Space travel is a concept that’s paradoxically one of the most culturally iconic and divisive among the population, especially since this is a world where economic security takes priority over plumbing the deepest reaches of space in order to discover cosmic monstrosities lurking in the darkest corners of the furthest galaxies. Unlike most moral or economic arguments, where one side is composed entirely of people that think coloreds-only bathrooms were a good idea, and the other is made up of unerring optimists with stars gleaming in their eyes, both sides in this debate have a strong voice of reason embedded in their arguments.
However, nobody takes the time to ask the thoughts of the real heroes, the vehicles engineered to drift through the void of space; after all, they’ve had to weather the loneliness of spending years without any sort of human contact. Jinrui took that fateful step when nobody else would, and the result is touching, if unsurprisingly cynical. Also, it involves a giant cat fighting an equally massive nautilus, which probably registers as some kind of fetish to a small subset of the population.
As silly, contradictive, and downright pretentious as it sounds, the greatest strength of this episode isn’t in the actual content; compared to previous offerings, it feels quite sparse in terms of subtext and social commentary, the normally off-the-wall presentation not adding to the overall effect. It’s difficult to pin down in words, but the execution of the giant cat fight that should have been the highlight of the episode was forgettable at best. But before I could write off the entire thing as a failed experiment, a heartfelt talk with Oyage and Pion completely assuaged my concerns that the episode wasn’t building to something good, and it’s a testament to the strength of the writing that a simple dialogue exchange can convey as much as the zaniness of previous adventures, even with less Watashi-snark.
Still no shortage of adorableness, thankfully.
And… that’s all I can say on the matter, really. I’d like to discuss the theme of the episode, but it’s a tricky beast, and I can’t for the life of me pin down just what it is. I can’t tell if it’s secretly advocating for space exploration regardless of generally being seen as a waste of resources, or if it really does believe that repurposing spacecraft to more directly serve humanity would be the ideal option, regardless of just how inefficient the end result is. Those are my two possible interpretations, neither of which I entirely agree with, so make of them what you will.
Regardless of just what soapbox Jinrui is trying to preach from, the final ten minutes of episode five are more emotionally charged than almost anything else that’s aired this season. Romeo may have the subtlety of Red Skull doing a guest performance in the Blue Man Group, but by the gods he can really breathe life into two spacecraft waxing philosophical about their loneliness. Most importantly, and this can’t be said enough, short-haired Watashi is back, which is more than enough cause for celebration.
Curiosity, what have we done?! ;-;
Also, I think this “arc” is played out before the first episode, which is why she is short-haired.
Oh man, Haruhieqsue nonlinearity would be fantastic.
One thing I really liked was how the spacecrafts said they came back to Earth. Voyager mentions that he got a signal a year ago and just decided to come back because he got lonely. It’s said so matter-of-factly that it completely blows over the fact that there’s no way for them to come back (or at least it would be really hard).
Yeah. I thought that was funny. A physicist’s perspective.
Well she could have just had her hair cut again after the fact, seeing as it magically regrew, but I’m willing to buy that it’s a prequel. Would be pretty neat if it was.
They started the show by animating like the third book or something, so that’s why I think it might be set before.
There’s definitely less satire in this episode, but I’m still not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. The entire story seemed kind of rushed and didn’t reach a great conclusion (don’t get me wrong, it was still good). I think they do comedy much better so I hope we’ll see more of that in the next episode, but I’m not giving up on the emotional stuff yet. We’ll see.
I was hoping that there’d be actual quality that wasn’t just Watashi’s deadpan snarking. As far as comedy goes though, she’s still the series’ anchor.
But I love deadpan snarking…
I do too, but it shouldn’t be the sole facet for any comedy, especially in Jinrui.
I did enjoy the surprise that this was a prequel to the first episodes of Jinrui and that it gave the reason as to why the Narrator’s hair was so short to begin with, but I felt like these two episodes’ message was done in a messy way? I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, because on one hand we had the overarching theme of technology and human dependency, but then we had the show poking humor at the shounen/mecha ‘overdramatic’ genre, and then we had probes who were in love with one another. In comparison to the previous two episodes, which were strictly focused on fandom and otaku culture, this just felt…very cluttered. I still really enjoyed the whole nautilus and cat fight. Just goes to show how little it takes to amuse me.
Gah, sorry for getting back to this late. Anyway, I agree that they tried to pack way too much into these past two episodes, aiming for several marks but not hitting any of them in the process. Still, the end result worked far better than I expected, helped in part by a cat fighting a nautilus.
Yeah, hopefully this next arc will be a little better – it looks promising!