Rolling Review – Active Raid (10)

Episode Synopsis:

Logos’s two remaining members, Bird and Mythos, are ready to enact their horrible plan. Mythos burns down his super secret building and Bird reveals himself to the police. Unit 8 gets disbanded and in the face of the greatest threat ever known to the police force, who will rise to stop it!!?!

Episode Review:

Episode 10 is fast paced and culminates in a interesting issue for our heroes but the ride to get there is not totally smooth.

The episode starts with Mythos having a flashback about the pink haired girl and then a newspaper article appears about the terrorism act “The Fruit of Tragedy”. Apparently the cult leader for the act fled oversees. Mythos wakes up and we are given the impression he either IS the cult leader or suffered as a result of the terrorism act.

Moving away from this we learn about the Refloat Waterfront. It’s a Projection Mapping event to restore the submerged district. The event involves mist machines on trains and a coordinated light show of some sort. Mostly…I was just confused.

The problems start with the fact that the show had no real character drama to begin with. Bird and Mythos meet for the first time and Mythos shuts down his secret building, revealing that he helped random girls pay their debts in exchange for them acting like his older sister. The tiny pink haired moe girl turns out to be a computer generated “younger sister”. All this dissolves and I found myself going…”What was the point?!”. Was I supposed to be feel sad? surprised? amused? I never understood anything about the enemy and the newfound knowledge that he’s been creating a “fake” family means nothing and wastes episode time.

Later in the episode, Bird tricks Rin’s twin sister Haruka into coming to the school so he can…almost seduce her? It’s been hinted at that Haruka finds class pres guy (Bird) attractive but this scene makes no sense at all. Bird calls Haruka over and then the police show up to get him. To Haruka’s shock he reveals himself to be Logos’s leader and allows himself to be taken into custody. At the debriefing, Haruka gets a double shock by learning that Rin is the leader of Unit 8. I can only imagine that Haruka’s emotional takedown is going to feature in a later episode but it all feels so pointless because the rest of this episode ignores this completely.

All seems well now that Logos is in custody but Unit 8 is suddenly disbanded after it’s revealed that Asami’s uber boss has been watching her (and thusly Unit 8) the entire time. The members all begin to accept that they must go their separate ways. Magically…Rin determines that their must be TWO members of Logos. Of course this is true because…reasons….

Unit 8 attempts to regroup to discuss their new theory just as Mythos proceeds to unleash…a giant earthquake at the Waterfront Event?! Just kidding, the earthquake never happens but all the power goes out and we discover that the Orochi system has been breached! Oh snap! What will happen to Japan!

Episode Summary:

Some old elements from episodes past come together to make Episode 10 work out for Logo’s grand scheme. Overall the big issue that I had with this episode is that everything at the end happens way too fast. Unit 8 magically puts all the pieces together about Logos, and Asami’s mission to spy on Unit 8 was forgotten and then used as a plot device. A more overarching problem is that I don’t care enough about these people to really feel bad that they are disbanded as a unit.

I’m curious to see what all the fuss is about but this episode felt like it had to cheat to get us to the end.

And since it’s the most interesting part of the episodes…here SHE is. I swear if she isn’t important somehow I’m gonna hate this show…

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