Rolling Review – Active Raid (03)

Episode Synopsis:

Welcome again to Active Raid, wherein juvenile psychopaths troll the power suit police by manipulating mentally unstable individuals into causing havoc with specialized industrial hardware. This week’s target: a pop idol concert. Also we get to see some interpersonal friction inside the squad.

Episode Review:

I don’t know, folks – from where I’m sitting, the ice this show is skating on is already thinning out. I feel like we’re jumping through a lot of weird hoops, as if part of the show’s goal is to deliberately set up the kind of “Yeah, but” moments that Su mentioned in last week’s review. Perhaps most noticeably, another younger sister to our main antagonist appears (high-school-age, I think), and attempts to feed him a tomato mouth-to-mouth while straddling him. The intended “Yeah, but” is that he banishes her from his room for this action, but, really, this only raises the question of why she thought it’d be a good idea in the first place.

More key to the main plot of the episode is Asami’s punishment for destroying the building in the previous episode, which takes the form of cosplaying a pop idol and throwing down at karaoke. This serves an initial “Yeah, but” when Rin explains that a punishment tends to be as effective as the degree to which you don’t want to have it happen to you ever again, and then it circles back in at the end of the episode when…

uhhhh…

I’ll be honest: I have no idea why this was happening. It’s entirely possible that the command team got a play-by-play of what happened before the evacuation, but they only try this at the same time as they’re fighting for remote control of the unit – which, I might add, isn’t quite as interesting to look at as it feels like it should be:

Who do they think they’re deceiving, though? And to what end? The Logos guy (whose handle is probably Mythos) seems pretty confident that any attempt by the pilot to oppose the remote control could end up breaking his bones, but, with the speed that thing was moving earlier in the fight, I’m frankly surprised that that hadn’t happened already. Ultimately, it seems like the dance number is just there to add insult to injury when the crew finds out that the fight was caught on live TV.

And I understand that the overweight creeper is the kind of poorly-adjusted social outcast that Logos would be able to con into this sort of thing, but did we really have to get the shirtless shot? I mean, I’ll buy that not every power suit in the continuity necessarily involves a G-Gundam-esque body sock (though I will note that those are the only kinds that we’d seen so far) – the cut-away just seems a little unnecessary.

And another thing: Soichiro (the blue-haired guy) is obviously tired of dealing with Takeru (the red-haired guy, natch), to the point where, right before the sortie, he resolves to take Rin up on an offer to transfer to the First Investigation Division in Osaka, but he decides not to during the post-fight conversation about how much trouble they’re about to be in. Maybe I’m just botching my Sense Motive roll, but I’m having a hard time picking out what his thought process was there.

There is at least one good thing to come out of this episode, though, and that is the mysterious new development in background-character-spotting. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out, even – or perhaps especially – if it’s never actually explained.

Episode Review:

Hear, hear.

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