Boy oh boy, is this ever a tough week to talk about Kanata no Astra.  Not because of the quality of the episode (which was again excellent) but because it’s such a goddam tease.  This is generally a grey area to begin with, because if I’ve read the manga I have to figure out what’s obvious and what isn’t – and sometimes, the answer can be anything but obvious.  What seems self-evident to me might not be self-evident to someone with no experience with the material, and I can’t always remember what my thoughts were at the time I first read something.

I think we can say at this point that Shinohara Kenta loves to offer clues, and I can also say with confidence that this means a second viewing of Kanata no Astra (which is what this is for manga readers, in a sense) plays very differently than the first.  Shinohara plays fair, for the most part.  I”m also struck by the fact that I never would have thought after Sket Dance that he had a series like this in him.  Astra is certainly funny and charming, but it’s much more than a mere trifle – it’s quite a multi-faceted story with a good deal of complexity both on the plot and character side.

Last week’s cliffhanger is dealt with in fairly short order (again), but as is often the case with this series is raises new questions even as it answers others.  Charce’s explanation for his mysterious behaviour is that he was a transfer student from a country called Vixia, the only place that was allowed to keep its royalty after the last world war.  While its role as a sort of country-sized renaissance faire makes it a tourist hub, the country itself is strictly segregated, nobles from commoners.  Charce was a noble, and became friends with a commoner girl named Seira (who’s not the only character in the cast played by Minase Inori).  Tragedy strikes Seira and she falls into a coma, eventually being removed from the country by her parents.  Charce soon follows, cutting ties with his noble family, and the mother we met a couple of weeks back is in fact his adoptive mom.

Charce’s painful tale certainly seems like a valid explanation for why he didn’t volunteer his life story to the others.  That’s not to say there aren’t elements here that demand closer scrutiny, but as with last week’s tsunami events dictate a quick change of focus.  The Astra arrives at its next destination, the planet Icriss (fun with anagrams time – Shinohara does love his wordplay).  Its orbit and rotation are perfectly synced, such that it has a perpetually sun-baked and frozen side, with only a narrow habitable zone in-between.  And that zone turns out to be inhabited by enormous carnivorous plants, one of which snags the Astra and eventually causes Zack to crash land it, damaging the reactors beyond hope of repair.

So, then, it seems as if “Lost in Space” has morphed into “Castaway” – as Zack calmly but grimly notifies the others that Icriss is now their home.  All they can do is try to uninhabited planet survive as best they can, and while everyone tries to put a brave face on it, it’s Quitterie that reacts most badly.  She’s distraught and seemingly sees no point in living on in such a situation – so much so that Zach suggests that she might want to consider using the Astra’s one working cryogenic device to go into deep sleep and hope rescue arrives in the future.  This is a terrible gamble and it’s not surprising that Quitterie blanches at the notion – whether Zach intended it or not, his suggestion is the metaphorical slap in the face that causes Quitterie to come to terms with her new reality.

All of that is plenty to happen in one episode, but Astra offers up another doozy of a cliffhanger when Funicia and Charce find a wrecked ship while searching for food.  At first glance it looks like the Astra, but it’s merely the same class.  At first it appears abandoned and it’s certainly in bad shape, but the computers do boot up and a message on the com panel – “Help me” – prompts Zack to correctly guess that someone is in the cryogenic device.  And indeed they are – a blond-haired woman who, according to the control panel, has been asleep for 12 years.

That’s certainly a lot to gnaw on, but that’s what next episodes are for.  I actually thought it was quite a rash decision for Kanata to wake up the sleeper at all – if indeed they had gone into cryostasis hoping for rescue as Zack suggested Quitterie do, are the new arrivals right to wake her up when unable to offer any hope of rescue?  I suspect in the end I would have come to the same decision Kanata did but it would have taken me a hell of a lot longer to get there.  That Kanata is able to act so decisively is perhaps a sign of both his strength and weakness as a leader…