Saunders’ Arisa continues to cheat, but she leads Kei to an empty location. One of the Oorai teams finds Saunders’ flag panzer by accident, and they lead it into the clearing where the other Oorai panzers are waiting. Kei balances the battle by relieving Arisa with just four of her panzers, including Naomi in the Firefly. Two Oorai teams are taken out, and the remaining three are sandwiched between the flag panzer and the rest of the Saunders team. Miho’s panzer climbs a ridge, and Naomi follows them. Hana manages to take out Arisa’s flag panzer a moment before Naomi takes them out, and they’re victorious. Their day of victory ends with a call to Mako informing her her grandmother fell; Miho’s sister lends her a helicopter to rush to Oorai.
After all the twists and turns and distortion of reality in the Eureka Seven finale, it was nice to settle back into some nice, uncomplicated girl-on-girl tank warfare (that just sounds wrong). And after really putting the nasty, f-bomb-spewing cheater Arisa (voiced by Haruhi herself) right in our faces for extended periods of time, we were pretty confident the episode wouldn’t let someone that insufferable win and gloat about it later on. Instead she gets scolded by her Commander Kei, who preferred a fair fight to total domination.
Saunders lost, but it was a honorable and exciting battle, not an easy, boring win. Such chivalry is part of Sensha-do, or Tankery, or Panzerfahren, or whatever you wanna call it. And it was exciting: lots of tanks chasing other tanks like a game of armored tag. And it’s not a total victory for Oorai either, but a win by the seat of their pants, as Hana manages to get her shot off a heartbeat before the too-cool-for-school, gum-chewing Naomi. Mako’s sudden family emergency caught us off guard; it was apparently a reminder that at the end of the day, all this playing around in tanks isn’t as important as family…we guess.
Rating: 6 (Good)
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