Space Brothers - Episode 18

Those pesky green cards really are playing havoc with our prospective astronauts as their latest round of testing draws towards a close, with broken clocks, phantom alarms and food shortages all serving to plague them; or at least, Mutta assumes that all of these things are green card related.

Unfortunately for Mutta himself, even he isn't going to be left out of the green card fun as he receives some instructions of his own - to make his crew-mates jump twice a day by making a loud noise.  Although he bemoans the misfortune of receiving this task it seems to be right up his street, and he wastes no time in getting into the thick of doing what is required of him.  But will the other crew members think that he's weird?  Well, it's far, far too late to be worrying about that already, my friend...

If only Makabe had such irreverent concerns - as he completes his puzzle of YuruYuri's Akari and allows his mind to drift back to incidents in his past, he frets that he's too used to playing devil's advocate while he ponders how to reunite the seemingly fractured relationships within Team B.  Of course, Mizoguchi still isn't helping along those lines, and with additional issues such as the deletion of the data the team were compiling to help choose their candidates raising their head, things only become more fraught.  Such is the pressure within the group that Makabe looks all set to lose his head in the heat of everything that's going on - luckily for him, his daughter of all people comes to the rescue, as he finally realises the words she'd been trying to say to him before his departure for the exam.

Even though I keep suggesting that this section of the series is threatening to outstay its welcome and go on for too long, I can't really fault the fact that it keeps rolling on at a decent clip and finding ways to keep its experience compelling - the shift in focus towards Makabe this week was a smart one, as clearly there was a lot more to say about his experience and difficulties at present compared to Mutta's situation, and this fresh perspective certainly helped to further extend the longevity of this section of the show.  Now that he's reached his own epiphany, I think it's time to move on and close out this current round of testing - unless of course we're going to get a glimpse of Team C, who I still assume have torn one another limb from limb by this point based on the fact that we haven't heard from them in an eternity.