“Welcome to this mistaken world” -Truth
(Since not a whole lot happens in Episode 5 and since Episodes 5 and 6 fit together so nicely, I’ve decided to do them in one post)
Summary: Episode 5 gives us a bit of a break from all the excitement of the first four episodes. The episode introduces the Generation Bleu headquarters as well as one of the other IFO teams, Goldilocks. Ao spends a lot of time wondering why he joined Generation Bleu in the first places (since no one is especially welcoming.) Gazelle, Pippo, and Han (who were stowaways on the Triton) ask/blackmail the chief of Generation Bleu, Christophe Blanc, for jobs. Team Goldilocks is dispatched to deal with a Scub, but they run into a lot of trouble when they discover that a Secret is there too.
Episode 6 starts off with a strange bucktoothed man/crazy lady/ child solider/ drug lord/ shape shifter who wreaks havoc on a couple of different underworld type locations. He/She/It has amazing powers (other than being able to change form at will) and seems to be looking for something. We then get back to Team Pied Piper, who have been dispatched to help Team Goldilocks out of the dire situation the find themselves in. Ao, Fleur, and Elena arrive at the scene just as Bruno, Goldilocks’ Chief, steers their ship, the Medon, into the Secret in the hope that his sacrifice will damage it and create an opportunity for the others to be saved.
Ao and the others grab the other teams pilots and retreat with them to a near by hospital. Ao visits the youngest of Team Goldilocks’ pilots, Chloe McCaffery and they have a talk after which Ao is able to mentally get himself back together. He flies off to join the rest of his team and then uses some of what Chloe told him about fighting the Secret to beat it. The episode ends with the shape-shifting weirdo from the beginning of the episode breaking into the Generation Bleu headquarters on the search for the Nirvash. He introduces himself as Truth.
Impressions: Episode 5 was a nice break from all the information and action of the first four episodes, but it’s obviously a stop gap for the next round of action. It was nice to see the headquarters (it has an AWESOME building design.) This episode definitely showed that as much as Ao looks like Eureka, he is very much like Renton emotionally. They go through some of the same “Why am I here? What purpose do I serve?” kind of thoughts once they join their respective teams. Up until now, Fleur and Elena had been nice to Ao (or at least cordial) so it seems very out of the blue for them to act cold and almost mean to him. And then when they were suiting up to go, they just return to normal? It seemed strange. Oh! and the Nirvash (which is now officially called the Nirvash) got a sweet paint job, red, a silvery-white, and some green accents (but not like the original.)
Before I go on, I think I should mention that I don’t cry very easily. I can count on one hand the number of movies that have made me shed a tear. So I wasn’t really traumatized by Bruno’s death (and, I mean, he had like 3 minutes of screen time tops.) It really drove home the point the show has been making about protecting kids and not letting them die (see top image.) Seemed kinda early on in the show to throw in a character death like that, but what do I know? The fight with the Carousel Secret, as I like to call it, was all right. I know this series is only going to be about half as long as the original E7 and doesn’t have as much time to spend on episodes where they focus on character development, but even to me the way Ao recovered from his little depressed spell that he was having seemed a little bit too fast.
Let’s skip to the good part: TRUTH! After seeing him in the opening, he finally makes his appearance. What the heck is up with this guy? He has to be the overarching Villain-with-a-capital-V for the series. He’s got himself a pair of crazy eyeballs, that’s for sure. For a show that has weird monster things and giant robots, I really was not expecting a shape-shifting guy with the ability to blow things up at will to show up. He seems to be very interested in the Nirvash. And what the heck was he doing in the beginning where he was in two places at once?
Final though: We see in a scene from Episode 5 what looks like a hand sticking out of a piece of Coral. Then in Episode 6, Fleur (I think) mentions that the Generation Bleu headquarters was built using materials found inside the Scub Corals. I’m really CURIOUS about this. Why and how do the Scub Coral get stuff inside them?