Robotics;Notes - Episode 5

As Aki continues her PR assault in the hope of sponsorship, Kai has other matters on his mind after his decidedly strange experience at the tail-end of the previous episode.

Thus, while the robotics club leader finds herself meeting some journalists interested in covering the club's adventures at Robo-One (at least, until Subaru shows up and becomes the new focus of their attention), Kai is looking into urban legends and the like which might explain his experience - to this end, he invites Daitoku along to point out some of the myths in the hope of tracking down the phenomenon which occurred to him.

This hunt in turn leads to some wider discussion of the world of Robotics;Notes - we already know a little about the trigger of Aki and Kai's illness, but it seems that other things are afoot with the climate and the like of the planet which are yet to be explained by scientists and the powers that be.  It's against this backdrop that Kai finally stumbles across and recreates his prior experience, and as he tracks it down further he finds what he's looking for - an errant AI which seems to know who he is, and imparts some very important information upon him.  Are solar flares and the impending death of the sun the cause of the world's meteorological mysteries, and is NASA spearheading a cover-up to avoid this information becoming publicly known?

It seems that we're now getting to the heart of Robotics;Notes conspiratorial story, via an episode that was slightly slow-going until it picked up markedly in its final third.  It's still hard to really fathom how the various threads of the overall story are going to come together, but then again that's half the fun, and for now the show is continuing to be pretty accomplished with enough moments of outright fun and entertainment (plus some reasonably smart use of its technological aspects) to be worth watching.  Besides, how can an anime which references the infamous UVB-76 possibly be bad?