Various comments about it below the fold. Needless to say, it's packed with spoilers.

OK. Kongou's power is called Aerohand. As demonstrated, she put her hand on the side of a truck, and then it moved as if there was a rocket engine connected to that point. The presumption is that she can do that with any large mass, and it doesn't appear to need to be aerodynamically shaped. So in any kind of debris field, she's going to have no shortage of ammunition. And given that she took down two helicoptors with that truck, it seems she has some considerable degree of control over the object while it's in flight.

Kuroko goes into combat with a long cloth strip full of those spikes she uses. Her control and speed with them are amazing. At one point she slides her hand along a segment of the strip and teleports maybe 20 of the spikes, all into different places. She does the same thing she did in the thug's hideout of putting them into the barrels of guns so that the guns can't fire. But if necessary she too can use random debris as projectiles, dropping them onto or placing them inside of her targets.

Both of them can kick serious ass. Which is more dangerous? I have to give the edge to Kuroko, mainly because of mobility. Kongou has to move around a battlefield by running. Kuroko can get to where she needs to be in a blink. That also means she's better at dodging incoming fire. Nonetheless, between the two of them they take out a platoon of men with heavy combat gear and live to tell the tale.

Between Kongou, Kuroko, and Mikoto they pile up a pretty impressive body count this time, and I don't mean wounded. They try to cover that up -- we never see any blood or body parts -- but for instance there's no way the pilots of those helicopters survived what Kongou did to them. Not a chance.

Kongou's power by its nature is pretty indiscriminate. If she's shooting large objects, people she hits are going to go splat. When she used her power on one of the enemy soldiers, presumably it knocked him off the side of the elevated highway, and he fell to his death. And when Mikoto takes out another platoon of heavy weapons, it's hard to believe that every single one is just stunned. She would have used a wide area shot to get them all at once and would use enough power to make sure they all went down and stayed down.

Kuroko, too, albeit indirectly. Some of the guys whose guns she disabled were stupid enough to try firing them. These being  grenade launchers, they exploded, and the initial explosion would then set off the remaining rounds in the magazine, so surely some of them must be dead as well.

So a lot of the faceless spear carriers on the side of the bad guys have to be in the morgue. (Or in Kuroko's case, vaporized by explosions.)

Saten gets a moment of glory. She didn't end up developing a power. Instead, she was the only one who could do what she did, because she doesn't have a power. Everyone else was immobilized by Capacity Down, but it didn't affect Saten because it only affects people who have a power. Uiharu gets her moment of glory by figuring out where the controls are and telling Saten, and Saten uses her baseball bat to ruin all the electronics, releasing the others again.

I have to say it was pretty cool that Saten's big edge in the fight was that she didn't have a power. Points to the writers for that.

Telestina continues to be a horrible villain. I really got tired of listening to her cackle. Easily the worst aspect of this episode.

There was at least a bit of justification for Telestina's exposition moment: Mikoto was trying to buy time for Saten. So points for that, too, even though it meant us listening to Telestina gloating. Damn, that was annoying.

There were a lot of things about this episode, and in fact this entire plot arc, that don't survive a trip to the refrigerator (e.g. why isn't Konori crippled or dead?), so to hell with trying to understand it on any kind of deep level. I'll only make one point:

They show Kiyama in the hospital, and the last scene is an aaawwwweee heartwarming moment relating to her. But leaving all that aside, y'all do realize that she's going to spend the rest of her life behind bars, don't you? She committed all kinds of serious crimes in the Level Upper arc, not least of which is that she's responsible for killing or seriously wounding about a dozen AntiSkills. She dropped a truck on a group of them. No way they walked away from that.

Easily the stupidest thing in the episode was the beam-o-war. Completely gratuitous, and utterly nonsensical. The only justification for it was that they wanted to give Mikoto the last blow in the fight. (The right way to have handled that situation was for Kuroko to put a handful of spikes into Telestina's brain before she could fire her blaster.)

Still, it was action-packed and it really was fun, and everyone got a moment in the spotlight, even and especially Saten. I have to say that my favorite moment was Kuroko showing up to provide Mikoto with heavy ammunition. Not only was that awesome, but the animation in that sequence was pretty amazing.

UPDATE: A different question woould be why it was that the five schoolgirls were still running around loose during the epilogue. On the face of it they committed a hell of a lot of crimes during this episode.

Presumably Konori, Kuroko, and Uiharu would claim that they were doing all of it in the line of duty as part of their investigation of the Poltergeist case and other crimes related to it. They would claim that Telestina was illegally using MAR facilities, equipment, and personnel as part of her project, and that when it became obvious that the bad guys were using heavy weapons it became necessary to temporarily utilize the powers of two civilians (Mikoto and Kongou) and to fight at an equivalently violent level.

And since all five of them (six, really; Konori too) are not currently in jail, presumably someone in a position of authority bought that argument.

If they have been exonerated in that way, the flip side is that branch 177 of Judgement will now have one hell of a rep given that they cracked both this case and the Level Upper case. That's major league.

UPDATE: I've been making a bunch of changes inline in the first couple of hours after it was posted, so you might want to read it again.

UPDATE: On the question of "who's more dangerous, Kongou or Kuroko?" it depends a lot on who they're fighting. If they're fighting against each other, Kuroko wins easily. If they were fighting low-level thugs, Kuroko also is better.

But I think Kongou could fight against a tank and win. If she could touch it, she'd take it out easily by throwing it into something hard. Even from a distance she could toss really large objects at it. It seems that a tank would be too large for Kuroko to teleport, so about all she could do is to try to kill the crew by putting objects inside the tank.

...I guess Kuroko could disable a tank almost immediately by putting a big rock into the engine, couldn't she? And she could pretty easily disable the main gun. So maybe it's not so straightforward.

Anyway, Kuroko really does seem to have the edge, Kongou's pretensions notwithstanding. Nonetheless, Kongou did show up at a good moment, and she really was helpful in the first battle.

UPDATE: And now it's the next day, and I just watched it again.

As stupid and illogical as it was, I have to admit that watching it makes me happy. So in that sense, in terms of story telling, it's successful.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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