|
Now in Japan
|
|
Written by maehara
|
|
Tuesday, 18 October 2005 00:00 |
 I was having a discussion with some who had seen all of Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu not too long ago, and they compared it to Saishuuheiki Kanojo
in terms of how depressing and heart-rending Iriya's fate turned out to
be. Having only seem the first two episodes myself, I couldn't
see the comparison, especially after the pure comedy of episode
2. By the end of these episodes, I could see where he was coming
from - and there are still two episodes to go...
3 - 18:47'32"
It's festival time, and the newspaper club's doing a presentation on
Sonohara Base's alleged UFO's - not that Asaba and Akiho got much of a
say in the matter. While working on the project, Akiha makes
clear her feelings about Iriya - 'hate' is definitely the word, making
Iriya's membership of the newspaper club just a little awkward.
Not that it looks like it'll be a problem for long - Iriya's been
getting called out of class a lot. Mid-way through the festival -
several days after he last saw Iriya - Asaba gets a phonecall from her,
insisting he comes to meet her. With a first-level alert having
been called and war seeming imminent, there's something she wants him
to see...
4 - Suizenji, Answer Me!
With a state of
emergency in place and a recent suspicious fire at the
base, people are starting to get a bit twitchy. Iriya's back in
class, though, and Akiho seems to be making an attempt to be friendly -
it's enough to get half the class tailing them to see what
happens. It turns out she's more interested in trying to wind
Iriya up than be friendly, though. When trying to tweak her with
stories of the time she's spent with Asaba doesn't work, Akiha resorts
to a new challenge: a how-much-can-you-eat contest. Later, Iriya
is taken seriously ill - Asaba's smart enough to realise that her
condition's got something to do with what she's doing at the base, but
when he voices his feelings on the matter all he
gets for his trouble is a beating, while Iriya, given the chance to
stay with Asaba instead of returning to the base, chooses to run away
with him...
For all that the first half of episode 4 is all about Akiha trying
to be a bitch, it's good fun to
watch & shows the series hasn't completely lost its sense of
humour. The last thing I expected was for the two of them to end
up as friends at the end of it. The intervention from Iriya's
minder at
the mid-point of the episode was a sudden & a stark reminder that
this isn't really a comedy, though, and the tone of events through the
rest of the episode really does start to move the story in the same
sort of direction as SaiKano
- especially when Asaba and Iriya decide to run away together.
Fortunately, Iriya doesn't try to lay the emotion onto the viewer quite
as much as SaiKano, which makes it a little easier to watch, and no less compelling.
Episode 3 was a little
stranger & quite hard to follow - there's more going on through it
that I could get into the synopsis and the story is a little muddled,
but the main themes are the relationships, and the triangle between
Akiha, Asaba and Iriya. While I was rooting for Asaba &
Iriya, you couldn't help but feel sorry for Akiha as she sat by herself
at the end of the festival. Quite touching, in its own way.
From what I've seen here & heard elsewhere, it seems Iriya
is only going to get darker in tone over the final two episodes.
While I definitely want to see how the story ends, I'm a little bit
wary that there'll be too much of an attempt to play on the emotions -
but if the writers have been able to avoid that temptation, this should
turn out to be a must-see series.
|
