Cinnamon Ass

Oh dear, Satoru Utsunomiya, when will you learn to draw facial features properly? You’re an incredible animator, but most of the time you can’t draw actual human bodies to save your life! It’s so sad, as it detracts from some of the most powerful scenes in this episode.

And what a powerful episode! I cried. I am such a wuss. However, there’s one thing in particular I need to clear up with you, faithful readers! Watch out for spoilers, people…

Right, so in “a” future, Miho becomes a complete social outcast and gets so depressed she forgets things and is about to overdose on aspirin, Isami goes off the rails and nearly turns to murder after one of his eyes is taken out in a knife fight, and Ai almost leaps off the roof of a building because she puts her knee out running to find Isami post-op and so can’t play football professionally.

This can’t be the future that produced Lacrima, obviously, as both Miho and Ai are alive there, although it must share some similarities (particularly Fukurou’s eye and Amamiku’s career as a doctor/scientist). But I wasn’t totally clear as to whether it was the future that produced Shangri-La - it was insinuated as such, but it didn’t seem to make much sense if it was. Plus, wasn’t it all just a construct that Noein made using the kids as they stepped out of Haruka’s house? Otherwise there’s no way that Yuu and Atori could have interfered really without changing Shangri-La in some respects.

Was that what Noein was talking about at the end of the episode? That the future still hadn’t changed because of what happened to Yuu i.e. Haruka’s death (which I’d guessed quite some time ago, she seems to have a pretty tragic fate in every time line - hopefully the “real” one won’t be so bad) and some presumed “quantum event”? As we know Yuu goes away to high school in Tokyo in this timeline (from Isami’s conversation with him once Haruka activates the Torque) so whatever turns him into Noein must happen after this (facilitated by Haruka’s death), but I’d assumed that the Magic Circle’s experiments were going to have something to do with it - I guess not, though. Given we’ve only got two episodes left I really hope they find time to explain what the hell happened to create Noein and the Dragoons given that they’re supposed to have timelines roughly similar to Hakodate to an extent.

Hmmm, my head’s all confused about this now, so I’ll talk about some of the non-intellectual stuff in this episode!

Why could Yuu see the buildings in Shangri La but Karasu couldn’t? It had something to do with Yuu’s feelings for Haruka making him more able to reach her or summat, right? I didn’t quite understand that part of the dialogue - help me, more Japanese-proficient people! Please? It’s hardly crucial, but I like the scriptwriters’ random explanations for things they obviously went “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” at when writing this show.

Asuka noticing her house is gone = AWESOME, even if we did seem to get the weird episode 2-style character designs for her scenes (but hey, at least they look human *cough*Utsunomiya*cough*). And while I’m ragging on Utsunomiya, I will concede that he is almost peerless in human nuance despite his inability to draw faces and hands - this episode threw all consistency to the wind, but it was still rather nicely done.

Shinohara is a sleazeball, and I’ll be glad to see his come-uppance whenever that happens - I’m sticking to my theory that Mayuzumi is the Wanderer of Time, and something’s going to go wrong with the Magic Circle project that casts him out into space-time permanently (or at least I HOPE we get some kind of explanation for him, we’re running out of time…) Hopefully Team Uchida (yes, she is my favourite out of the four of them) will infiltrate the ship in time to stop things - interesting that we’ve got two “brains” in Tobi and Uchida, and the “brawn” from Kosagi and Koriyama. Well, unless Tobi tries throwing those computer cube things of his at people - and shouldn’t he be fading into nothingness soon as per foreshadowing a few episodes ago?

Did Atori say that he had been to Shangri-La before, having attempted to teleport there with Marie, but she’d somehow got lost in the transfer attempt? There was something about that when he was warning Isami-tachi about leaving the house, but I didn’t quite catch it. Looking forward to him vs. Shangri-La judging by the next episode preview.

I think this is perhaps my biggest concern at this point - we’ve only got two episodes left, and can the show really wrap everything up successfully in that time? The next episode is entitled “End”, and Satelight are being very careful in not giving anything away about it - the next episode preview shows next to nothing that could give away anything about the plot, and the Noein homepage is similarly cryptic, so I’m hoping there’ll be some resolution coming up here. The extent of how well the show gets resolved really determines my overall opinion of it - Noein has been utterly brilliant so far (even the stretch of “okay” episodes around 17 to 19 were miles better than most series) and I just hope the end is as spectacular as the rest of the show has been. Is that too much to ask? Please?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Noein. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.