天下制覇

That thing was gross.

Impressions:

…In short, no. Nobody gagged the robot. And there really has to have been a better way of handling the whole different languages thing than having characters blip back and forth between languages. It’s really jarring, especially when they do it literally in the middle of a conversation, and most of the time, serves to do nothing but pad out the time while the robot repeats it. I guess this was probably a little bit better than the first episode purely by dint of having more pirates and fewer CG vagina metaphors, but it was still talking heads, talking heads, and the occasional distance shot while the talking heads continued rambling to themselves. These aren’t characters. They’re standard archetypes explaining their archetype. At length.

But hey, there were pirates in the last three minutes of the episode. On their cute little CG ships and gliders. Which he proceeded to vaporize every single last one of in one attack. I’m not even sure how that worked exactly, and "reflector laser" doesn’t cut it. First he blows everything up, then, with literally surgical precision, kills every single pirate simultaneously, including ones holding people hostage. It seems like at least one step could have been skipped here, but I guess then it would look too silly. I feel like I should also note that the pirates had three ships, each nearly as large as the Gargantia, so I’m really curious what the total body count there was.

So what we have here is a setting without characters, just blathering talking heads going through the motions at a glacial pace. It doesn’t even sell the whole brave new world thing particularly well. Again, LWA may be coloring my judgement a bit, but I doubt it’d be any better if I hadn’t just watched something that did succeed admirably at it. Not having a driving plot is different from nothing happening period. My god. If this was Star Trek, there’d have already been three yelling matches about the prime directive, Scotty would have adopted a chiprabbit thing, and Kirk would’ve slept with the helmsman. As the B plots. And I guarantee you that the pirates would’ve have been tucked away to only be brought out in the final minutes of the hour long ordeal.