天下制覇

Wrong lesson.

Impressions:

Not that I'm sure I could've thought of a way they could've written themselves out of the corner they had gotten themselves into as any kind of character triumph, but this was two episodes just to lead up to Red giving a speech about doing your bestest, and let me tell you, if I watch another piece of Japanese media without that in my life, it will be too soon. The deus ex transfusion was still handled in about the most unsatisfactory way possible, with none of the characters having really done anything but montage over, again, trying their bestest in the face of adversity, only to be rescued by foces beyond their ken. Mostly, this episode made me consider how much more interesting it would've been had it gone the other way; had Red been part of the transfusion, put into an alien environment and trying to save the body's life. Not that it would've been much better, but at least then they might've been able to better pretend like someone had any agency.

Final Thoughts:

As with so so many Japanese shows, the core problem was an utter lack of ambition. We repeated the same episode over and over again, just with a slightly different cell each time. Every episode was an apocalyptic disaster, so there wasn't much variety either, not to mention tha the body metaphor didn't really work half the time. There are tons of shows through the years that have done Fantasic Voyage episodes that inform how they could've done this much better. Personally, the decision to not have an outside-the-body portion showing all these crises to be regular life stuff is the most baffling to me. The juxtaposition alone could've been milked for way more jokes instead of falling back on "Red makes a face when she's lost" for the billionth time. Alas though, the ambition thing.

Repetition breeds contempt and boredom, and this was built on repetition. Perhaps good for some biology factoids, but even most of those are repeated until you can sarcastically recite half of them even before they pop up.