Episode 11 starts off with a fat man singing a very bad, off-key karaoke rendition of the show’s ending theme. For that alone, I love this episode. Sure, it gets kind of stupid after that, but the singing is just so goddamn goofy.
Okay, this episode begins by bringing back into the fray the dullest character in the entire series, the back-to-society cyborg Sayori. But she’s here making money playing guitar and reciting dull monologues about her need to kill Techno. Which is funny, too. And she tries, again, to kill Techno, the same way she’s tried to kill him the last two times she made an appearance.
And while watching, you realize that the show has reached its saturation point. Judging from the covers at this link, it would sure seem that manga author Noriko Nagano has gotten a hell of a lot of mileage out of the concept. I haven’t been able to track down any copies or synopses of the manga, so maybe it shoots off into brilliant thematic extrapolations that would blind these Conrad eyes. But my point is that, by episode 11, the concept of the anime is spent, and it’s a good thing it is coming to a close.
I suppose that, for cartoon geeks like me, this shores up the central appeal a lot of anime has: that a lot of it has the good sense to stop when it’s done, particularly in these twelve or thirteen episode series. Hell, there are a lot of twenty-six-episode series that could do well with being trimmed in half, or the like (Tenchi In Tokyo, para exemplum).
Back to the show at hand: It’s reasonably entertaining, I suppose, though it exists mainly to set up the conflict that will resolve the whole series – Hitomi, who is damned insecure, mistakes a grandmotherly kiss for one of deep passion, and decides that Techno will never love her when he discovers she’s human, and decides to leave him.
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