Monday 13 August 2012

Rinne no Lagrange: Season 2 - Episode 6

Body-swapping seems to be the in thing in anime this summer, although I'm not entirely sure that either Madoka or Yurikano will be singing its praises from the rooftops judging by this week's episode of Rinne no Lagrange.

Mind you, there isn't really any time for this odd state of affairs to sink in from the aftermath of this transfer, as the "experiment" and its disruption has managed to cause chaos, with crystalline shards penetrating the ship all over the place like some kind of pink out-take from Guilty Crown.  In the midst of all the confusion, Muginami grabs Madoka (who is really Yurikano of course) to lead her to safety while some of Dizelmine's men ensure Yurikano (really Madoka) is safe by jettisoning her from the ship in an escape pod.


All of these goings on also quickly lead to a space-borne fire-fight between Le Garite and De Metrio troops - a battle which Muginami and Lan try to prevent as their own mechs appear, while Yurikano also gets involved.  Of course, it's Madoka who somehow manages to blunder her way into resolving the crisis by inadvertently hitting the emergency intercom within her escape pod before pondering and waxing lyrical as to Yurikano's situation, making some surprisingly astute observations as to the romantic inclinations of her host body.  As the contrivances continue, first Yurikano's body and then her personality come face-to-face once again with Dizelmine, solidifying the feelings apparant between the two just in time for Yurikano to vanish into thin air.  Now that's resolved, is there a new hope of peace between Le Garite and De Metrio?

The first thing that springs to mind about this week's Rinne no Lagrange is that it's a bit of an odd beast - in terms of pacing, it covered so much that it could easily have been expanding out to fill three episodes at least, making it feel almost rushed in its execution - a prospect not helped by perhaps some of the sloppiest animation this series has delivered so far.  It's actual story is, as I've already mentioned, hugely contrived in a number of ways as it racked up its coincidences and moments of luck to steer its story in the right direction.  I can forgive a certain amount of this on account of the show's jovial nature - here is a series which doesn't take itself too seriously - but it still felt like it was stretching its credibility a little too far with some of the shifts in this particular episode.  If I didn't know better, I'd say the series is trying to rush through aspects of its current story so that it can get back to goofing around with its main characters, but perhaps it simply has a lot more left to say over the second half of this series.  Either way, this left us with a curious sixth episode that I didn't dislike per se, but that felt like it could have been handled far, far better in some pretty fundamental ways.

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