Monday 26 May 2014

Knights of Sidonia - Episode 7

If fighting and defeating a single Gauna wasn't tough enough, the prospect of fighting an entire hive of the things is a terrifying prospect - one which, thanks to the climax to last week's episode, we know didn't go well at all.

This week starts by filling in the blanks of exactly what happened to both Nagate and (perhaps more importantly) Hoshijiro - with orders in place to use explosive charges to sever the hive's tail, everything seemed to be in place for a successful operation until Tanikaze detonated his charges too early, ensuring that the plans failed.  Rather than a genuine mistake, this was in fact Kunato's doing to discredit his rival, and in the aftermath a number of lives were lost, including that of Hoshijiro as she went to the aid of a stunned and incapacitated Tanikaze.


Needless to say, our protagonist doesn't take this news well initially, and although Kunato is very keen to tell Nagate that Hoshijiro's blood is on his hands he's also equally quick to remind Tanikaze that he shouldn't tell anyone of Kunato's deception.  All of this needs to be put to one side as another Gauna threat emerges however, with Midorikawa taking the Commanding Officer's role as the Sidonia destroys a gas planet correctly suspected of harboring Gauna which escaped during the previous sortie.  These Gauna look disturbingly familiar however, which may make for difficult times ahead for those about to face them.

Having delivered a jaw-dropping cliffhanger last week, it was going to be tough for this episode of Knights of Sidonia to follow it up, and so it proved to some extent as we could already piece together what had transpired in the sortie to destroy the Gauna hive without actually seeing it.  Having said that, there was certainly some emotional impact to be had from actually watching those events play out in the way that they did in this episode, which was followed by some more nice moments of world and character building before launching us into yet further space-faring action - something I'm looking forward to next week, as it still seems to be what the show does best in both narrative and animation terms.

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