I suspect the bubble is going to be a very busy place this season, with so many shows clinging on by their fingernails.  One you get past the first three or four it’s pretty much a scrum at this point, and Takt Op. Destiny is certainly a part of that.  I modestly enjoyed the premiere, liked the second episode very much, and felt rather indifferently towards this one.  If that’s not the definition of a bubble series, I don’t know what is.

This ep played something like a hybrid of the first two, but somehow not projecting the best of either.  It was heavy on expository dialogue for starters, which always slows narratives down to a slog.  And I continue to like Cosette (who apparently is really gone, though who knows) better than Destiny.  I find she and Titan, the perky musicart who shows up just in time to save Takuto’s assets at the Symphinica festival, to be about as cliched “2020s anime” as characters could possibly be.

Titan arrives in the company of Lenny, the conduct0r who does most of the expositing.  He got on my nerves too for the record, and Hino Satoshi’s performance is pretty grating.  Nevertheless he’s here to fulfill a role, to explain to the holdover cast and the audience what the hell happened.  Which he does, including the fact that Cosette is apparently no longer involved apart from being a host body for Destiny.  The only thing he doesn’t explain  – because he doesn’t know – is why the D2s showed up when they did, but it seems pretty obvious that their attacks on Takuto’s father a decade earlier and him now are not coincidental.

Conveniently Anna’s sister (the one who’s not dead) works for the Symphonica research lab in New York, which means we also have an explanation for the road trip we walked in right in the middle of.  Lenny seems pretty certain Destiny is not functioning properly – musicarts aren’t supposed to just appear the way she did, and they’re also not supposed to suck out their conductor’s life force every time they fight.  So it’s off to seek professional help, which means driving through Vegas and then taking the southern route to the East Coast, then heading up through the Appalachians to the Big Apple.

Given how schizophrenic Takt Op. Destiny has been for its first three episodes, I’m not really sure what the default tone for this show is.  Or indeed if it even has one, and all that makes it rather hard to predict where it’s going to go from here, and whether it will have any staying power.  Thr first two episodes were so different I would have thought this one might clue us in on which one was the feint, but it just left me more unsure.  I suppose at least part of the time it’s going to be a road trip story, and in theory that could be interesting given the dystopian U.S. setting, but for me Cosette and Titan are a lot to take.  I’m forever blowing bubbles.