Let me go back to what I was saying about anime blogs a few days ago. The main point is just as applicable to anime itself. What does it take to make a good anime, at the bare minimum?
1. Have something to say.
2. Say it.
3. Stop.
This show fails at step #1. What are they trying to say? I have no idea.
This episode sort of attempts to say something about the nature of life. I think. There are still the underlying themes of why the human race has declined, laziness, lack of responsibility, and so on. The creators throw a few ineffective cracks at political correctness. We have the fatalistic human monument project continuing its work. We take cracks at shounen battle anime (like *that* hasn’t been done before!). We have space probes that just don’t want to be alone.
There are even more mysteries from the previous episode that haven’t been solved. Who built the city? What happened to it? What are the slimes? What are the fairies? I assume we’ll get answers to some of these questions eventually, but the problem is the lack of focus. There’s so much going on that they don’t concentrate on what’s important. I don’t know what they point is.
Humanity has Declined tries to say everything, and hence ends up saying nothing at all.
And it could say something… It could say a lot of things! But no, we get more wacky video game references instead.
Yep. I am really starting to lose interest.
FK YA GIANT CAT VS SQUID LIKE MONSTER! I shall wait for the epic scifi channel movie version with horrible b movie acting and of course supplied with very low grade CGI.
I liked how P-girl and O-boy were named after space probes because damn I did not see that twist coming and was it in line for the Mars mission?! DUN DUN DUUUN! If so this anime is deep or the producers have physic powers.
I will miss P-girl! She was awesome <3
You don’t exactly need psychic powers to line things up for the landing… it was planned well in advance. I didn’t see it coming either, but still, as someone who worked with robots, I thought the whole thing about them having feelings was dumb.
Nekomimi >^.^< NYAN!
Nyan.
Admittedly Jinrui has been more miss than hit lately. This ep. for the most part was too random for me, as well.
However, maybe I’m too emotional but I found the space probes thing really touching. Before this ep. I didn’t really care about space probes at all and I had to wiki Pioneer and Voyager. But they do have a lonely life out there in the dark and cold. It makes me also feel somewhat nostalgic that these probes were built in the 1970’s and are still traversing space.
Such animistic ideas are one of my favourite peculiar elements of anime. Even though I certainly don’t believe that inanimate objects are “alive” I think such ideas contribute to living more in harmony with the surrounding environment. It reminds me to properly care for things and to honour their service.
The main problem for me with this story, I think, is that I actually work on robots. The idea that Voyager and Pioneer would develop feelings and return to Earth is simply laughable. They have far less intelligence than your cellphone.
That said, Voyager and Pioneer are amazing. Voyager is still doing good science over thirty years after it was built.