Sunday 2 June 2013

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet - Episode 9

No sooner have they left the fleet that Pinion and company's breakaway group are off to hunt down the whalesquid next and the supposed treasure trove within which it is situated.

As Pinion himself can't help but ruminate on the events surrounding his brother than has led him down this path, Ledo's train of thought is far simpler, as he has nothing more in mind than annihilating the Hideauze.  Luckily for him (and Pinion for that matter), with Chamber to hand doing exactly this proves to be no real issue, especially when he's helped out with numerous barrels of explosives which his crewmates gleefully toss into the sea for maximum damage.


With the whalesquid population decimated, Ledo's next task is to search the long-lost human facility that has become the whalesquid nest - the home to some kind of "queen" with eggs aplenty ready to be laid, and even more baby whalesquid currently in gestation... at least, there is until Ledo and Chamber destroy the lot.  Once in the heart of the facility, Chamber detects a host of data storage still within its administration block - data that is, for some reason, highly classified by the Galactic Alliance.  Upon Ledo's insistence that Chamber show it to him, the reason for this soon becomes clear - to avoid all the long rigmarole and to boil it down into a single sentence: Hideauze is people.

Yes, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet really did just go there, and yes, it feels incredibly stupid, especially in the unintentionally hilarious way it's presented on-screen.  While I was expecting some kind of twist regarding the Hideauze to come from this episode, and although some of the back story that goes along with it is somewhat interesting, the delivery of this twist via a big info dump and some incredibly heavy-handed story beats feels... well, Hideauze.  I mean hideous.  Hopefully the series can somehow run with this and bring something good from it in the long run, because right now it feels like this entire series has just come crashing down under the weight of a massive delivery of stupidity.

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