Monday 29 October 2012

Medaka Box Abnormal - Episode 3

After just one night of training from her big brother, Medaka and Zenkichi are ready to face the former's "date" with the wanna be ruler of the world Miyakonojou.

Between proving themselves to be effectively immune to his command voice and with Hitoyoshi, striking out surprisingly effectively with an attack of his own, Miyakonojou is at least impressed enough to reveal a little more about the so-called Flask Plan - a plan filled with the Abnormals of Class 13 as its subjects, but also one which ultimately looks to use the whole of Sandbox Academy as its testing ground.  It's this news that really sets Medaka's mind on the task at hand - getting to the core of the Flask Plan to find out all she can about it, and then quite possibly to destroy it.


Rather than involve the entire student council (which is currently run ragged with complaints about Class 13's members from students anyway), Medaka and Zenkichi choose to go it alone... or at least they would have done were it not for the interference of Shiranui in telling the other two council members what is going on and pointing them in the right direction.  They arrive not a moment too soon, with Medaka easily passing the first test of the Flask Plan's laboratory complex by entering a code of a million combinations correctly and leaving Hitoyoshi to pass through using his own abilities - a task which leaves him wavering until the others show him how its done.  A simple door is about to become the least of their problems however, as they reach their first true test within the complex...

After a sluggish and overly wordy first half that adapts the original manga faithfully but adds no frisson to account for its animated nature, I was a little worried that this series was going to start slipping in quality again after a decent enough start - thankfully, the second half of this week's instalment felt a little more energised in terms of both its subject matter and presentation to make things just that bit more compelling.  The real test for Medaka Box Abnormal is how it handles events to come however - this could just be the time to shine for this series, so it needs to make a convincing job of it.

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