Shikabane Hime: Aka - Episode 6

By the end of episode five of Shikabane Hime: Aka, we were left with a zombie corpse car thing, and not one but two gun-toting yet cute dead schoolgirls. I mean really, if you asked your average geek for a definition of awesome, wouldn't it be something along those lines?

Anyway, I digress - Episode six of this series takes us along the same road of internal politics, betrayal and questionable morality that the last instalment first set us down, from the contracting out of the one Shikabane Hime who is allowed to kill humans to assassinate Keisei, who is believed to potentially be the "betrayer priest", while meanwhile the real betrayer reveals himself as a former "top gun" contracted priest who killed (and, it's suggested, loved) his own Shikabane Hime, and has a rather neat party trick thanks to all the corpses he's collected from his SUV of doom.


All in all, this episode balances things out reasonably well, mixing in som gun-toting action and transforming corpse car fighting with a fair few revelations about both the Shikabane Hime and the entity they work for. Of course, given where we are within the confines of this particular series, revealing these facts only leads to more questions, reaching to the heights of "Does Makina believe in heaven?" through to the more general question posed last episode about whether creating Shikabane Hime to kill corpses is any better than the corpses that are created by themselves. We also have to question just how benevolent the religious organisation behind this whole thing is too, as the betrayer priests insists that he is in fact the betrayed instead, and the fact that they were more than willing to contract a killer to take out Keisei hardly paints a picture of a friendly family business.

So, all of this blends together to make for a pretty successful (albeit not ground-breaking) episode, although I am starting to get a little fed up with Ouri - Is there any point to him turning up to all of these scenes of death and destruction? Thus far he's added very little to the series aside from being the eyes and ears of the viewer, and to be honest I was expecting him to have a far greater role to play in this series than simply acting as that vehicle - Indeed, I still believe that this will be the case further down the line, but we seem to have been rather slow to reach that point so far. Oh well, that gripe aside, Shikabane Hime: Aka is at least keeping up its entertainment factor, so on that closing note I can't particularly complain.