We’re into the home stretch now with Radiant.  Four eps remain, and the Rumble Town arc seems to have come to an end.  However, its main purpose was clearly to set up what follows – the intersection of Seth’s fate with the Thaumaturges.  Obviously we’re looking at another example of an anime basically getting to the real starting point of an ongoing manga and leaving things there – the last five minutes of this episode make that point pretty clearly.  It sucks, but at least I’m used to it.

Piodon’s role remains unclear.  Certainly he’s important, but this ep didn’t clear up any of the mystery surrounding his connection(s) with Seth.  He raised what appears to be the central question facing the protagonist – what side do you choose to be on?  Hameline’s hatred certainly drove her to extremism, and I’m not going to fault Seth for trying to stop her from killing an entire city – the baby, the bathwater, and everything else.  But neither do I have an issue to her reacting with disbelief to Seth’s seeming loyalty to a bunch of people who loathe people like him.

The Rumble Town arc has been a huge improvement for Radiant, and highlighted a lot of themes clearly important to Tony Valente as well as bringing the plot of the series into focus.  But for the power players here, Rumble Town and its inhabitants are merely a backdrop.  Torque is interested in one thing and one thing only, and that’s Seth.  Just why exactly hasn’t been made clear, but when his battleship arrives in town Torque sends out one of his thaumaturges, the old man Santori, the read a laundry list of charges against him.  Something here doesn’t add up, as Seth would have to be have been committing crimes from the womb pretty much for all that to be true.  But it’s obvious this is not a simple fabrication, and the fact that Seth feels as if he recognizes the names being read clearly indicates there is indeed a connection of some sort.

As for the demise of Hameline, I think it was pretty much inevitable and I never felt as much sympathy for her as I suspect I was supposed to.  Mistreated as she was, she’s done some pretty terrible things in the name of revenge.  Naive as he is I’m mostly with Seth here, going the bad guy route really isn’t the ticket.  Hameline redeems herself a bit by sacrificing herself to give Seth a chance to escape, but it seems as if that will drive Seth into a rage which causes some sort of transformation.  And he’s apparently no match for Torque, so another spell in the brig of an Inquisition battleship seems to be on the horizon.  Seth’s ties two men may be his salvation here, one who works for the Inquisition officially and one (Piodon) who has some sort of connection with them whose nature remains unclear.

One other element here that intrigues me is the difference between inquisitors and sorcerers.  They may call their powers by different names, but to the outside observer “miracles” and fantasia look pretty indistinguishable.  I see a few possibilities here: maybe these two powers actually are the same and that’s being covered up, or perhaps they spring from the same source.  Did they arise independently of each other, or split off in the distant past?  Are they mutually incompatible with each other?  Lots and lots of questions remain, and very little time to answer them…