Space☆Dandy - Episode 4

It seems as if Dandy and company have landed themselves another jackpot, in the form of an alien that looks a lot like an known existing species but is still sufficiently different to surely by a unique creature.

Having been bitten by said creature, Meow starts to look a little peeky, and after brushing it off as just a lack of sleep for a while Dandy eventually relents and takes him to hospital only to find that, to all intents and purposes, Meow is dead.  A member of the walking dead, if you like.  You can probably guess where things go from here - by the time Dandy and QT return to visit their pal they find the hospital over-run with zombies, and desperate to escape Dandy decides that the non-organic QT is the perfect weapon to aid him in this situation.  Except, it seems that this particular zombie virus can also infect robots...

While this would normally be the end of the story, the delightful twist in this episode is that we continue to follow the adventures of the zombie-fied Dandy, QT and Meow - a journey of despair, raw meat, yogurt, visits to shopping centres and the joys of being able to claim on your life insurance while you're still around to enjoy the payout.  Although there are disadvantages to being a zombie (particularly when you're an alien hunter), Dandy seems to get along just fine as the zombie virus spreads across the universe.

 I'm sure I wasn't the only one to roll my eyes as soon as the prospect of a zombie apocalypse came about, and sure enough the first half of this week's Space Dandy was as predictable as you would imagine.  Thankfully, this was simply the build-up to a wonderful pay-off in the episode's second half, which was delightfully tongue-in-cheek as it followed the lives (or afterlives?) of the cast as zombies, poking merry fun at other zombie fiction as it went ("for some reason, we have the inexplicable urge to go to the mall") and taking the whole thing to its logical conclusion.  It's becoming one of the joys of this series that it doesn't really care much about continuity, happily killing off the cast or the entire universe here and there simply to make an entertaining climax to the episode at hand, and the result is another hugely entertaining episode that had me giggling along throughout its second half.