Sunday 23 February 2014

Space☆Dandy - Episode 8

Dr. Gel has himself a rather nifty tracking device - so nifty that it'll even play music while it's going about its business.  Every silver lining has a cloud however... said device also inexplicably fires missiles when its music playback is activated.

Meanwhile, Dandy and company have found themselves exploring a planet made entirely of junk - let's just call it Junkion and start pretending that Space Dandy inhabits the same universe as Transformers - a place which has supposedly not been visited before and so must surely be inhabited by an undiscovered species of alien, right?  Well, there's certainly something on the planet... an elderly dog that enjoys the final flourishes of its life as the subject of Dandy's adoration.


With said dog's passing, little does the Aloha Oe's crew realise that this mutt played host to exactly the kind of rare species that Dandy was looking for - a pair of brothers who are, to all intents and purposes, fleas.  Once it becomes evident that these parasites are now on board Dandy's ship, chaos ensues, leading to the death of one of the brothers at the hands of Dandy's comb which in turn sees the other try to avenge his fate by taking over QT.  By the end of this skirmish, yet another planet has been destroyed, and poor Dr. Gel has once again seen his plan to capture Dandy thwarted.

It's a little difficult to balance my thoughts on this week's Space Dandy - in a sense it felt rushed, as it didn't have sufficient time to really build much emotion into the life and death of its brief canine star, and the aliens at the centre of the episode also played a role that wasn't exploited as fully as you might have expected.  Then again, the subject matter of the episode certainly wouldn't justify filling a longer running time, so it makes sense to limit it to its twenty minutes or so of fame, and there were some great laugh out loud moments scattered throughout the episode.  Not enough to make this one of Space Dandy's better episodes, admittedly, but it did make for a slightly sharper comedy turn than the past couple of instalments as the show sticks doggedly (do you see what I did there?) to its standalone format.

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