I knew things weren’t going to stay cute and lighthearted for long.
Mission: Bring samples of the virus from Mars and bring it back to Earth to create a vaccine and save humanity. Everyone on the Annex is heading off to Mars, where Captain Shokichi says that it’ll take 39 days to get there. Everything is fine, everyone’s getting settled in and enjoying themselves for now. People are having fun with the gravity and making sure their bodies are getting comfortable with it for Mars.
We get into love talk all of a sudden where Eva asks Sheila if she likes the Captain, and we find out that she does. She grew to have feelings for him when he comforted her when she had skipped training before the surgery because of depression. Again I ask, how are these people chosen for this mission? Anyway, they have cute girly talk where Eva keeps saying that Sheila should tell the Captain her feelings, which Sheila changes topic and suggests checking the shower room. There they meet a woman with a metal tag around her neck. I think she’s important, I’m guessing she was part of a past mission.
More fun time and 19 days have passed, the boys are playing catch, two guys get into a heated fight, the main group helps the blonde guy out that stopped the fight named Ivan. He gains a crush on Sheila, which Akira mentions to not get his hopes up because she has a thing for Captain. Teasing, more fun. I’m just glad that the group has gotten along with each other, but I guess it’s a little boring since we don’t see much of it. I know they wanted to speed the expedition up, because seeing them in the ship for 39 days would be boring too. But at least we do get to see them interact.
19 days pass and they finally reach Mars’ atmosphere. Everyone is on edge and scared for this mission, knowing that they’ll be up against those monsters. We get a flashback with Eva and that asshole named Adolf (…interesting picks for German names), and for once he was actually nice because all he ever says to people is that “You’re all vermin and you’re all going to die”. Even so, Eva is scared. We switch to Akira and Marcos, noticing someone has been in the shower room for far too long. And being nasty, peep in. And this is when things go wrong.
The next thing they know, a giant cockroach crashes the door from inside, holding a club and the girl’s corpse in the other hand. It’s not just that one, but there are even more terraformars in the ship. How in the world did they even get in there when they’re not even on Mars? There are terraformars attacking the others, just a gruesome bloodbath taking place. Everyone onboard is vulnerable to these things because they need to take a medicine where their superhuman abilities would awaken that they received during the surgery. Problem, all the medicine is in the storeroom. Bigger problem, when Akira and Marcos get there three terraformars already have destroyed all of it. Mission failed.
Questions! How did those things get in there, and what’s going to happen now? No one anticipated this was going to happen, and they weren’t supposed to take the medicine until they landed on Mars. Guns don’t work on these things. And the fact that those monsters destroyed the medicine must mean they’re intelligent, another problem. Things just keep getting from bad to worse. The tables have turned. We have no problem killing bugs and we feel more powerful than them, but that’s not the case here. We won’t be getting any cute talk anymore, this is a battle of survival. Really, the only ones that could probably stand a chance against these things are Akira and Michelle because they already have superhuman abilities, but it’s going to be tough for only the two of them to fight these things, especially since they don’t even know how many are in there.
Also, there was a man from the U-NASA (from the beginning of the episode) that went to a bar to question a man that was an engineer from a past Mars expedition, asking for his help. Also noting that the Annex project being different from the Bugs project, which is the current expedition. Wonder what that was all about.
One thing I’ll note for the censorship. Over the years Japan has changed it’s laws regarding gore on television, so we won’t see shows like this uncensored until the blurays/dvds come out. Though they were pretty strict with this censoring but I don’t blame them because the last five minutes were really gruesome. REALLY gruesome. Also, I love the fast-paced opening, it really fits the show. I also enjoyed the ending song. I can’t wait to see what happens next week.
