“What the hell’s up with your right hand?!”
Impression
What a great episode. The visuals, the OST, the falcon punching – everything just reeked of awesome today. I must admit, I can’t remember too much about the original fight scene (it’s been years since I’ve glanced at Index) but I’m pretty sure they did a better job this time round.
Touma’s heroism really showed through. Despite turning up too late (after realizing his phone’s clock was 20 minutes off =_=) he still managed to prevent MISAKA 10032 from being killed, and pissed off Accelerator enough to divert his attention. After all, he’s the last person who’d want to stand up against him – a seemingly useless Level 0 standing up against Academy City’s strongest Level 5 is such a joke it’s not even funny. Until Accelerator tasted Touma’s fist a couple of times, that is. While not as satisfying as watching Rivaille teaching Eren his rightful place, Touma’s “Imagine Breaker” punches did make me very happy 😀 Despite knocking Accelerator around a couple of times, it was interesting to see that Touma still got hurt. Rocks are still rocks – even if they’re forcibly thrown at Touma by Vector Change, they’re still real physical objects, and he’d get hurt by them. The same applies to the flour crates and the dust explosions. It’s only because Accelerator had this weird fixation with reversing his blood flow and destroying his body from the inside out that Touma was able to punch him so easily.
Speaking of Accelerator…it seems like he’s managed to redefine “batshit insane”. To be honest, I’m not sure how much of that was an act – to an extent, his brutality was an attempt to intimidate the Sisters into not attacking him (with the intent to stop them getting killed). But I’m sure there’s a reason why Misaka’s labelled as the sanest of all seven Level 5’s. His surprise at feeling pain made me laugh 😀 Of course, being the strongest means that it’s likely he hasn’t been hurt many times, let alone punched – and thus he has weak physical resistance against someone like Touma, who practically lives off street fighting. I can understand why he doesn’t need physical resistance though. If he can control plasma to that extent, he really doesn’t need hand-to-hand combat. Letting that thing drop would have destroyed the entire city.
Then we have Misaka, who is still of the opinion that her death will stop the experiments. It seems she shares many similarities with 10032, doesn’t she? Both of them wanted to save Touma, and were willing to sacrifice themselves to do so. After all, Touma’s just a random stranger to them, who decided to risk his life for “an artificial body and mind” worth 180,000 yen. But he’s also the hero that Misaka’s been after all this time – someone who’s willing to get beaten up to that extent to protect his own ideals. It looks like Touma will be getting up next episode to finish the job properly – but where do we go from here? The Sisters arc wraps up after this in Index, but I’d imagine Railgun will have a few more loose ends to tie up first.
I like how they’re staying truer to the light novels with this adaption. For example, in the first season of Index that plasma scene was no where near as epic as it was in the novels… I guess they rectified that here. Little discrepancies here and there have really made this retelling of the arc more interesting than the original, keeping it fresh without deviating too much from the established plot.
And it’s definitely great to watch Misaka and all 9000+ Misaka clones falling in love with Touma all over again…
Oh yes, it was much more epic than Index – And now after randomly watching this one episode I’m totally marathoning this series (finally).