Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino - Episode 10

It's been literally a million years (and by a million years, I mean last September) since I last got to watch an episode of Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino, but at last episode ten has become available for my delectation.

Although this episode doesn't really move this series plot forward to any degree, choosing to more or less eschew the Pinocchio arc almost entirely, it still somehow manages to be a pretty good episode. The focus here is split almost equally between Triela and her "handler" Hilshire - While Triela is tasked with protecting the daughter of an important person involved in a trial (who we saw earlier in the series I believe, it's too long ago for me to remember to be honest), we also get some flashbacks to Hilshire's past, as he begs to work in the field solving child abduction cases, a passion which sees him performing an off-the-record investigation that leads him to who else but Triela, a set of circumstances that directly leads towards her current situation.


So, in many ways this episode is really just scene setting and history, yet it works pretty well, especially in the case of Triela - Seeing her interactions with a normal teenage girl was fascinating in its own way and succeeded in highlighting both the similarities and differences between the two, while the flashbacks perhaps didn't explain as much as they should about Hilshire's personality but at least made for a solid "origin" story for his current relationship with Triela (which incidentally turns out to be rather carrot and stick based in this episode, as he takes her from hanging out with a normal girl to some brutal military training).

Perhaps it's just a case of absence making the heart grow fonder, but I really quite enjoyed this particular instalment of Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino... To put it simply, it just worked. With just a few episodes to go now, perhaps I can manage to finish this series before the year 2525?