1 Not to be a spoilsport or anything, but this post is laden with unwarned spoilers.  For those of us who haven't been able to watch the episode yet, would it be possible to maybe give us some chance to avoid them?

2 OK, I'll toss it all below the fold.

3 Of course, you can't have a science fiction anime without some Engrish, and there were two nice examples of it: "dammy" and "erectronic".

4

A really fun episode.  And the design of that military ship at the end was something else.  I wonder if they had to get permission for it from the Bowie family.

The feed from Crunchyroll has always been pretty good.  The only time I ever had any serious problems with it was the first night they streamed the final episode of Strike Witches 2.  That was torture!

5 I decided I wanted to watch it again. The second time, about the 18 minute mark it stopped (because I caught up with the download) and it was awful from there forward. I ended up switching to 720p, and for some reason that worked great all the rest of the way.

6

Regarding the last ships that showed up:

What were they doing there?

And who are they? The Wikipedia page says that there is an "Interstellar Alliance", from which Sea of Morningstar revolted and eventually gained its independence. There's also a "Galactic Empire", and I assume that's who owned those ships.

Is Sea of Morningstar part of the Galactic Empire? And is it shaping up for a major war between the two coalitions?

I also have some questions about Jenny Doolittle. She's the daughter of a major interstellar shipping company, and I wonder if she's got some skin in this game. First, when one of the privateers takes a prize, the ship is more valuable than its cargo. Presumably they take it back home again. Does Jenny's company buy them?

That's one side of the coin. The other is this: if the other side has privateers, too, then Jenny's company may be losing ships to them.

Here's what I expect: eventually the Odette II will get rearmed and renamed, and become a second privateer commissioned by Sea of the Morningstar. Jenny will be its skipper, and girls from the school will end up as its crew, and it'll work with Bentenmaru, informally under Marika's command -- and maybe with the Barbarossa, though that remains to be seen -- in some sort of critical operation later on.

7 My assumption was that the ships at the end were simply part of the Navy of Sea of the Morning Star.  As to why they happened to be there...good question.  That may harken back to some of the speculations from last week.

8 Dave, spoiler tags please.

9 Thank you, Steven!

10 Right!  Sorry...I guess that was kind of spoilerish.

11 Just re-watched. WRT to the previous discussion here about episode 4, anyone else notice that Marika calls Ririka Okaa-san, and Ririka's reaction to it (21:43 in the CR stream)? It does seem that there is something going on there.

12 Yes, I caught that and wondered "what the hell?"  Also, I really like Jenny. Girl's got style.

This episode also answered a question of mine.  I didn't see how the few dishes we saw on the Odette II could possibly "sail" the ship.  But it seems, based on what we saw in this episode, that there are actually a lot more reflectors that don't exist physically -- the dishes we see are actually creating an electronic "sail field" behind the ship that catches--or reflects--photons..  Without something of that size, there's no way the light pressure would be high enough to move the Odette. Contemporary fiction usually postulates sails with an area in the thousands of square kilometers to move a ship about our solar system..

Pretty damn cool, and I think, worth the wait, to see a scientifically accurate battle. (Within the limits of physics as we know it anyway.)

13

I can poke holes in it. But I don't want to. The Rule of Cool excuses the few small mistakes.

They're not running a physics symposium here, they're telling a story. It's nice when the story cleaves to physics as we know it as closely as this, but it isn't really necessary.

14 Pete, they've already said that Mouretsu Pirates will be 2 cours. In particular, it'll be 26 episodes.

15 Bonkura joshikousei is a wonderful term. "Idiot high school girls" is a good translation.

16

On the other hand, "Fool!" isn't a strong enough translation of bakame. That's pretty strong language for a young lady, which is why Marika was a bit shocked.

It's more like "Damned fool" or "You stupid son of a bitch".

17 I still like "nincompoop" for "bonkura"...

18 It's difficult to translate insults. And obviously Crunchyroll (and all those who sole that translation) couldn't really use "son of a bitch" for bakame. I think "You stupid jackass!" would have been a good compromise.

19 ubu:  How about magnetic sails, which use solar wind rather than photons?  You don't need much physical structure for that (see M2P2).

20 Definitely a good episode.  The first arc is wrapped up nicely, and I like where we are now.  I just wonder whether we could be at the same place in terms of story and characters in 4 episodes or even 3. As expected, the adult teachers and some government forces were more or less on top of things, willing to let the girls work through things as a teaching exercise and test, but prepared to step in the moment things got out of hand.  I suspect everyone expected either a) nothing happens, b) the girls get away clean, or c) it all goes haywire, but it's intended as kidnapping and that can't succeed with all the backup available.  The girls taking out the enemy computers and resulting gunfire was probably an unpleasant surprise. I wonder how close the two pirate ships and the government ships had to be to get there within minutes of the battle starting, and whether they started coming in when the jamming started, or whether they waited for the gunfire.
Steven, you state "as expected they were after Marika."  I don't see anything that says that.  Nothing contradicts it, but nothing says it.  They could have wanted the ship, or the collection of rich and otherwise significant schoolgirls.  In fact, if they were after Marika, I'd think they'd have been paying more attention to where the Bentenmaru was.

21 If it was a straightforward piracy attempt, they wouldn't have resorted to hail-Mary shooting at the end once they lost their computers.

There was no benefit for simple pirates in outright destroying the Odette II. But for people who want to take out the Bentenmaru, killing or capturing Marika would do it. With her dead, the Letter of Marque expires.

You might argue that those shots were intended to convince the Odette II to surrender. But how was it to do so? Lightning 11's comm was down; there wasn't any way for Odette II to yield.

No, they were shooting with intent to kill, and the only reason that makes any sense is if they wanted to kill Marika.

22 Hmmm. You could argue that the reason Lightning 11 was shooting at Odette II is because LII wanted the hackers silenced. With Odette II gone, LII could reactivate its computers and other systems and then run for it.

I don't buy that idea. These aren't really pirates. They're privateers, and as such there are expectations. For a privateer to move into a hostile system and slaughter a ship full of school girls risks angering their sanctioning authority and having their Letter of Marque revoked.

And if they did that and got caught anyway, they wouldn't just be imprisoned. They'd be hung for it.

So no matter what happens, there isn't any win for a normal privateer in destroying the Odette II -- unless they want to kill Marika.

23 More speculation.  I need to re-watch a few episodes to see if I missed anything, but: Bentenmaru and Barbarossa are both referred to as "The pirate ship xxx".  I don't recall Lightning II being referred to that way.  I wonder if it isn't actually a licensed privateer, or is licensed to a different system that uses a different naming convention?  Whether it is or not, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the larger enemy of the series, whatever that turns out to be, wasn't behind this attack, directly or indirectly.

24 "Lightning 11" is a call sign, not a ship identification. Remember, after they sent their surrender demand, Jenny commented that they hadn't even bothered identifying themselves.

25 Something that struck me: If the Lightning II is theoretically a privateer, I can't imagine how a ship of schoolgirls would be a legitimate prize or a legitimate target to destroy. Could privateers historically take any ship flying the flag of their adversary, or did they have to leave non-commercial shipping alone? They can't even argue that they're targeting a crewmember of a privateer, because Marika hadn't agreed to become the Bentenmaru's captain.

In re: David's note: I assumed that Bentenmaru and Barbarossa were both identified as 'the pirate ship xxx' because they're known privateers and were running honest transponders. The Lightning II may or may not have been using its real name, and even if that was its real name it may not be known in Tau Ceti as a privateer. I can see lots of reasons for foreign governments to not tell Tau Ceti who they issue Letters of Marque to.

26

It's Lightning eleven, not lightning two. Just wanted to make that clear.

What I think is going on is something akin to the Cold War. Each side is making attacks on the other, using deniable proxies, but both sides are pretending it isn't the case because they don't want the war to go hot.

The raiders making this attempt on Marika aren't officially sanctioned by the planet they're from. Maybe they don't even have a Letter of Marque.

Unofficially, the government of Sea of the Morningstar knows who it is. After all, they have the guy who tried to kidnap Marika from the cafe, and certainly have interrogated him. But everyone is smiling and nodding and not openly admitting anything, because it would lead to fullscale war.

27 I wonder if the crew of the Bentenmaru might have been taken a bit off guard by how far the attackers were willing to go at this stage of the game?  Otherwise, they might not have stood off quite so much.

28 Marika's last-minute change of plans made the action begin early.