Kenjirou believes the uber-alone to be beyond anyone’s ability to defeat, even the Vivid girls. But Akane refuses to give up, finding Rei’s key washed up on the beach, and deciding to fly to the alone where Rei is trapped inside but alive. The others follow. The alone settles over the Manifestor Core and starts sapping energy. Akane docks with Himawari, Wakaba, and Aoi in sequence to break through the alone’s armor, while the others’ suits fail and they fall to the earth. Before the alone can kill them, Akane docks with Rei to create VividRed, who lands a massive, fatal punch to the alone, destroying it. The five girls reunite but a strange ribbon appears in the air telling Rei her world has been restored. A door appears, and Akane gives her the key. She says they’ll meet again, and after a little time passes, Rei returns.
Once the character issues were resolved, all four girls became BFFs, and the Rei’s misunderstanding was rectified, the series kinda ran out of things we cared that much about. Sure, the Big Bad was still there, but suddenly swallowing Rei last week turned out to be the most interesting thing it would ever do. This week it simply laughs an evil laugh, boasts and gloats, and talks about judging and erasing, and we simply don’t care because the girls will obviously defeat it. Worse, the peril was mired in technobabble; Kenjirou was trying in vain to explain what was happening whan what was happening didn’t really make sense. An event horizon that threaten’s the entire universe? We ask you.
Dispatching the alone did at least require some unprecedented tactics, including Akane docking with all three of the other girls one by one, which gave them something to do. And we knew if Rei showed back up this week, the series would have her dock with Akane too. She’s purple, after all. The resulting Vividred avatar was a successful melange of the two girls’ looks. And she blowed stuff up real good. You’d think that would be all and Rei would start hanging out with the girls all the time, but then, in the most-tacted on last-minute twist imaginable, Akane just blurts out “They’re going to fix it!”, refering to the alone-makers deciding to restore Rei’s world, which we thought was almost as cheap as Aoi secretly hating tomatoes.
So yeah, while the alone thing needed a resolution, we leave this series thinking it ran an episode too long.
Rating: 5 (Average)
Stray Observations:
- While Zetsuen no Tempest and Maoyu took great pains to minimize casualties in their latter episodes, this series proves it has little regard for the lives of pilots or the great expense of all those frigates and warplanes. After a while it gets a bit silly.
- Speaking of silly, both the ships and planes are clearly expelling exhaust of some kind, suggesting they’re independently powered by fuel. Yet when the alone starts messing with the Manifestor, both lose power. This makes…NO SENSE.
- In the closing credits, we see Kenjirou has transferred back into his human body. Which begs the question: what took him so long?
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