Robotics;Notes - Episode 19

Just as Aki looks set to get her big chance to catch up with big sister Misaki, so said sister seems to be in the middle of something nefarious while pursued by a gun-toting, suited man.  This, however, is only the beginning of the insanity.

Before there's so much as time to draw breath Misaki has escaped her gun-wielding foe, hopped aboard the robot she was supposed to be demonstrating at the Expo and almost literally laid waste to the entire exhibition centre as well as all of the robots within it, GunPro-2 included.  With news of an unprecedented and massive solar flare also breaking around the world and the appearance of an obelisk-cum-space elevator that seems to hark back to Gunvarrel's final episode in Tokyo, it almost seems too crazy to be believed.

Perhaps that's because what everyone is seeing is too crazy to be real, with Misaki's pursuer suggesting that the entire thing is an AR-esque work of subterfuge (or which Kai and Aki's childhood ferry incident was a precursor) used to cover up an even greater crime... a crime about to be committed by Misaki, who is believed to be in league with none other than Kimijima Kou.  Exactly what Kou's real plan is and how it can be stopped remain to be seen, but things are looking decidedly more dangerous for our group of robot-building buddies, that's for sure.

After so many weeks of complaints about this show's inability to deliver, all of a sudden we find ourselves staring in the face of an entire series worth of plot points in a single episode.  If anything, this week's instalment goes to the other extreme of providing us with entirely too much content, making it difficult to sift through and keep track of what's going on to create more confusion than I suspect the series was actually aiming for.  On the positive side however, I'm more than a little happy to see the show lay a bunch of its cards on the table, and there are some interesting points worthy of further exploration regarding the human response to what is presented in front of them, be it with their own eyes or via another medium like the Internet.  Messy it might be in places, but the scene is set, so this could finally be Robotics;Notes time to shine.  I've only made such a proclamation around a dozen times with this series now, right?