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Digital Downloads
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Written by maehara
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Monday, 06 October 2008 16:00 |
 Excuse me while I break into a happy dance - BLASSREITER is over! As with the episode before it, the show's finale manages to be a decently watchable episode - but with all that's gone before it, I don't think I've ever been so glad to see a series end. Now, I wonder if I can bill GONZO for the hours of my life I've wasted on it...
Joseph's final battle with Xargin has begun, but it will still be an hour before the Isis nanomachines injected into his body become active. Isis will allegedly bring certain doom to Xargin, and to Joseph himself - but Joseph has to survive until they activate if he's to win the day. Meanwhile, in the air and on the ground, Sasha and Mei-Feng desperately try to intercept the attack that has been launched against the country - with no other options apparently available, the UN has decided to turn Germany into a smouldering wasteland. However, the missile carrier manages to deflect the interceptors with its state-of-the-art systems and edges ever closer to German airspace....
Okay. First black mark: there are still some unresolved issues and mysteries here that I'm not really happy about - there would probably have been time in the episode to deal with them, were it not for the focus being so heavily on the fighting, but there you go. BLASSREITER has hardly been the poster child for internal consistency, so I'm not surprised - just disappointed. The writers have also been unable to resist the urge to hit the Big Red Reset Button at the end of the series, and so after all they've been through and all the heart-rending deaths we've seen, we find in the epilogue that all the show's characters are still around, after a fashion. That's cheating, to me, and earns the show another big black mark to add to its already huge collection of 'em. The dead should damn well stay dead.
On the good, though, while this isn't exactly intelligent viewing, there's enough going on that you're unlikely to be bored and for once, the action is actually quite enjoyable. There are two tracks to the final battle, with Joseph versus Xargin on the one hand and Sasha and Mei-Feng versus the missiles on the other - switching between the two regularly stops either one of them from becoming tedious and helps the appeal of the episode immensely.
All far too little, too late, though. As a series, BLASSREITER has been a complete train wreck, with it never seeming to know what it was trying to do or what message it was trying to convey. When it bothered to focus on its characters, it worked well and was a decently-enjoyable watch - but the rest of it was just an unwatchable mess, and the improvement in the final episodes came far too late to save it. Sure, this episode's decent and has been marked accordingly, but given all the c**p you have to wade through to get here, I really can't recommend it.
Watch this episode
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