Part The First
Let’s figure out what really happened, because this episode is longer than the others, and anything we’re gonna know for sure, we’re gonna know here. After the last episode, Haruka disappeared with Canti-sama, leaving Naota despondent. Then she came back and left again, this time taking Naota. However, they didn’t leave town. One day, Ninamori saw them sleeping on a dumpster. True to character, she did nothing. So far, all this is clear.
Mamimi has lost her kitten, and she’s lost Naota. So she finds a little robot-thingy from the river that eats electronics, and decides that it’s the new Takkun. She uses it to sic on all the mopeds, bikes and cars that belong to her enemies. But it goes out of control, because it’s a master power unit. Canti-sama (he’s another part of the power unit) merges with it, and becomes a big-ass thing that’s going to make the enormous iron-shaped Medical Machima flatten the earth.
Haruka couldn’t care less about this. She wants to rescue the pirate king Atomsk from the Medical Machima – not because she loves him, as the government spook implies, but because she wants his power.
There you have it. Haruka has put a lot of time and effort into taking some incredible power from some guy, and she doesn’t care if she has to flatten the earth to do it. Naota has legitimately fallen for her, but he knows better than to let her get the power. He doesn’t want to be used. So he sends it away, and Haruka runs after it, leaving Earth.
Part The Second: Who Cares?
Now that the series is over and all is right with the world, we can find comfort in the central message of the show: Don’t trust women.
Naota has three women, and none of them cause him anything but unhappiness. Mamimi doesn’t like him, she likes the idea of controlling him. She calls him Takkun – the name she gives her pet kitten (which runs away) and her electronics-eating robot. And all of her Takkuns run away.
Finally, Naota tells us that Mamimi leaves school to become a photographer, but he doesn’t know what happens to her. Throughout the show, she takes a number of photographs. It’s the only way she can keep anything, since everything else runs away.
Naota and Ninamori have a strange relationship. She seems to like him – they’re classmates, she cheats him into the school play, and so on. But despite the time spent at his place, her only real interaction with him is to look at him from the side of her eye, and to say that whatever he’s wearing doesn’t look good on him. She sees him in a sleeping bag with Haruko, but, as I said in the synopsis, does nothing to them.
We see her last in her school uniform, stealing Naota’s drink just like Mamimi used to. So I guess they’re still friends, or whatever they were. (An aside – she looks really cute with hair cut short.)
And then there is Haruko. Haruko who runs away — Haruko who uses his brain as an interdimensional portal to transport robots and get her into the Machima building and getting Atomsk. She feigns affection to get what she wants, and she lets Naota know just what she thinks of him: that’s he a kid.
It’s true, of course. And FLCL is about this. Naota wants to grow up and be recognized as a grown-up. He tries all sorts of things, but in the end he just wants some kind of mommy/girlfriend that will make everything OK. He ends up pretty much where he started, but instead of carrying around a baseball bat that he doesn’t swing, he plays a bass guitar. He’s not wholly his own person (he got the bass from Haruko), but he’s doing something. And that’s a little more grown up, and a lot less pretending to be grown-up.
Rating :A
