Space☆Dandy S2 – 08
Wait, the main character can die?
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With record-time lateness, here I am with the latest episode of Space Dandy. I had to deal with death-related family issues, so I wasn’t really in the mood to talk about an episode dedicated entirely to Planet Limbo. Just so you know I’m not a slacker…But I’m good now and ready to talk about the latest adventures of everyone’s favourite pompadour’d pervert. |
I am still hopelessly in love with these episodes that allow Dandy to explore beautifully designed planets that have landscapes not even remotely similar to ours. The colours, impossible angles of structures and complete disregard for anything familiar really made me feel like this was a hostile, uncomfortable place to be in. And it is. The planet is essentially limbo – a place where the souls of dead people go. It’s not hell or heaven, but a middleground where you can do whatever you want. It has no particularly bad connotations (eternal suffering) but it also doesn’t have any good connotations (free ponies and everything you desire). So although it’s a world without sadness, it’s also a world without joy. There’s nothing terrible about the place you can really put your finger on, but everything is slightly off to the point where it’s not somewhere you’d want to stick around for very long.
It’s just a downright creepy planet, and most of the episode is like a tour to show off all the creepyass things the directors can think of. I was very fond of the live motorbike alien because it reminded me of a bedazzled Hermes from Kino’s Journey. The only similarity is that they’re both sentient motorbikes but..come on..how many sentient motorbikes do you ever come across? I also quite liked the singing…penises? Tubes? Anemone? Anyways, these whatever-aliens that sung about the futility of living and how the cloud of death is always looming over you was hella creepy. Normally I wouldn’t take something with beady eyes and baby pink skin so seriously, but when they sing in an eerily synchronized (and good!) chorus, you can’t help but listen. All of these aliens and more were only shown briefly, which is why I say it was like Dandy was touring the planet. We got to see all the highlights of the planet in a brief period of time.
This tour, however, seems incredibly unrelated to the story. The whole point of Dandy wandering around is find food, so these encounters could essentially be replaced with just about anything and we’d still get the same message in the end. But that’s what I like about these kinds of episodes. They serve as voyeuristic views into other worlds, landscapes, and creatures. It’s endlessly entertaining to see the stuff they think of next, and Space Dandy just never stops being wonderfully weird in everything that it does.
The only downside to being more of an atmospheric piece is that the whole love thing with Dandy and Planet Limbo herself ends up being ignored until the very end. She just kind of pops up and announces her love. It’s not a bad moment since we do see glimpses of her silently watching Dandy, but it is a little weird to throw her in so conveniently to revive him. I just don’t think having shots of her peppered throughout the first part of the episode counts as build-up to a love confession. It’s illogical! But then again, what even makes sense on this crazy planet?
Now, she does mention alternate universes and how Dandy’s life branches off into different timelines. Is this something that’s special about Dandy, or would she have been able to see alternate lives for any soul that made it there? Whatever the answer to that is, I like that she addresses the alternate universe thing canonically. We’ve seen Dandy die several times at the end of an episode, and it seems that these are just alternate universes where Dandy isn’t quite so lucky. In one universe he’s alive and well…in another he’s taking his planet girlfriend on a date in a white tux. It’s all a little mind-boggling for me, but it’s neat to know that they actually wrote in a way to explain why sometimes the crew just DIES at the end of an episode and comes out fine the next week. There’s some sort of timeline here, and maybe oneday they’ll reveal more about it to us.
Or not. Next week looks pretty lulzy.
Some serious Hyouka vibes going on here
About Overcooled
A neuroscience graduate, black belt, and all-around nerd. You'll either find me in my lab or curled up in my rilakkuma kigurumi watching anime.
POWUH: 400-499 with 445 comments
i dont think dandy ever made it back to his timeline (well the time line that is associated with his journey through the nebula)…Poe did say that she wouldnt be able to bring him back to where he came, but to a dimension where he doesnt meet a disastrous fate in the nebula (doesnt have to be that universe in general). Now this ep is completely up for interpretation so any interpretation could be correct, but this is an interpretation i see that really brings up some questions as to who dandy is.
I think that Poe met dandy a long time ago in an alternate dimension. When she talks to him in the cable car, she recognizes him upon taking a closer look at him; now I know that could be interpreted as Dandy’s constant deaths bringing him to Limbo and her recognizing him because of that, but they way she reacted towards recognizing Dandy was if it was the second time she had seen him or that she had not seen him since a certain period of time. Ud think with the bajillion times dandy has bit the dust, she would stop having that reaction, but regardless, she did which is why i dont think it has to do with Dandy dying a bunch of times. i actually think it that has to do with the ending, in which we see dandy coming down to see poe in the cable car. I think what we see in the end is Dandy, in the dimension where Poe recognizes him from. Dandy may have been a entrepreneur type of person (a sort of true dandy, which would explain the fancy clothes), a random soul that gravitated to Limbo in the early stages of its creation; i say early because we see Poe wearing the clothes similar to the one she was wearing when the planet was still full of life (and those exact two aliens in the field of flowers she was standing in when telling dandy about the history of limbo, one of them being ferdinand). I think this the dandy that Poe remembers, which is why she made that statement that she loved him; she has loved Dandy for a long time, in another life where they were actually together, a time that he no longer remembers. At the end of the ep, Dandy was not sent back to the “nebula time-line” (it that time-line it seems that he is truly dead, i mean…why would Poe just send him there if he was still going to be dead) but to a dimension similar to the one Poe remembers meeting him in.;the dimension in which she fell for him.
Limbo can exist everywhere and yet nowhere so even if Limbo was destroyed in one dimension, it can exist in an infinite amount of other dimensions. This is a very early Limbo we see in the end. One can also interpret that scene as a Limbo that is not necessarily for the dead, but just it’s own planet, and the new residing place for an alternate Dandy. Either way, i dont think dandy ever made it back to the nebula time-line, which is why we still see him dead at the end of the ep; or perhaps he did, but since he is just knocked out, his soul is still able to drift between the living and the dead. It doesnt explain why Limbo is different, but again the aesthetics could just be a result of it being a different dimension. Still, i strongly believe that this alternate dimension has something to do with Poe’s first (or second) aquaintance with Dandy long before she became lonely because that scene right before she sends him back to an alternate dimension is too poignant to be dismissed. As for Dandy himself, we can assume that in any infinite amount of dimensions, whether dandy was creating a new universe, or traveling in time and becoming a religious symbol, dandy affected the universe in multiple ways through his death and rebirth, and him meeting up with Poe in Limbo were just a result another one of his outlandish escapades, albeit a more beautiful one. Upon second viewing, this ep was more romantic than i intiially thought and it makes a hell of a lot more sense why Poe said she loved dandy.