Classroom ☆ Crisis – 05

 Beach Showdown Ace Pilot vs. Ninja Accountant Round One! Fight!

Alright, alright, alright. It’s my third of three fanservice coverage weekend! This was probably the most demure, and least antic laden of those, and it managed to covey all the story and character points very well. Three out of three ain’t bad…..

It’s just a mere 5 Billion Yen Deal

So we begin with Yuuji Kiryuu trying to take the wind out of Nagisa’s sails, and underestimating him like he usually does. He set up a penny-ante deal, a minor corporate take-over, expecting him not to be able to complete it in the given time frame; with the upshot being if the business prodigy can’t handle the small potatoes, then he can’t be an effective leader.

Yuuji is set up to be a typical Peter Principle type; lucky connections that he does nothing with, can only succeed by knocking other’s down, and rises to the level of his own high incompetence. He already looks the part, but he has all the other qualities of a cheap villain. I hope the writing can rise above that. But no matter how sloppy it got, Nagisa has a team waiting in the wings…

It’s not like she’s an agent an assassin or a ninja

But this was the beach/onsen episode, and the one that I think really excelled at the attendant tropes that come with that. I think it pulled it off by sticking to one central theme and going from there. These are misfits trying to be normal, or showing that they are quite normal all things considered. We get the boys trying to peek in on the girls, and the girls one upping them easily (don’t underestimate intelligent women!)

This also includes a healthy dose of shipping and relationship rivals. So for the scoreboard. Mizuki has a friendly interest in Nagisa. Iris has a friendly interest in Mizuki. Saito cuts Nagisa from Mizuki, and Angelina follows suit, cutting Mizuki from Nagisa. Iris has the high hand in defending Mizuki from Angelina. Then there’s the unknown relationship between Iris and Nagisa. Action, reaction, over-reaction. Much ado about nothing?

But we also get the extra added bonus of more character background. Angelina almost let her secret out pulling that hidden blade, but we see it and are suspicious from the get to. Her reaction to Mizuki’s pointed statement doesn’t help her at all. But in the middle of all this, Angelina (Hattori! such a great name for a Ninja!) fills us in on some of Iris’ backstory. She suffers from amnesia, and cannot recall more than ten years back. This was supposed to be something that only the Sera siblings know about…and that leaves us with the all questions. Not just that Angelina knows, but how and why…which masks the real question of how it happened in the first place.

Computers are crap in the future

Well, maybe I’m not being generous enough. The laptop was taken out by a ninja thrown hot dog on a stick; with mustard as both the condiment and the jealous driving force. The tablet…well, tablets are never not going to be cheap pieces of crap, and it did run afoul of rocket experts, so maybe that’s a given.

But anyway, this formed a great deal of the major plot. It’s also the one weak point that I can go on about. I know for a fact that most business deals reaching the end are a hurry up and wait proposition. Why they needed to show Nagisa in always always type monster mode to display work is beyond me. I mean, a mobile phone would have been the right tool. Maybe a laptop to write a few more detailed emails nearer to the beginning. But honestly…

But without the man burrowed deep in his work on “vacation” they wouldn’t have been able to show just how distant her really is. I love the scene where the children rushed past him on the beach. It hammered home, more than his lack of swimwear or general aversion to beach play, how much he wasn’t like them and his peers, that he might have never had a beach vacation in his life. To busy out there in space. Sure, it’s on Mars, and I still scratch my head over Fourth Tokyo having very Japanese like mountains and roads…much less a seaside….

You’re as reckless as ever

We also get some additional evidence that both Iris and Nagisa share a past. They did a flashback to the first episode, specifying the boy not expecting to see her at all, much less there, much less as a pilot. They’ve given us a peak at possible clues without spilling the beans all at once and I appreciate that quite a bit.

I’ve seen quite some speculation on this relationship and the events that could surround it. That Iris and Nagisa both were in a crash of some sorts, and she lost her memories and he got his scars. That’s plausible, but seems far to simple at this point. I think they do have a connection, one that probably cuts close to Nagisa’s heart, and one that he is defensive about. He’s not above holding her at arms length, like he does everyone, but he is visibly closer to her.

…and then there is Mizuki. She really has his number, or she’s the closest to it. I don’t think she has any romantic inclinations towards him. She’s just the type that wants to be on good terms with people, and she has a great deal of interest in what makes people tick. Her curiosity gets the better of him, and he cannot seem to resist being pulled out of his shell. She is helpful in a nice way, offering to make rice-balls, is genuinely pleased to see him when she didn’t expect it. Still, Nagisa is who he is, so he won’t come out all the way.

His specific denials do speak volumes for him instead. I don’t blame him for not going along with the boys in their tomfoolery, so he gets marks for avoiding that bit of social awkwardness. But for how long can he resist Mizuki’s charmed questioning? How made of stone is he? It was all thanks to a well placed onsen trope or two, but she’s seen him naked in more ways that one….

In wrapping up I’ll touch on few moments that I enjoyed that I left out above. I love the fact that this sort of fanservice episode did both that, and stayed demure about it. There weren’t any obvious cheeky shots, or silly steam censors floating around. They played it pretty straight, and used it to transition plot and character points very well. The bottom line is to show them in a relaxed setting, and how they react to that.

Also they did a some great bits with the supporting cast. They dropped a huge hint that Subara may very well be a reverse trap (doesn’t help that “he” has Yosino Nanju, the current fripside vocalist and VA for Symphogear’s Shirabe working those pipes). In the show, don’t tell department they gave us leet-hacker Sakugo learning to break corporate servers when he couldn’t the first episode, and having Nagisa regard him as a useful resource in addition to being an irritant. Then there was Makoto’s inventiveness with traps and fireworks, along with her perspicacity to back it up. Of course, I’m leaving out Angelina and Saito hooking up, cause they were drunk….

The show keeps it going with some very choice storytelling and characterization, and this episode acted, as Saito hung the lampshade on, the breather before they take the full plunge. Let’s hope we get some Space and Rockets soon…

Next Time

“Family of Shame” or…what do these kids have planned?

About skylion

All around nerd that enjoys just about any anime genre. I love history, politics, public policy, the sciences, literature, arts...pretty much anything can make me geeky...except sports. Follow me @theskylion