Houkago no Pleiades Episode 6

I said I was going to drop the coverage, but then this episode happened.

Talk about choosing a bad time to drop the coverage of this series. Although some may have been more hyped up about the episode, for me it wasn’t extraordinary… but it was definitely the strongest episode to date. But what kind of blows is that it took six weeks to make things interesting again. And it is not just that: While it makes sense for this event to be so sudden, the only thing that bothered me was the transition between episode 5 and 6. Episode 5 was a character central episode, and wasn’t exciting or anything of the sort and that was it. Nothing significant to the plot happened. Then all the sudden, this week’s episode starts off with a bang of “What is that in the sky?!”. Frankly speaking, I wished they had actually put that in last week’s episode to serve as a cliffhanger so it wouldn’t feel as if it just came out of nowhere. They could have easily put it after the ED. It would have served as an excellent hook for people like me, who have grown bored of the series. That is exactly what Houkago no Pleiades has been lacking since the first episode. The hook!

As for the episode, what made it strong? What made it different from what we have seen for the past five weeks?
There are a number of things that we didn’t know about which were revealed today: One of them being about the Spaceship and the true purpose of why our tiny Pleiadian is in such a hurry to retrieve all the fragments. See, since the engine broke down, their spaceship when into this slumber state where it dematerialize. What nobody realized what that the spaceship is about the size or bigger than Earth itself, and it’s too close so it’s getting pulled in by the gravitational force and~ basically the world would be doomed if it crashes into Earth. This is why the little Alien was in such a frantic state, trying his hardest to get the bloody engine to work with the few fragments they had managed to collect for themselves.

The second thing was Subaru’s development. I sincerely hope Subaru will not take two steps back after finally taking a step forward into the right direction. Her meetings with Minato were not all in vain, today played an important role of where she had to made a decision, and she had to make it fast. Minato helped her get out of the building which Dark Star (or as the girls like to call him: Horned Cape) had locked up so that he could steal the fragments they had gathered without any interference. I also want to give her major props for being sharp about the fragment they had just received. She had realized it was the same one which Dark Star had stolen from them.
Subaru also made courageous decisions today, putting her body in front of Aoi to protect her (not that I ever doubted her doing that in the past) and the school telling Dark Star that she would not move from his attack (which of course was merely a bluff- or at least that’s how it looked). I like seeing Subaru being more affirmative and I hope to see more of that from her, especially now that Minato has disappeared.

…Which leads us to the third point: Minato. Rather than simply provide friendship advice, he actually did something for an exchange. It was interesting because as soon as he found himself in pain, he started talking about promises and resolutions. He clarified to Subaru that he had never declined her offer to join her Stargazing, and asked if next time she could invite him. He also provides her assistance of escaping the school by directing her to follow a path that will lead her out, along with handing her a flower, promising it will protect her. That said flower reacts to Subaru’s convictions and causes the girls’ Shafts to evolve, providing them enough energy to put the spaceship back into a hibernated state.  But when Subaru returns to the greenhouse, all the plants in the garden has withered and Minato is nowhere to be found and all what remains is a single plant. And from what we have heard from him (if it is him) saying to Dark Star, the place is now closed.
It certainly begs of the question of what happens next. Minato never thought too much about leaving the garden but now he has enough interest that he wants to.

What pipes my curiosity though is how Dark Star was shooed out of the Greenhouse when he had stepped inside, and shortly before that, due to the matching earring (though Minato was wearing both at the time), there was some sort of energy which had affected Minato.

The one thing I was hoping to get out of this episode was to understand why Dark Star is trying to collect the fragments himself, why he was saying “it’s too soon” to the spaceship when he played it off that he didn’t care what happens to Earth. He is a very mysterious, not to mention confusing character. I honestly though when he woke up in the garden was was speaking to (I suspect) Minato’s silhouette, I thought the guy was going to say, “I am you.” but they didn’t elaborate to that point, but they did make it a cliffhanger- so there we go, they finally thew us a bone. It’s small, but at least it’s something to perk our interest again.

While this episode was the most significant to date and not flat for an exchange, unfortunately I didn’t consider it amazing. This is why I can’t say that, “OMFG SIGN ME BACK IN!” because one episode of actual development taking place isn’t enough to motivate me to jump back onto the bandwagon without a second thought. I decided to share my thoughts this week’s episode just in case next week’s episode manages to be interesting or more, then maybe I can continue, as long as it has stuff that motivates me to want to write about it again (I mean hey, this is the most I have written for this show to date!). So as a heads up for next week or future episodes, if I end up not writing up an entry within 48hours, that will mean I have dropped the coverage for good.