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Monday, 12 January 2009 00:00 |
 Gunslinger Girl was one of those shows that was popular enough - in the west, anyway - that there was always going to be a good chance of a sequel. And lo, it's here - so let's travel back to the Social Welfare Agency and see how its conditioned killers are handling life...
Guise has been on a mission to France, but is now on his way home to Italy and looking forward to being reunited with Henrietta. As luck would have it, there are expected to be major demonstrations in Rome on the day of his return, a development which sees them - and other pairings from the Social Welfare Agency - pressed into action to deal with the instigators. The demonstration soon descends into riots, with the militant Five Republics movement suspected of being behind them, and the detonation of a bomb at the scene soon raises the stakes. Henrietta and Guise get a lead on the perpetrator and give chase while Triela attempts to set up a sniping position, and their target is soon deceased. But after the mission, Henrietta finds that what she'd assumed was her gift from France bears an inscription dedicating it to someone else, and grabs the wrong end of the stick...
The first thing I thought on seeing Henrietta again was, "Hold on, is this a prequel?". The character designs for this season have been tweaked somewhat, with Henrietta in particular looking younger than she ever did, but it becomes clear as the episode goes on that yes, we are dealing with a sequel series. There's a short voiceover sequence at the beginning of the story to explain the history of the Social Welfare Agency and what they're been doing to the girls, just in case you missed the first season, and from there it drops us straight into the first set of action scenes. The Five Republics movement is clearly being set up as the opposition for this series (I hesitate to call them "villains", as in a lot of ways the Agency is just as bad), and here we get to see some of the lengths they'll go to to create mayhem.
One of the running plot threads from season one revolved around how unstable the girls were - their conditioning wasn't perfect, and each of them were left with little personality defects that eventually caused problems. Henrietta's was an inability to respond proportionally to events - the smallest bit of damage to Guise and she'd go nuts - and there are hints here that she's still working on that. In one scene, Guise has to reassure her when he takes a scratch, as she's clearly prepared to let rip in response. It's good to see these quirks still there, not just for continuity's sake but also because it gives hope that the series hasn't been dumbed down. Gunslinger Girl was never just about the gunplay, but also about the girls themselves, how they were being used and abused and how they were coping with that. If this season is to have the same appeal, that aspect of it will need to still be there, and it looks as though that's the case.
For all the promising material, though, this episode still doesn't feel quite right, and reading reactions from when the series was airing in Japan reveals that it didn't go down well over the course of its run. I'm not suffering from disappointment yet - it's only the first episode, after all - but Il Teatrino is definitely missing some of the old magic. Here's hoping it can rediscover it in future episodes.
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