There are times when it's really good to have a tsundere around! Especially when she's carrying a blaster and knows how to use it.

That sure wasn't what I expected. And they did a good job of hiding the punchline when they created the next-ep teaser last episode.

Turns out Marika didn't have a plan in mind at the end of last episode. But her brain trust came up with one, and big points to Grunhilde for the initial suggestion.(It's interesting how Gruier and Grunhilde are being treated as top officers.)

The idea was that if Robert Dolittle didn't have any weakness they knew about which they could exploit, then perhaps Jenny's fiance (Junay Krooph) did have. And boy, did he have a big one.

It was his yacht which they boarded. The camera was a live feed to network news all over the galaxy. Real time coverage as the famous, glamorous joshikousei pirate captain idol Kato Marika made a boarding on a yacht!

And what they found. They were expecting an orgy. But it turns out that Junay and his father were preparing a revolution, and he was having a rally with a unit of troops when Marika and her landing party burst in. Lily caught all of it with her camera. It was like something out of fascist Italy.

And this was where Chiaki really shined. She spiked, rushed forward, and started shooting with her blaster. In pretty short order, everyone had surrendered. Junay was on his knees, crying, begging for mercy -- on live TV. Jenny pretended to be a reporter, and obviously was having the time of her life.

Back at the hospital, the real bridge crew had been researching Robert Dolittle. Courier broke into Hugh and Dolittle's systems and found a bunch of incriminating financial information. They packaged it all up and gave it to Show, who passed it on to Marika.

So while all of that was going on with Junay, Robert Dolittle's ship also docked with it, and he came on board. We got a confrontation between him and Jenny/Marika. Marika was strong and gutsy, not even slightly intimidated by him. And she revealed that Robert had been smuggling weapons to Junay's father, which is big-time illegal.

So the wedding is off. Junay and his dad are going to prison. And for the next while, Robert is going to be really busy avoiding his own prison cell, but Jenny figures he won't be going down. Jenny is now free to go to the university, and is very satisfied by Marika's performance. Robert almost certainly will continue in charge of Hugh and Dolittle, but Jenny is free to continue her efforts on her own company. And Marika gets a big chunk of change from Jenny every year for the next ten.

And for the girls of the yacht club? The experience of a lifetime. Two major jobs, one by appointment and one ad-lib. They learned a lot about themselves, and they've got a story to bore people with forever. "Hey, have I ever told you about the time I was a pirate?" The star was little Ai-chan, who seems to have a real talent for piloting.

Marika has docked the Silent Whisper on Sea of the Morningstar's space station and has given the yacht club permission to fly it. Because of Marika's Letter of Marque, it's legal for her to own it.

What we didn't see was authorities at the school giving the yacht club hell for what they did, let alone the authorities on the space station. I guess that just gets swept under the rug.

Or maybe the Fairy Godfather did it. I have this image that there's a high level bureaucrat in the government whose primary job is to make sure that the Bentenmaru's license never lapses. He's the one who greased all the wheels so that Misa and Marika could go through 20 government agencies in a single afternoon and end up with Marika being issued a fresh Letter of Marque. And he almost certainly pulled a lot of strings in this case, telling people to lay off of her.

I think the Fairy Godfather is also responsible for the Odette II, and the way that it's assigned to the yacht club. It's also his job to maintain that situation. And if everyone in the yacht club gets expelled and the club is shut down, that rather screws that up, doesn't it? So he will also have a word with the officials at the school, telling them to ignore it. There may be a slap on the hand, but that's it.

What I don't quite know is how he manages to keep the parents of the girls from screaming. I guess the answer is, in the words of Show, "You shouldn't ask questions like that."

A lot of moments of awesome in this episode, but Chiaki's tops them all. And if Marika has a big-time rep, this may help create one for Chiaki, since her rampage was on camera. People are going to wonder who she is, and it won't hurt the reputation of the Barbarossa a bit.

There's a Japanese term: kanban musume. It means "poster girl", more or less. It refers to the way that family shops, especially small neighborhood restaurants, use a daughter in their advertising to try to bring in customers. Marika is Bentenmaru's kanban musume (and Ririka used to be), and now I think Chiaki will be the same for Barbarossa. I don't think that Kenjo will mind that at all. It'll be good for business -- and it's another step in the process of turning Chiaki into a worthwhile commander to take his place come the day.

By the way, one other noteworthy event: Gruier was completely calm and unaffected while Bentenmaru was under fire, and did her job very well. Absolutely solid as a rock.

Gruier lost her nerve a couple of times during the Golden Ghost Ship mission, and had to be talked down by Marika. I think she's spent a lot of time thinking about that, and has decided she is never going to let herself do that again. And she was great. Gruier and Grunhilde were significant assets on this job. And it's a step on their way to becoming good adults.

Gruier and Grunhilde are sisters, in the sense that they are the only real family they have. Neither of them has any identifiable parents since they're both the result of genetic engineering. During the crisis, they had aligned against one another. But with the crisis past, they have been using the time on Sea of the Morningstar to bond with one another. And their time on the Bentenmaru was a part of that. You can see it happening, and it's a very good thing. They need each other.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:19 AM | Comments (26) | Add Comment
Post contains 1145 words, total size 6 kb.