Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story – 15 – The Swing Within

When Eve’s Orange Bullet holes the ball and gives them the win, Eve has to be told it happened; she must’ve gone into a trance when using Orange, which is probably why she hasn’t used it until now; it’s a last resort. As for Aoi, she passes out and remembers her father training her and telling her he wants her to not just win, but keep enjoying golf with a pure and innocent heart, for “hearts too sharpened by conviction can sometimes shatter”. That’s a great line.

Despite hearing news that her daughter is in the hospital and they can’t find anything medically wrong with her, Seira still can’t be bothered to cancel a business meeting to go see her. Real Mother of the Year shit! But she also knows that Aoi is going through the same “thing” as Kazuhiko, only earlier in life (he was in his 20s), which is concerning.

Fortunately for Eve, Aoi comes to in time to treat her to all the hamburgers she can eat, and the next day they watch Nadaminami’s Oikawa Kaede and Himekawa Mizuho trounce their semifinal opponent. Eve makes a throat-slitting motion to Mizuho, who is looking forward to facing off against a real opponent.

There’s no rest for the weary on the eve of the final against Nada, as Coach Reiya takes Aoi to the driving range, not to teach her anything per se, but simply to “put a spell”, which he accomplishes with three swings. Aoi recognizes his first as her mother’s then her father’s. She doesn’t know the third, but it comes with lots of sparkles, as any good spell should.

Reiya tells her the third swing is the one still within her, which has been waiting until now to be unlocked. Amane, watching from the bushes, notes that it’s far more advanced than even the most ideal swing Aoi’d been working on, and after just a few swings, she already has it mastered. After leaving Aoi to practice, Reiya himself collapses after just those three swings, and a concerned Kinue comes running.

On the subject of special golf attacks that take a lot out of you, Ichina has been over it over and over and can’t find a way for Eve and Aoi to beat Nada…unless Eve can pop off two more Orange Bullets. Eve, a picture of confidence as she lounges on her bed, tells Ichina she’ll shoot all the Oranges in Florida if that’s what it takes to win. And so we enter the finals with both out Gold Girls relying on new and unpredictable weapons.

The change in Aoi is instant and shocking to everyone watching, from her suddenly frustrated Nada opponents, to her mother (who finally deigns to arrive to watch after her daughter already finished eight holes), and Leo and Date watching on TV. Klein and Lily are also tuned in at their classy bar. But just when they’re just one hole from beating Nada, Aoi can fell that she has just one more swing left in her.

After taking it, she’s unsteady on her feet, but Eve is there to support her and to take it from there…but won’t commit to a kiss, which is important due to what comes next. As expected, when Eve begins to execute another Orange Bullet she experiences a mental shock, and suddenly her long-buried memories of her childhood, and the identities of her parents, are suddenly unlocked.

Just as Aoi changed as a golfer after Reiya’s spell, after the rush of memories and emotions triggered by Orange, Eve unleashes a Rainbow Shot, identical to that of the late, great Kazuhiko. A rainbow shot means the club is swung without any hint of uncertainty in one’s heart.

An astonished Aoi, still conscious and leaning on her golf bag, approaches Eve after her shot, and Eve declares her real name: Evangeline Burton; her mother’s name, Eleanor Burton…and her father’s name: Hodaka Kazuhiko. Since that’s the same father Aoi has, that makes these golf girls half-sisters by blood.

And while I’m glad Eve finally knows who she is, and I love the postcard memory of her family to close the episode, I am a little disappointed, since this revelation confirms that Aoi and Eve will never be a romantic item. Unless, ya know, Birdie Wing goes and does something weird and crazy, which, as we know, it has never done in the past.

Or hey, maybe Kazuhiko isn’t actually Aoi’s dad. Hey, one can hope. And even if Eve x Aoi isn’t to be, there’s always Eve x Vipere!

In / Spectre – 09 – There is No Truth Here

Parliament is in session, and Leader of the Opposition Iwanaga Kotoko confidently casts her first net of logical fiction, hoping to snare enough votes to neutralize Steel Lady Nanase. A string of believable lies issues forth from her brain and fingers into the forums, creating a non-supernatural solution to the murder of Detective Terada. This early in the game she knows she doesn’t have to convince everyone, just enough to start creating reasonable doubt. It’s as much a murder case as a committee for a bill.

Her solution to Terada’s unusual, uncontested murder is surprisingly elegant and plausable, capitalizing on Terada’s general exceptionalism both as a detective and as a judo practitioner. She also makes good use of the site where his body was found (an abandoned gas station on a sleepy road). She spins the yarn of a the unghostly killer rigging a weight on a pendulum and luring Terada to the spot where it would smash into his face at great speed and kill him without resistance.

Since the episode can hardly just show Kotoko tapping away on her laptop in the back seat of a car the whole time, the online committee is visualized as her standing alone in cyberspace, surrounded by the screens of other users on the forum, poking holes into Kotoko’s solution. Kotoko expected this—any underdog would—and rather than trying to make everyone happy by plugging all of those holes, she settles for reducing the belief in the ghost story by increasing the specificity of the “real” killer’s description.

When that description starts sounding an awful lot like Saki, the policewoman turns around to shoot an angry look at Kotoko. She explains that it’s not her intention to frame an innocent policewoman at all, but to create an alternate killer that both fits the facts of the case and has motive (in the case of Kotoko’s fiction, romantic obsession). After all, neither her solution nor the legend of Steel Lady Nanase are true; they are dueling fictions. Since Rikka’s got a huge head start, Kotoko has to use every rhetorical weapon at her disposal to create lasting doubts.

And therein lies the challenge of this committee: even when Kotoko starts to sway the flow of the forum in her direction, the flow changes back to believing in the ghost all too quickly. That’s because Rikka is killing herself, visualizing and choosing the future threads that favor her ghost story. In the meantime, Kurou duelling with Nanase isn’t just to serve as a gauge for the effect of Kotoko’s lies (her power fluctuates in real time), but a way for Kurou to die and see the futures that favor those lies.

Despite it being another extremely talky episode of perhaps the talkiest show of the season, this is honestly all very fascinating and exhilarating to me. Your mileage may vary, but watching Kotoko do her thing is freaking awesome. Not only that, her first solution not holding up long was already folded into her calculations. She has three additional doubt-creating amendments to her proposed bill, so she’s feeling very confident about a legislative upset.

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card – 16 – Meiling Out

From the word go, the airborne Sakura was one busy Cardcaptor this week, pushing Siege to its limit by covering the entire Daidouji estate, stopping the burrowing Card in its tracks, then securing it before it destroyed the mansion. Flight is so happy to work with Sakura, her wings carried her so quickly Kero-chan couldn’t keep up with his head camera.

After finishing tea with Daidouji’s mom, Sakura and Meiling go one way, while Akiho goes another, with the latter encountering Yuna D. waiting for her. When he lets slip something about Sakura’s father that he shouldn’t know, he whips out his pocket watch, stops time, then rewinds it to before he slipped up.

This leaves Akiho confused but totally oblivious to what just transpired. I shudder to think how many times he’s used this magic to get Akiho to collect information, then make her forget, to say nothing of the “dreams” in which she and Sakura appear. None of this is the conduct becoming someone you can trust!

While pondering the possibilities of a future Kaito/Sakura confrontation, Sakura and Meiling end up the targets of some kind of Card in the form of a martial arts-wielding killbot in Chinese dress, who comes at the girls with extreme prejudice.

Here, we get to see Meiling’s own martial arts in practice, as well as Sakura’s natural athleticism and agility. The two are able to defeat their attacker by coordinating their counterattacks to be mirror images of each other, crystallizing the bot and giving Sakura enough time to secure the second card of the week, “Struggle.” I for one am glad this card is now  on Sakura’s side!

After the battle and later that night, Sakura is overly worried about Meiling. While appreciative that Sakura cares about her so dearly, she reminds her what she said before the killbot attacked about “good people making her sad”, because some of those good people are looking out for others so much they don’t care about themselves.

Meiling things this applies to both Sakura and Syaoran, and thinks both of them need to take a step back and think of their own happiness—at least occasionally—and not in a “seeing other people happy makes me happy” kind of way. But one thing Sakura is certainly happy about is that she finally got to fight side-by-side with Meiling. And they kicked some killbot-card ass!

Before hopping on the plane back to Hong Kong, Meiling also warns Syaoran over the phone that whatever he knows or has planned that neither she nor Sakura (with whom she’s now on first-name terms) knows about, if he gets hurt, she knows who’ll be saddest, and if he makes Sakura sad, he’ll regret it. Bottom line: Don’t mess with Meiling.