The collapse of the Singapore stock market sends shockwaves around the world. Shockwaves in a very literal sense, called “C”, which travel relatively slowly. For the concept that the title of the show emphasizes, you’d think they’d try to at least provide the illusion that they aren’t just making crap up as they go along. And as if the show already didn’t make enough sense, the creators suddenly decide to let people in the financial district mint money from a beating heart in exchange for possible futures. Where did this come from?

Next, IMF girl lectures Kimimaro for a while, making up stuff about his father. She ends with a moving “and now you’re here!” speech as she removes her sunglasses and poses. Kimimaro is deeply moved. Then all the children become homeless men. Kimimaro decides that Souichiro is wrong and decides to take back the future. IMF girl warns him that they may have to use illegal measures, but he is brave and full of confidence. It only took eight and a half episodes and a country disappearing for him to decide to stop pretending to think deeply and to actually do something.

Next, Kimimaro tells Mashu to become his daughter. Then he kisses her. No, Kimimaro, doing those kinds of things to your daughter is not allowed.

The high point of this episode was Mashu getting licked by a dog. As is probably apparent, I’m quite disappointed in the direction this show has taken. It has one of the most creative settings in recent history. Yet it utterly fails at making this setting coherent and consistent. The creators continually pull things out of thin air, and never bother to delve deeply enough into any single aspect of the setting so that it actually makes sense. Half of the show is just spouting economics jargon without any real meaning behind it, just because it sounds cool.

The other half is Kimimaro hanging around and getting lectured at by random people. He is completely useless as a protagonist. It doesn’t help that most of Kimimaro’s lecture series is about comparing whether it’s better to have a present or a future. Am I the only one who thinks this is a stupid question?

In some ways C is similar to Fractale: C is the successor in the Noitanima timeslot, and both have ambitious settings. They both have problems in developing their settings: Fractale jumps around to too many locations and wastes too much time on Clain’s “perversion”, while C wastes time on the great present / future debate and doesn’t really even try to explain the setting aside from spouting more econobabble.

I’m not going to even bother complaining about the English scenes since they were actually pretty good compared to the rest of the episode. It certainly could have been much worse. I feel like I’m being especially harsh on this series, but I was hoping for much more.

The pace is starting to pick up, and this was probably one of the best episodes of C so far. There’s lots going on: Kimimaro’s teacher tries to commit suicide, Japan is decaying, something’s going on with Hanabi (the purple haired girl we haven’t seen since the first episode), Kimimaro burns all his Midas money, and Singapore’s about to be wiped off the face of the Earth.

I’ve been complaining for a while now that Mashu and Kimimaro are the two most boring characters in the show. Kimimaro’s still is usual self, but it seems that things will get more interesting with Mashu shortly. She seems to be related to Kimimaro’s father’s past, and is probably Kimimaro’s sister. Hopefully we won’t get the siscon end. I’m guessing that Souichiro’s asset, similarly, is that girl in the hospital. Perhaps the assets are the futures that are being bet, the futures that could have been.

The biggest flaw of this series is still that none of the econbabble makes any sense. The actual workings of the financial districts remain a black box (i.e., why do they run out of money?) and I doubt that this will be addressed at all. Furthermore, all the philosophical debates about “future” vs “present” are rather silly and pointless in my opinion. I really hope that the ending of this show doesn’t have Kimimaro and Mashu shouting “I believe in the future!” and destroying the financial district with the power of trust. I’m concerned because I can actually picture this happening.