Eureka Seven AO - Episodes 23-34 (Completed)

It's taken far longer than any of us might have expected, but at last Eureka Seven AO comes to an end courtesy of a double-bill for its grande finale.  Will we finally get to learn the truth about, er, Truth?

Having realigned myself with what was actually going on in the show when we left it (it has been a while, after all) we find ourselves with Team Pied Piper engaged in a pitched battle against Truth and an interfering Naru, who still insists that it's the Scub and not the Secrets that are "in the right" in the battle that has waged between them and more or less ruined the Earth into the bargain.  This makes life decidedly tricky for Ao, who seems entirely unsure as to where his allegiances should lay himself, with only the realisation that Naru's health could be in danger spurring him into action... and not a moment too soon, as Truth is swallowed up by a Scub Coral before revealing his true goal - reverting the world back to what he sees as the "correct" one - and turning on Naru in the process.  In the ensuing chaos, Ao fires the Quartz Gun, and once again succeeds in changing the world in a manner which seemingly obliterates Truth but also does little for Naru's health.

After quickly settling into this altered world and a perceived victory for Generation Bleu, any fragile piece is quickly disturbed by the appearance of an unknown IFO - an IFO that just so happens to belong to one Renton Thurston.  With Eureka making a ghostly appearance at the same time, we're treated to something of a family reunion before it becomes clear that the goals of father and son aren't about to align at all.  Ergo, while Renton is looking to ensure that the Scub Coral in the world vanishes completely, Ao simply can't accept this for two reasons, those reasons being that to do so would mean Renton giving up on Eureka, and just as importantly what the disappearance of the Scub might mean for those "infected" by or otherwise assimilated with the scub.  When push comes to shove, we're left with an epic conflict between father and son and their clashing ideologies to "do the right thing" in their own respective minds.

So, it finally comes to an end... although I imagine it's pretty much unanimous that Eureka Seven AO was no Eureka Seven - indeed, it barely felt like any kind of sequel at all quite a lot of the time - it still felt like a brave and largely decent attempt to extend the original show's scope and universe massively.  This didn't always work out perfectly, leaving us with entirely too many twists, turns, time travel and alternate universes to make for a simple viewing experience, and towards the end it leaned a little heavily on its Deus Ex Quartz Gun to provide those twists, but it was still a heady and far-reaching piece of story-telling that thrilled, emotionally moved and excited when it got it right.  How often it actually got everything right is a matter of debate that I can see raging for some time, but to my mind it worked more often than it failed miserably and still had plenty of fun with its characters early on in the series to leave me with an impressive of Eureka Seven AO that was, for the most part, positive.  Who knows, maybe we'll see this universe revisited again in another seven years?  Then again, we might just get a poor alternate world movie a few years from now instead, and nobody wants that...