Gunslinger Stratos ep 9 [ Completely Expected ]

Yeah what’d I say, Dr. Odhner is evil. He starts off the episode by force pulling Remy and Tohru and. . .what then? Welp, he and his other world  counterpart say with his new data they’ll be creating energy cubes and that basically, Tohru is screwed. What does it all come down to? Petty jealousy. I won’t even pretend here, this scientist is so blatantly uninteresting that I don’t care about this.

This episode really shows off a lot of things that are wrong with this show. No kidding, I have so many issues with this show that stem from it’s low production value and it’s limited amount of time. Why do I care about this episode? The character’s you have spent time making me care about might be here but they’re not really in enough danger to make me upset.

The thing we learn is Odhner hated answering to Kyohma. Well you know what? We haven’t seen enough of that! He apparently went on rants about it but we had to hear about rants and meaningful dialogue from exposition. What kind of storytelling is that? We also have Kumi come into a more important light but as I’ve mentioned everyone except all the mainly featured characters haven’t really shown.

This show has all the materials to be good. And some of the episodes are entertaining! Unfortunately given the production values it’s hard for me to say much. This episode featured everyone being imprisoned and locked down, and there was no fear from me. About 10 minutes in I was fully aware everyone would be okay. There’s even a scene where Tohru pulls a knife on guards and it’s implied he had to kill them, but there was no weight there. It just happened. Nothing was very deep.

This really just felt like a distraction. We know the real threat is Dead End and when the episode began with another threat going on at first it was interesting. Yet as the episode kept going I didn’t feel anything beyond a ‘well that’s nice’. We see a lot of characters and we give them more weight now, but how do they matter to me this late into the game? The problem is they don’t. I’m invested in very few things.

I will say it’s important he got to Kyoka. As you should all probably guess by now I think I’m safe to say my prediction of who the ghost girl is might be 100% right, but the preview for next episode shows it’ll confirm or deny that. This is a show about time travel and there’s a couple, afterall. If the show continues as it has been, my review will simply be it’s been an average but entertaining ride. It’s on the coat tails of shows like Black Bullet, never hurting anyone but never quite making the impact they’re capable of.

Until next time.

Oki