Friday 11 November 2011

Guilty Crown - Episode 5

Shu may be freed from captivity, but is he free of his captors?  While he carries with him the ability to signal his position to GHQ and thus spell doom for Gai and his Funeral Parlour forces, "freedom" seems too strong a word.

Regardless, for now Shu is very much central to Gai's plans as he outlines his next aim - to steal something called "Leucocyte".  With a complex and alarming number of possibilities to their next mission, there's plenty of hard work ahead for those within the Funeral Parlour - not least for Shu, who is clearly in need of a significant amount of training.


Enter Ayase to perform this task, as she pulls no punches in introducing Shu to the various individuals and their specialities within Funeral Parlour's arsenal - not that he shows much hope of getting to grips with them in the training montage which follows.  In lieu of failure after failure, Shu continues to mull over his situation and sounds out the possibility of leaving the group and taking Inori with him.  Inori, of course, has no intention of doing such a thing, as she makes her loyalty to Gai all too clear.  Still, when push comes to shove (and thanks perhaps to some words from Ayase), Shu decides to face up to the test Ayase has planned to see if his abilities are up to scratch, with his particular unique trait ultimately serving him in good stead.  Any celebrations are short-lived however, as news from Gai's mission to take the Leucocyte filter through.

Shorn of the slick action of previous episodes, this was a pretty middling instalment of Guilty Crown - it offered us little new information about Shu's personality (we pretty much have him summed up now) and didn't really delve into Ayase's persona as much as we might have liked either.  Sure, this episode gave us some important progress, mostly in term of seeing Shu accepted into the Funeral Parlour fold a little further, while also filling in a blank or two surrounding Gai, but that aside the gorgeous visuals and great soundtrack made this feel like a work of style over substance, something which Guilty Crown can't afford to be... well, guilty... of too frequently.

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