Cinnamon Ass - Reborn Like a Zombie

Trinity Blood Episode 5 - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Abel and Esther arrive in Rome, and after a fiasco involving Abel losing his ID they go to see Katarina, who berates Abel good-naturedly. Basically, the rest of the episode is meet-and-greet time for Esther (and the audience), as she meets the other members of Ax, the Vatican subgroup that Abel works for - these include the perceptive Noelle Bow, the scatter-brained genius William Wordsworth and Kate Scott, the British commander of Ax's main battleship. We also get to see more of Pope Alessandro, but he's annoying and snivelly so the less time spent on him the better. The only particularly interesting part of the episode is when Katarina flashes back 10 years, when a mysterious spaceship crash-landed in Rome and all hell broke loose - it's insinuated that this is the origin of the Rosen Kreuz order, and that Katarina's family were killed by vampires. Abel is seen weeping over the body of a dead woman before slaughtering a bunch of vampires and later promising to protect Katarina. Plus Esther has a star-shaped birthmark (hurray, clunky foreshadowing, but that means that Esther should at least prove important!).

But all that was incidental to the REALLY BORING CHARACTER INTRODUCTIONS. I have no problem with character development, it's always welcome, and it's not as turgidly paced as some series I can think of. However, it doesn't make for a very exciting watch, and frankly the reasons I'm watching Trinity Blood are because it's got great animation and good action sequences, so an episode devoted to vaguely comedic hijinks doesn't exactly appeal to me. It's not bad, just dull.