“If I went home and saw my mother, I’d just hug her and never let go.” -Pippo
Summary: Naru starts the episode off by flying around in space naked, and claims to then be able to completely understand everything. She then emerges from a Scub Coral on Iwato Jima. Meanwhile, the battle for Eureka continues. A Secret (who looks like Truth’s Secret form) arrives, just in case there weren’t enough different factions on the battlefield. Ao is eventually successful in making it close enough to return Eureka home but not before she drops a bombshell on him that the child she’s carrying is actually a girl. Ao returns to Iwato Jima to search for clues regarding the possibility of him having an older sister.
When he finds out that Naru is also on the island, he pays her a visit. They have a talk (mostly about Truth and the Scub) but before long they are interrupted by Nakamura (the guy who’s a totally dick and works for the Japanese Defense Force) who has come to put Naru in quarantine and arrest Ao for Endo’s death. Before he can drag the two off, Naru displays some of her new powers and calls up Eureka’s Nirvash (which had fallen into the ocean earlier in the episode). She then proceeds to blow some shit up and asks Ao to leave with her. When he declines her offer, she takes off leaving a very confused Ao behind.
Impressions: Let it be known that this episode is about where I lost all sense of what the hell is going on in this show. As much as I love E7AO and the characters, this was a really frustrating episode for me to watch. There is just too. Much. Going. On.
This episode just felt like they had decided to stuff in as much action and detail into it as they possibly could. It’s like seven different cooks all decided to make one dish without really planning out what the ingredients would be and so everybody just throws on what they want. Instead of eating a balanced meal with a clear main ingredient and a variety of supporting side dishes, you’d be eating a dish that pairs sushi with meatloaf and fried chicken all on one plate, without rhythm or reason. While all those things might be good separately, when they’re thrown all together like that it just becomes a mess. And that’s kind of what this episode was: a hot mess. Without a main event to base all the action around, as in previous episodes where the focus was on defeating whatever Secret happened to show up that week, this episode just kinda falls apart in to a collection of really random and scattered events.
Literally ever minute was packed to the gills with information of some kind. But instead of serving to clear up or answer some of the questions, all this information just makes the story more and more convoluted. I mean, you’ve got Naru flying around in space, naked as the day she was born, doing God knows what, talking in riddles, you’ve got Ao fighting Truth who’s basically an all powerful God or whatever, you’ve got three different governments and Generation Bleu all converging on this one spot where this fight is going on, all for different reasons, you’ve got Elena going capital C Crazy and trying to kill Eureka, and you have Eureka herself who just casually mentions that she’s actually pregnant with a girl before flying off into the arms of a very fucked up looking Nirvash. Not to mention a lot of the other stuff that’s talked about in the dialogue. And that’s just the first half of the show!
In the second half we see Naru and Ao talking for the first time since Naru was taken by Truth. She’s like a totally different character at this point and now claims to understand “everything.” Well good, then how about you explain it instead of trying your darnedest to imitate the Sphinx. Nakamura, whose a character I haven’t really touched on a lot because 1. I didn’t actually know what his name was (I had to look it up, because they only mention it like once in the show) and 2. I really though he’d go way by now, is another character who is just around in this episode. Just what is his motivation for all of the damage that he causes, in this episode and in previous ones? It’s yet another thing that’s just left hanging. The thing that just really just made me a little mad was Naru and the Nirvash she and Truth pull out of the sea. Where the heck did that come from? Is it really the one that Eureka came in that dropped into the ocean earlier? But we saw that one get all kinds of destroyed by Truth before it hit the water, and this one looks pristine. So can the Scub magically repair things too? And why would the Nirvash, the same one that Truth claimed hated him, now all of a sudden just do his and Naru’s bidding? Naru and Eureka both want to save Ao (or at least protect him) so why does Naru not like Eureka?
Now, I’d like to think that I’m not a total idiot and that I can follow complex story lines without too much difficulty, but this is just…I don’t even know what information is important to the story anymore (I don’t even know what the main focus of the story is for that matter! Is it Ao looking for his mom? Is it the search for which world is real? Is it about the Scubs and the Secrets and trying to control them? Is it about Naru and Truth and who they are and where they come from? These are not questions you should have 14 episodes into the show)! And that’s what my main critique of AO comes down too; it just can’t seem to decide what kind of story it’s trying to tell and so it’s trying to tell them all. If it manages to pull it off and tie up most, if not all, of the seemingly endless plot points it’s got going on, it’s going to be great. But if it doesn’t…it’s just going to go down in flames as a show that tried to spread it’s self too thin.
Final Thought: Okay, what the fuck is up with Naru? Not only is she wearing some kind of new, ugly ass get-up that looks like the bastard offspring of a table cloth and something a hippie cult member would wear, but now she’s got weird ear things? What is she, half Pokemon? And what the hell are they there for? So she can better receive messages from her alien overlords? I guess it’s just one more thing I’ll add to my growing list of “things that happen on Eureka Seven AO but then are never really explained.”