If I said this wasn’t an especially great episode by Apocalypse Hotel’s standards, you’d have to take it in context. This show has been an absolute revelation, the surprise of the season (Witch Watch has also surprised, but it’s not on the same level). It’s also been on a freakishly good run lately, culminating in last week’s abject masterpiece. This was not on that level for me, but still pretty damn good – there’s a lot of room for that.
Basically I have two issues with this week’s ep. First, the rod from God is a dumb idea in real life. As such, it amounts to a dumb idea in fiction too. Yes, it’s a real proposed weapon that propeller heads have been debating since the fifties, and the series pretty much depicted it accurately. For myriad reasons it makes almost no practical sense as a weapon, which is why no government – no matter how crackpot – has ever tried to develop it. So there was a lot of narrative ink spilled over what amounts to a crackpot theory, with the seeming implication that it was actually a good idea.
The other issue I have is that this is really the first time I found Ponko – a character type I almost always find annoying and had not at all with Apocalypse Hotel – annoying. The constant whinging on about her dumb idea got on my nerves pretty quickly, as did her yelling and bawling generally. I still think she’s a great character, and the revelation that she’s actually an honors graduate of an engineering university on Planet Tanuki makes her even more interesting (I still haven’t figured out what aging means to tanuki, if anything). But yeah, she was a lot to take here – let’s hope they tone her down.
The whole “Ventura, Ventura, Space People” thing was amusing in an almost Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita sort of way. In fact I mentioned way back with Episode 3 that AH kind of reminded me of that show and while I’d sort of forgotten, it really does fit now that I think about it. That was a series that kind of limped to the finish line after a great start, but as an original I hope this show doesn’t follow suit. And the advertising satellite idea was a good one, too. I mean, even robots get bored I’m sure, and these guys have all the time in the world on their hands. Why not build a satellite and a rocket to launch it? The occasional E.T. is all the Gingarou has to look forward to anyway, even with an onsen.
But then the whole rod from God thing got in the way of the fun. Again, dumb idea on both sides of the fourth wall. And Ponko as a sort of reactionary right-wing politician was kind of icky to be honest, a gag that didn’t work at all for me. Frankly there’s no way Yachiyo should have been won over, Nostradamus or not. And I mean, maybe there are laws against that sort of thing for a reason? Does Yachiyo want the Gingarou to be a hotel known as a flouter of law and order in the galaxy?
Be that as it may, build the RFG they do (along with the rocket and satellite) and it takes 70 years to boot. Ponko is in charge of the project, and she can’t solve the weight problem (working out doesn’t help). Yachiyo arrives at the logical, practical solution – if she goes instead of Ponko, all that heavy life support equipment can be left off. This seems to work pretty well until an untimely solar flare zaps Yachiyo for long enough to see her untethered and adrift in space. I have had suspicions for a while that we might be headed for a tragic ending with Apocalypse Hotel (the OP and ED seem to hint at it). But I think it’s too early for such events here, and I suspect Yachiyo will make it back home one way or the other.
