?
• The other two coins Aizen brought to the ball game were Black King and Gargorgon, just in case you had doubts about him being behind those attacks.
• Red King is tied with Big Joe for the Ultraman monster I like the least. Sorry, I’m sure there are plenty of people who love these classics, but I can’t stand their designs. As for good designs-
• Still no Dinosaur Tank.

in awe at the size of this neck, absolute unit

colons’ Thoughts

I only have some pretty small observations for you this week; Euri covered it pretty well. So:

• Fashion update: we very briefly got a shot of our fraternal protagonists wearing different shirts, before they went back to their uniform ones. As ever, I have hope that this will change, but I lose a little bit of it every time.
  • Aside: the hat with the bear on it, pictured above, is very good.
• Red King sure does make some lawsuit-baitingly perfect Godzilla noises.
• Aizen’s drones are just three Urbos hanging from an offscreen fishing rod. Drones are cheap, Ultraman, why can’t you just buy and modify real drones?
• This show has had shots at different times of day before, I am not sure why the awful post-processing was necessary to fake an evening shot on the baseball field.

The preview seemed pretty exciting, though, so here’s hoping next week will be better.