Saturday, 3 June 2017

Re:Creators Episode 9 Review

Magane Fan Club now open for business
(This review contains spoilers!)

          Last week’s Re:Creators continued to finally become more of the show it promised it would be from the beginning, upping the action and mystery while at the same time throwing out the unnecessary overdose of exposition that plagued the first few episodes. This week was a continuation of that same high, as the show focused on one of the most fun and interesting characters in the whole thing.

          The big question from last week was whether Mamika was going to survive her encounter with Altair or not. This question was answered in the cold open with a big and bloody “nope”, as she was brought crashing down to Earth still mortally wounded. What this episode doesn’t tell us is what the consequences of the Magical Splash Flare were. Altair is nowhere to be seen this week, and neither is the gun-toting guy that seems to be her number two. While it’s fairly obvious they’re still alive, one has to wonder what happened to them afterwards.

          Anyways, Mamika dies in front of Magane, with her last wish being for her to tell Alice that they need to side with Meteora to take down Altair. Magane, of course, doesn’t exactly tell Alice the truth, instead flipping the narrative to make it sound like Meteora is the one who killed Mamika and Altair is the one they need to side with.

          A lot of the episode is given up to Magane, and how she’s working to turn all the heroes against each other. It’s been made obvious that she doesn’t care whether the world is saved or destroyed, but rather just wants to have fun messing with everyone. Since Altair has done barely anything at all over the course of the series, Magane is the closest we have to a main villain right now, and she’s a lot of fun. I love the subtle ways she’s able to turn conversations around in her favour and get people to do what she wants. She’s an extremely interesting and fun bad guy.

          Through her we also got hints to Sota’s past, and how he’s done something in the past so that he “can’t see someone anymore”. I think at this point we’ve been given all the puzzle pieces to figure out what happened here. Sota was friends with the girl who created Altair, but the two drifted apart after she became successful. Then he did something to make her commit suicide, which is why Altair targeted him in the first episode. All that’s left is for the show to explicitly tell us the details.

          There’s also an interesting little nugget of conspiracy lying beneath Magane’s lies. What if Meteora is actually working for Altair? She kind of randomly showed up in the first episode alongside her, and it would explain her sudden knowledge of all her plans despite never really coming into contact with her. Plus there’s also the fact that it would help Altair’s plan of making the creations fight each other if she had a double agent working on the other side.

          My one big problem with this episode is a continuing one with the entire series: there are too many characters than they can juggle right now. Selesia is completely absent this week, as is the mech guy who still has done squat. While they don’t really have a place in an episode so focused on Magane, I really wish they’d been given something to do. Why not have Selesia be the one to fight Magane in the end? She’s the most prominent character in the intro and advertising, yet has done basically nothing crucial since the pilot.

          Despite that, this episode is awesome. The writing on Magane turned her from a fun baddie to a truly interesting antagonist, and the way she’s subtly trying to manipulate the narrative is fantastic. Plus, if my Meteora prediction comes true, it’s an awesome little nugget placed early on for the more zealous fans.

FINAL SCORE
9/10

Amazing

No comments:

Post a Comment