Never trust anyone over Captain.

• It struck me in thinking about Argevollen this week what’s so odd about its structure.  Basically, this is a mini-series rather than a “series”.  It plays like on of those American TV mini-series about World War II in that each episode is like a little movie, rather than a smoothly flowing episodic narrative.
• One of the impacts of that is that while there is an underlying plot, the individual episodes tend to be rotational – they focus on a particular theme or subset of characters, not always a logical continuation of the one that came before.
• Brigadier General Cayenne (if that is your real name) is clearly not to be trusted.  Even if his assessment that Arandas is going to lose the war could be chalked up to hard-hearted realism, he seems altogether too cheerful about it (and everything else).
• The first bombshell he dropped – Argevollen was “supposed to go to me”.  The implication that he’s in cahoots with Kybernes is obvious.
• The second bombshell is a bombshell only to Samonji – Tokumine is Reika’s younger brother.  Samonji’s reaction betrays that he genuinely didn’t know, which I guess is possible given that they have different last names.
• The biggest bombshell is the one Samonji drops on Tokumine – not just that he was Reika’s superior officer, but that she died as part of an “experiment”.  Obviously, the details of this experiment are likely to be utterly crucial for the second cour.
• My take on Samonji’s decision to tell this to Tokimune at the bar was that he was (as Cayenne foreshadowed) hoping to get punched – at the very least I certainly saw it coming.  I think Samonji felt he deserved it, and wanted that punch to help assuage his guilt.
• Of course, if that’s true it makes Samonji extraordinarily selfish – things get very nasty for enlisted men that punch their commanding officer.