Suisei no Gargantia -- ep 13

Having abandoned this show about half-way through, I was curious to see if the final episode could redeem the mess. I've been following other people's writeups of the show, and haven't been too impressed. So I watched episode 13.

 

---

IMHO no, it didn't redeem the mess. The introduction of the other mecha was a complete deus ex machina. And while it did give Chambers a moment of awesome, it didn't really make any sense. (By which I mean it didn't make sense in story terms.)

And meanwhile, Ledo having slaughtered thousands of whale squid and trashed a hatchery and slaughtered tens of thousands of eggs and young, the whale squids don't seem to have minded much. I thought for a while that maybe he'd committed genocide and they no longer existed, but lots of them are shown in a cameo in the final. Did they attack the surface fleets in revenge? Evidently not. Did they start attacking and destroying every mecha going underwater? Nope, to that, too.

In fact, Ledo is shown using one of the Gargantia mechas to infiltrate the Whale Squid nest itself, and he reports that they ignored him. Do the Whale Squids have the patience of saints? Or did the genetic engineering destroy their brains? Or is it just bad writing?

I vote for "bad writing".

There were two stories in this series which got started, and then tossed in the trash basket. First, Ledo as "man from Mars" in the Gargantia fleet. Second, Whale Squids as a variant form of human, and what that implies.

And the director decided instead to tell the story, "Mad mecha enslaves the human race, or attempts to do so." Phooey.

Even so, there were a lot of nice visuals (in the part I watched), and I am going to hunt through episode 6 and see what I can find for top rotation anims.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 320 words, total size 2 kb.