Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu LOVE! LOVE! seems intent on leaving n0 fourth wall unsmashed this season.

There’s a certain point past which the term “meta” doesn’t even apply anymore, and I think Binan Koukou probably passed it some time ago.  Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t, but in the case of this series I think it suits the material rather well. The more absurdity, the more commitment to the premise the better has always been the mantra here, and suspension of disbelief was never really going to be on the table.  So totally selling out to the joke and abjectly satirizing the tropes is a damn good fit.

With that in mind, the formula which dominated Binan Koukou for a season and a half has fundamentally been transcended, and it now exists as part of an inward-looking parody of not just the mahou shoujo genre the series was created to poke fun at, but at Binan Koukou itself.  I guess when you can turn to self-parody with confidence the audience will come along you’ve kind of made it as a show.  Now, VEPPer turning someone into a monster and having the Boueibu defeat them is a small part of the setup (even if they do have 32 pages of backstory), not the payoff.

The payoff comes at Binan Land, the old-school amusement park which Yumoto loves and is about to be shuttered (Japan is littered with such parks).  Binan Land has a major role to play in a lot of backstories here (this is indeed an exposition episode – sorry Dadacha), most acutely Gora’s.  His alter ego is Maximum Goran (former Wimbledon champion), and we see via Yumoto’s flashback that Gora, too, was involved in the defense of the planet.  He seems to have been part of a hero show at the park, a show which acted as a kind of cover for actual earthling vs. alien battles.  And during one of those battles (with a crab-can monster played by Hayami Shou) Maximum Goran saved the pint-sized Beppu twins, which certainly explains a big chunk of their obsession with him now.

It’s too early to just how all of this fits together, but the evidence is stronger than ever that alien or not, VEPPer have no interest in conquest whatsoever – they just want their Gora all to themselves.  That means they really can’t be the true enemy here, and perhaps that’s whoever it is that kidnaps Gora and puts him inside what looks some kind of space coffin or something.  One thing VEPPer and the Boueibu can certainly agree on is that they love Gora, so it’s hardly far-fetched to imagine they might team up in order to save him.