The Journey Home #15-16 – This week’s episode is a paean to two of the hardiest lifeforms on Earth. First the tardigrade, which, as stated, is nearly indestructible, although it is new information to me that if you carelessly drop one into an artificial black hole, it will not only survive for a century but construct an entire psychically projected environment which can only be escaped by attaining a temporary state of nirvana.
The black hole (actually a wormhole, I think), leads to a midden on the far side of the galaxy. This seems like a poor use of jumpgate techology, but hey, if someone invented a magic hole that made trash disappear forever, we’d use it, wouldn’t we?
This brings us to the second most hardy lifeform on Earth: the cockroach. Okay, robot cockroaches, but still. Robot cockroaches which will swarm anything with electrical power and drain it. (Okay, maybe robot crazy ants.) Liberal use of a particle beam seems to get rid of them, but either it also drains the battery, or it didn’t actually work. And now our heroes are stuck further from home than before.
Attack on Titan #44 – If Rod Reiss could have just kept his mouth shut, the plan might have worked. But no, like many a villain before him, he feels compelled to explain exactly what’s going to happen. Given a chance for informed consent, Historia is not sure she wants to eat her friend. Plus, it gives Kenny a chance to show up and argue about it, and when even the prolific serial killer starts suggesting that something might be a bad idea, it is almost certainly a bad idea.
So, provided that Eren can get over himself long enough to fight off Reiss’s Titan form, the ancestral memories of what really happened before the Walls were built are locked away. Or are they? Eren was able to recall what his father saw when under the influence of the Reisses, so maybe with Historia’s help, they can be brought forth.
And there is clearly something very important in those memories. Even Rod’s brother who was all for sweeping the Titans away and going outside the Walls was all “nope, nevermind” once he knew the full story. Part of it may be the knowledge that the Titans are mostly their own transformed countrymen. But it may also be that what’s outside the buffer zone is even worse.
(Crunchyroll — AnimeLab — Wakanim — Anime on Demand — Funimation)
Persona5 the Animation #22 – The season clock is counting down, but there’s room for one more episode stuffed full of side stories and vague hints at what’s coming. The Phan-Site’s admin has a slight breakdown, and the Phantoms get all dressed up and head into Mementos just to tell him to get over himself. The girl Ren got himself on probation to save shows up and turns out to be a shogi prodigy, so they play shogi. I’m guessing that entire mini-arc was included just so they could animate the moment when she shouts out an attack name, fighting-show-style.
Back at the main plot, the Phantoms’ continuing ineptness at hiding the fact that they’re a group has both the traditional authorities and Akechi closing in on them. And since Sae’s boss appears to be in cahoots with the mysterious person in the black mask, that’s their real enemy catching up to them too.
And then things take a much more interesting turn with the revelation that the final Palace belongs to Sae herself, which puts a whole new spin on her interrogation of Ren. Are they actually in the real world? Or is the holding facility, like the other Palaces, a reflection of how she sees her relationship with other people? Is it a coincidence that the path has led to Sae, or have her ambitions been encouraged by her boss specifically to make her develop a Palace, and thus serve as a trap for the Phantoms?
(Crunchyroll — AnimeLab — Wakanim — Aniplus HD — Hulu — bilibili)
We Rent Tsukumogami #7 – An incense burner is possessed by the spirit of a man who died in a fire in Nihonbashi and longs to see his wife again. The ghost of a woman has haunted a building in Nihonbashi ever since a fire there. But these pieces don’t fit, because the fires are separated by a hundred years. A weird coincidence? Not really. Close-packed buildings made of wood, and paper meant fires in Edo were extremely common, and there would have been many fires between the one that killed Uraha-yanagi and the one that unhoused Tokubei and O-Kō.
That would seem to be when O-Kō lost track of Satarō and Suō. That explains why she would ask an art dealer to be on the lookout for Suō— Satarō and his family might be dead, and Suō might have been sold off somewhere.
I expect Satarō to show up alive just when Seiji finally gets up the courage to confess his feelings to O-Kō. They seem to be obvious to everyone else at this point, including the tsukumogami.
Our missing show this week is Steins;Gate 0, which has re-aired last week’s episode. This probably means production problems, and also that the lost time is going to be made up by cutting material from the remaining ones. As dense as the show already was, this runs the risk of making it nearly impossible to follow what’s happening.
