Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet - Episode 5

Following on from his attempts to help and discussions in last week's episode, this latest instalment of Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet continues to see Ledo pondering how to make himself at use aboard the fleet that has become his new home.

The trouble is, there's really very little call for a military man in the midst of this particular community that already has its fill of employees in pretty much every position you could ask for.  Even when the fleet comes to a standstill on a calm day to offer some downtime for all but its technicians, Ledo struggles to relax thanks to his concerns about not being useful.

It's this discomfort that Pinion plays on as an attempt to get an outdoor grill party running (yes, this is as close as Gargantia can get to a beach episode in lieu of any actual beach) hits a snag due to a lack of power, and just as pressingly a lack of knowledge on how to cook food probably on Chamber's part.  While waiting for these grilling problems to be resolved, Ledo is sent out on an important task which takes him through some of the more "interesting" parts of the fleet's community.  Thus, by the end of the episode we have the answer to an important question - what sauce would Amy prefer in a sausage sandwich?

Silly though parts of this episode were, and cliched though others threatened to be, that didn't stop the instalment as a whole being a whole lot of fun - it really played wonderfully into the personalities of its main characters and the relationships between them, and found no shortage of ways to use the situation of Ledo and Chamber in particular for comic purposes.  This isn't the kind of thing I want to see Gargantia doing every week, as I'm sure it has bigger fish to grill... err, fry... but as a one-off this was a genuinely enjoyable episode that perhaps brought us a little closer to the fleet's inhabitants.