Mawaru Penguindrum Ep 9: Himari's Side of the Story

The episode showed us Himari’s side of the story since episode one and learn a bit about her past.

Impression:
This turned out to be an unexpected “Himari Flashback Episode”. We’ve learned how she had disappeared from the cash register in episode 1 when Shou was paying for the hat and had been following her penguin all the way to the elevator which led her up to another mysterious location only to turn out to be the library she always goes to. The strangest part of all was that she suddenly had a handful of books she figured she’d return. Himari was looking for a book called, “Super Frog Saves Tokyo”, which is really- a book of her life. The interesting thing about this book, it could possibly turn out to be the actual Penguindrum and the ‘Destiny Diary’ that Ringo had could’ve been the decoy to mislead us and the enemy – or, perhaps it really does have that power where if it land sin the wrong hands, things will be thrown into chaos and misfortune will happen to those who are targeted.
The are several things I wanted to point out that we learned this episode. For one, remember the tale from Episode 1 that the children were talking about? That story was in several occasions spoken of about how the two people or rather soulmate each take a share of Fate, or so the chosen one.
The question now is, who is Himari’s destined soulmate? Himari did point out she had someone she deeply cared about, but she doesn’t remember who he is.
We also learn about Himari’s past how she and her friends were going to audition to become idols as ‘Triple-H” since their names all started with an ‘H’. However due to her health, Himari finds herself having to leave school and she doesn’t encounter her friends again till a few years later on the train’s advertisement having debuted as ‘Double-H’.
As for Sanetoshi, my my he’s a handsome one. He has rather an interesting character and was the one to give Himari the Penguin Hat in which he claims, “…a wedding veil bestowed upon the bride of fate.” Anyhow I’m certainly looking forward to see him again!
The next point I wanted to mention was the Seven Social Sins, that was shown very briefly, but certainly something to take a look at.

“Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Knowledge without Character
Commerce without Mortality
Science without Humanlity
Politics without Principe
Worship without Sacrifice”

‘Wealth without Work’ strikes my attention to Kanba. I don’t see him working part time jobs, nor do we know what he’s doing to receive that money from the shady people. So if he’s really not ‘working’ and getting the money, he has committed a Social Sin.
‘Pleasure without Conscience‘ might be referring to Ringo. She is not true to herself, she is living a lie as her sister Momoka, she isn’t actually in love with Tabuki and she isn’t acknowledging her wronged actions.
Right now I doubt that we’ve seen every single sin committed within nine episodes considering this will be having up to at least twenty. Now that we seen this, we ought to keep our eyes out for perhaps a glimpse of Seven Social Virtues.
Overall the episode definitely filled in Himari’s side of the story. I’ve been a bit concerned for the past few weeks that while Himari is claimed as a main character, she hasn’t been getting a whole lot of screentime. This episode certainly helped since it was focused solely on her, not even sparing us the details about Shouma’s condition! I was also mesmerized by the animation techniques. As you know I’m a HUGE fan when it comes to Studio SHAFT’s awesome animation techniques to convey the mood with elegance, eerie setting. So to see some of those same techniques, is like a jackpot for me. I LOVE IT, I can watch it all day long and for god sakes I need to look it up and know what it’s called. It leaves such an impact on the audience members like myself!
Next week, it sounds like Kanba is taking action. I just hope Shouma is alright!
PS: =______=; Only now I’ve realized that the last three entries I had not only misspelt Kanba’s name as ‘Tamba’, Tabuki as ‘Tsubaki or Tubaki’ and Episode 6 & 7 double entry was mistyped as 7 & 8 and good lord, sucks to know I only found these today. I fixed these errors, but I’m going to double check again once I finish this. Clearly the jet lag had taken a toll on me for the past three weeks. =_=;