Robotics;Notes - Episode 17

After so much meandering story-telling, last week's Robotics;Notes certainly shook things up in a major way, meaning that this seventeenth instalment can content itself with picking up the pieces of its aftermath.

Needless to say, everything has changed for our main cast of characters, as the death of Mizuka reverberates around Kai and Aki in particular, whereas the injuries suffered by Subaru as a result of the accident with GunPro-2 has far wider implications, that being the disbanding of the Robotics Club and JAXA pulling their support and funding from their Expo dream.  For once, even Aki seems to have lost the vigour to fight in the face of adversity, meekly accepting the club's fate as she does.

As for Kai, he continues to struggle with what he should do about the final Kimijima report - a situation not helped by the appearance of further people who seem to know about both Kou Kimijima and Kai's past, while Misaki also continues to have a part to play in her decision.  Indeed, it's Misaki that is also responsible (albeit indirectly) for bringing Aki out of her slump, as she once again discovers her determination to catch up to her sister, which means completing the GunPro-2 no matter what.  But will anyone want to assist her after everything that has happened?

Now that the series has finally kicked up a gear or two thanks to last week's episode, this latest instalment was inevitably some of the better far we've seen from this show so far - there was no shortage of emotion to lean on and this was mostly pulled off in a satisfying manner, even if its left us where we started about fifteen episodes ago to some degree.  Having done justice to what is set out to over the past couple of weeks, hopefully the series now has the legs to bring us home to a decent finale rather than wallowing in mediocrity again for a few weeks before doing anything interesting.