In 2020, I learned that dystopia is not for me.
I don’t mean the fictional kind; I’m talking about the real life stuff. I know people who spent their Great Pandemic Lockdown getting their money’s worth from Netflix, watching 900 movies and binging 500 TV shows in between baking bread and updating their social media all about it.
I’m impressed–impressed that they were able to relax. Wish I could do that. Sincerely. I wish that I could’ve untensed my shoulders and plopped on the couch and watched something other than news, doom and conspiracy theories.
Instead, my thoughts went something like this:
Everything could collapse soon and I am not ready, financially, emotionally or in any other sense. This is no time to marathon watch the Fast and Furious movies. I got worryin’ to do!
In retrospect though, a bunch of car chases would have rotted my brain less than the YouTube videos that I was watching.
Now it’s 2021 and I wouldn’t say that I’m any more hopeful than I was six months ago, but fear gets old and you move on.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m still alive and I really want to sit and watch Japanese animation from over thirty years ago about girls in mechanical armor fighting killer robots. When you can concentrate on something like that, you know that you’re okay.
It also helps that this is a pretty good episode.
So here’s the deal.
This is a direct follow-up to the previous installment, “Moonlight Rambler“. That one offered extremely life-like robots that run on human blood. They have the full span of emotions from fear to hope to love. They form attachments and it gets real sad when our heroes, The Knight Sabers, have to kill (or “kill”) a likable specimen of their kind after she becomes one with a machine that’s rigged to blow up big enough to turn Tokyo into a smoldering crater.
In the aftermath, The Knight Sabers have two problems:
1) Priss is so torn up over what happened last episode that she quits the organization.
2) Some mysterious group disguised as them is going around committing violent heists of crates of Boomers, the Genom Corporation war robots.
The bad guy is a fella named Largo, a super-robot himself who looks like a man. His most intimidating feature–when he’s not turning green and sprouting weird red veins, at least–is that he’s linked to weapons satellites up in the stratosphere. That means that he can mentally command lasers to shoot down to Earth from space at anyone who so much as looks at him funny. The target never sees it coming.
He’s powerful already, but like all villains, Largo wants ALL of the power, baby. He wants the ability to control every single Boomer and then reset the world as Boomer Land where the robots rule (and he rules over the robots).
You get the feeling that the world of Bubblegum Crisis is headed that way anyway–at this point in the series, we’re not surprised when any character turns out to be a machine–but it’s not happening fast enough for Largy Pants.
A few more twists:
Leo, the slick 80s cop character who’s hot for Priss and been trying to season her sukiyaki since the beginning now knows her secret identity as one of The Knight Sabers, though he keeps that info close to the vest.
Knight Sabers leader Sylia Stingray is definitely a covert robot. We’ve gotten hints of it before, but this episode makes it plain. It’s coy, but transparent due to a cool idea touched on here about how robots can be “telepathic” with each other. They can communicate with other robots without saying a word, like my computer right now picking up on the wi-fi signal from my modem. Makes sense.
In the end, everything’s in turmoil and tragedy still hangs in the air because that’s the Bubblegum Crisis way.
Me though, I just continue to groove on the awesome 80s style. That sizzling synthesizer score. That nicely cinematic opening, The glittery urban landscape. Little details like the shot of the empty gun shells clattering to the floor during police target practice.
I guess that’s how I like my dystopia.