CANAAN - Episode 11

It seems fair to say that things weren't exactly going the way of "truth and justice" by the end of the last episode of CANAAN, and in all honesty things don't really get much better for the majority of this eleventh episode of the series.

Despite discovering those frozen Canaan clones, Alphard has no problem in letting Maria and Yun-Yun escape, while she also seems more than happy to give the Snakes research data on the Ua virus and their attempts to create a "Canaan army" to Natsume, who then in turns calls in the military and US Special Forces to destroy the site.


While Canaan returns to the building despite knowing of this impending attack to rescue Hakko, so our own interest switches to Liang Qi, who faces off against Alphard only to lose the plot completely... not that she had much grip on her mental faculties from the very start. Her emotional rollercoaster (not to mention her fighting with knives in lingerie) is ended as she takes some experimental pills designed to give Ua virus sufferers synaesthesia, which finally drives her over the edge in a blur of love and hatred for all things Canaan.

As if that whole state of affairs wasn't bizarre enough, we also have Hakko having sex with a dead Santana, before Canaan is forced to make her escape from the factory before it's destroyed - The good news is that she carries Yun-Yun's medication with her, but the bad news is... well, pretty much everything else really.

You know, for all of my fluctuating thoughts and feelings towards CANAAN I can't help but feel like it's missing something, although I can't quite put my finger on what. The last episode did a pretty good job of delivering as required, and this episode also seemed to do everything that was needed of it, yet I still don't feel genuinely gripped by the story it portrays as I feel I should be. Yes, I can marvel at the consistently impressive animation quality and the like, but when it comes to anything deeper I'm left feeling a little empty - I'm not sure whether it's the characters or the story itself, but I just feel as though the entire show just needs something else to bring it from the depths of mediocrity; a certain something which it hasn't managed to consistently capture since those early episodes when everything still seemed fresh and intriguing.