AnimeVision

19 - Chii Waits
Chii's stuck waiting for Hideki to rescue her, with no-one but Kotoko for company. Hideki's doing his best to track her down, and Ueda (Chii's boss from the Tirol) joins in the search, but it still seems to be a hopeless task. While searching, Ueda tells Hideki of his own experiences of getting too attached to a persocom...

20 - Chii Wants
Kojima gets down to his analysis, while Minoru has received another picture that may have some importance. Hideki can't make any sense of it, but Shinbo arrives home just in time to be of use... Meanwhile, Chii's analysis is having some unexpected side-effects, and the extent of Chii's abilities becomes clear...

21 - Chii Answers
Shinbo's moved in with Ms Shimizu, so it's just Hideki at the apartments now. Otherwise, life is pretty much back to normal, but there's something different that Hideki can't quite put his finger on. Minoru's still trying to dig up what information he can about Chii, and shares what he knows with Hideki. There are more risky ways of gathering more information, but Minoru doesn't want to risk them - Yuzuki, however, doesn't agree and carries out some unauthorised hacking of her own...

Finally delving a little more into the show's real purpose (the relationships between humans & persocoms, it seems) and getting some real details on Chii's past & origins, which made this disc a good bit more interesting than the previous volumes. That it took to disc 5 to really grab my attention is a bit worrying, though.

On the new character front, Kotoko is almost worth buying the disc for - more humour from just that one character than anyone else on the disc. Kojima's less interesting (evil character turned good guy in the space of an epsiode? Puh-leese...), but he seems to have a role to play in helping Hideki & Minoru figure out what's going on. Also nice to have someone in the show whose ethics are less than snow-white...

Overall, then, I actually enjoyed this disc, which surprised me. I was beginning to resign myself to Chobits having been a bit of a waste of money. That said, one good disc doesn't save a series, and there's one more disc of story to follow (remember, disc 7 is just the recap episodes and the Chiibits short, so it's completist-value only), so the final batch of episodes will need to be something spectacular if they're to save the series from the 'mediocre' bin. Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen...