If EUREKA SEVEN ends up spawning a whole franchise of series - - and I can certainly picture that - - I suspect that the fans will end up cataloguing ASTRAL OCEAN with an asterisk next to it. It strikes me as the sort of sequel made after executives at a company change offices and get a new creative team on who don’t have the tightest grasp, or the strongest desire, on fitting the story they want to tell fit into any continuity that's been established.
Yeah, we’ve got Eureka, we’ve got Nirvash and we’ve got the Scubs… but now we’ve got some ripped-from-the-headlines intrigue in Burma’s drug market that feels incredibly jarring in the ES space opera milieu.
Watching this, I almost wonder if the staff had always wanted to do something political and are now using the success of the first series as an opportunity to scratch that itch without fear of failure. I’m not saying it’ll spin out this way, for sure, but I’ve seen it happen enough times in other stories where creators kind of blindside the audience by making some fumbling topical point at the end.
Hell, even the shape-shifter we’re introduced to in this episode seems kind of removed from the rules of fantasy that have been established so far. The opener with the Mexican stand-off was a little confusing (although, I did enjoy it even while I wasn’t always sure what was going on) and it’s starting to seem like Clue #2 for this show earning itself that asterisk.
Watch this episode, "Noblesse Oblige” here and decide for yourself, then read my comments on the previous episode here.
Tom Pinchuk’s the writer of HYBRID BASTARDS! & UNIMAGINABLE. Order them on Amazon here & here. Follow him on Twitter: @tompinchuk
The mix of series components like the island in between Code Geass and a few million other things. The first series seemed to hold things back for a a while- and I'm curious if that's what they're working towards. The new team's pilot/captain seems to have known Eureka before the era the story takes place in- but it feels like the reality of Eureka might have been tossed far into the future- or maybe changed entirely. It seems unlikely that Eureka would have disappeared into history or the strange that seemed to dominate the world would have left the world so completely.
I think some of the film bits with the shape-shifter was interesting in its own way- but semi-invincible, impossible to track, blow up buildings- seems like a touch beyond what was a somewhere on the ground- somewhere- story world.
A bit of a heads up, the next episode is a bit on the confusing side.
@LordTerminal: wait what an anime episode that is confusing ;)...next you will be telling me they have one that is "tricky"...*looks up at story above this one* oh wait different show but never mind...
@zaldar said:
What I meant was the next episode is going to be one of those mind-screw episodes the previous series was fond of. Though not to the same degree as that series but still what I'd call a bit of a mind-screw.
@LordTerminal: Ah thats good then as that was the part of the first series I enjoyed the most.