April 25, 2004
Madlax Episode 2 - crimson
Weirder and weirder...
Margaret Burton is a rich young girl living on her own in Paris with her maid, Eleanor. She seems to have problems with sleepwalking and generally focusing on the real world, and has been having strange dreams about tanks and the creepy girl from last week's prologue together with a blonde boy. Her ex-neighbour, Vanessa, happens to be in town after going to an auction for a strange sculpture, and takes her to visit her workplace (despite Margaret's repeated protestations that it's going to rain), where Margaret is creeped out by a strange man and mention of a country called Gazth-sonika, where the sculpture is co-incidentally heading.
Vanessa takes Margaret home and gives her a present of a pair of red shoes she'd been staring at, but they only serve to give her strange flashbacks to a ruined clock. After Margaret excuses herself, it becomes obvious that Eleanor and Vanessa know something about Margaret's past that they're trying to shelter her from. Margaret, meanwhile, digs out a treasured possession - a bloodstained picture book from her father - as rain pours down around Madlax in a distant city and a crazy man in a mask smashes the sculpture from earlier and waffles about insanity.
Margaret is almost identical to Lain Iwakura, except with some sort of dark war-torn past that makes her act erratically instead of weird technological doodads. As such it's fairly difficult to get to grips with the episode without going "what?" most of the time - her reactions to things make no sense at all, which is fair enough given we don't know her background, but she's surrounded by things that make her act in certain ways and the audience is given no explanation for them. However, the show is thick with mysteries, and unfortunately my curiosity demands I keep watching until at least some of them have been unravelled. Here's hoping they get Madlax and Margaret together fairly soon, though, the dual plotline thing could get fairly boring.
Posted by BluWacky at April 25, 2004 01:33 PM