This week we get yet another great episode for Kanata no Astra! It was completely riveting from beginning to end and I was on the end of my seat the whole time. It’s logical that after the episode’s conclusion last week with the news of someone inside the crew destroying the communicator, that we needed to have a look into who could be likely to do that, so I liked that episode 3 started with Kanata taking a look at each of the crew members separately and gauging out his feelings of suspicion. It also served the purpose of reminding the viewers how much we know about the characters so far and what their role within the crew is.
So far the two loners, UIgar and Yunhua are the most obvious choices due to their unsocial, withdrawn and quiet natures, but the way this show is written I have a feeling it could be anyone. In the end Kanata can’t figure out who it is on his own and he calls the thought experiment quits. Later on as they are arriving to the next planet Shummoor, Funicia tells the story of how she got adopted and some aspects of the story strike the members of the crew as strange. Once they question her more about it, it comes to light that the situation they’re in may have been planned for them after all!
Zack and Kanata decide then to tell the rest about the communicator sabotage. This causes the crew members to freak out and some of them voice their mistrust out loud more than the rest, Quitterie, I’m looking at you. As they start theorizing what could be the reason for someone wanting to have them all killed, Ulgar mentions his father is the vice-principal of the school which causes him the become the most suspicious of all. As they argue over these things, suddenly their ship is hit by small meteorites and the hull is ruptured. The air starts being sucked out of the ship and gravity control malfunctions so they have to put their discussion aside and rush to fix the problems with the ship.
As they celebrate afterwards that they were able to fix the issue, a bigger one appears: the planet’s gravity started pulling the ship in and they have 9 minutes to have the power back up or they will crash into the surface of the planet. I thought this was a very scary yet exciting situation for them to go through and it seems plausible enough in space since they were waiting to land and were stationed close to the planet. The part at the end when they land safely does strike me as a bit less believable, but what do I know! It just seemed kind of unlikely, but well, I can forgive such a small thing.
Once again there’s several intriguing things going on at the same time. First off, the fact that we don’t know anything about Yunhua and she had some very painful memories come up while she was accidentally drowning. She seems so troubled! I just want to give her a hug. Then, the fact that Ulgar is a decent shoot and he happened to find A GUN somewhere in the ship. I’m not surprised that guns were banned in this universe, that’s basically utopic for me, but I wonder then why there was one in that ship… or was Ulgar following instructions?? I guess we’ll find out at some point. Finally, there’s the fact that we still don’t know if the obviously suspicious people are the ones actually involved in the plot. It’s all very mysterious and I’m honestly loving it.
Keep it up, Kanata no Astra!
In science fiction the exact limits on what advanced technology can do are often unclear. So maybe it’s not impossible that a device that can manipulate gravity can instantly bring a ship to a halt just before it hits the ground. As well as cancelling out the backlash from such an abrupt stop. Similar to the inertial dampeners on Star Trek.
I have two big issues/question marks with this series at the moment.
1) Why does their trip require them to make it all the way back to Earth on their own? By which I mean why do none of the worlds that they are stopping at on their way home have any kind of human occupants? Space is pretty big so I sort of get it for the first few planets but it’s surprising that even the last one on their trip apparently has no human outpost of any kind.
2) Why has there been no mention of what if anything was in the ships database? Surely there would be records of some kind such as the original name of the ship, date of manufacture, crew and passenger manifests etc. If the database was blank or wiped even that should warrant a mention.
The thing that sucked them into space and showed up again seems like a wormhole to me. So honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some time travel shenanigans at play. It’s just a shot in the dark but I suspect the wormhole might have been created by them in the future. That their future selves are trying to fix something in the past that went wrong. Either that or they are fulfilling a pre-destination paradox where they have to make sure that history repeats itself.
Well, it is true that we can take such technology for granted, I just thought it was weird they didn’t comment at all on it.
What I thought about your first question was that maybe groups of planets are far apart. I imagine they use warping at some point, although it wasn’t outright mentioned, but even the planet they were going to camp in was deserted and far away from the planet they were originally from, so I suppose clusters of habitable and habitated planets are in somewhat close proximity maybe due to transportation resources, I don’t know. It’s a good point though.
Yeah, they should have looked at the database once they got in because it could have given them information on why the ship was left there so I also thought it was weird it wasn’t mentioned. Maybe it’ll be mentioned later on, but it’ll be too convenient if that happens. I like your theory about time-travel. I hadn’t really thought about it much, why that was there etc.