Coppelion - Episode 5

Now that the rescue of Professor Shiba has been completed, a clean-up operation is beginning of the toxic waste that has been found dumped in the city and all appears to be well - or at least as well as it can be in an irradiated city.

Any such sense of tranquility doesn't last long however, and before we know it a tank has appeared to shoot down one of the modified helicopters charged with cleaning up that toxic waste while Ibara and her comrades find tyre tracks leading to a crash vehicle containing a man and his pregnant daughter.  An already tricky rescue is made more difficult by the appearance of the aforementioned tank, apparently a remnant of the SDF's 1st Division who were also presumed dead in the aftermath of the initial catastrophe which overtook the city.

Whatever their current status, these guys aren't exactly friendly, and thus there's nothing for it but to escape - something which the girls and their newly rescued friends succeed in achieving, but not before Taeko is shot and wounded and the pregnant woman threatens to go into labour.  With the Prime Minister of Japan himself weighing in and telling Ibara that her team's new order is to attack and annihilate the 1st Division, it seems as if assistance won't be arriving quickly - although perhaps it doesn't need to with this latest group of survivors boasting a home known as "the Planet", a massive sphere complete with its own ecosystem and hydroelectric power supply.

At this point in the series, I'm really not sure what Coppelion is setting out to do any more - a lot of its more introspective moments about humanity and human behaviour seems to have been cast aside for (admittedly half-decent) action scenes and (rather less decent) moments of additional world building around Ibara's classmates and some of the unfeasibly complex science and construction that seems to have taken place since the initial disaster.  I really hope that this show has an interesting end goal in mind, but at the moment it feels a little like it's spinning its wheels simply because it can - a situation not helped by the fact that I'm increasingly finding myself wishing that Aoi was the one that had been shot...