Interludes like this are always fun for a manga reader (insert “Thriller”-popcorn GIF here), but frustrating when the manga reader is writing about a series like Kanata no Astra.  While I can’t deny a certain glee in seeing new viewers twist themselves in knots debating what’s really going on here and who the saboteur might be, one has to be careful not to give any hints – even indirect ones.  That, in turn, sharply limits what one can talk about regarding any given episode.  If I point out a hint that was placed by the author with the intent to have sharp-eyed viewers catch it, I’m effectively telling all viewers that hint was significant (whether they caught it or not).

So…  There are definitely hints.  That’s all I’ll say.

This I can safely say – the tone here was considerably more serious than in the first two episodes.  Comedy was at a relative minimum as the Astra approached planet Shummoor, and not just because Zack and Kanata were preoccupied with the broken communicator.  Kanata’s thought processes here were interesting – the way he found reasons to suspect and to not suspect almost everyone in the cast.  Also notable was that he happened upon Ulgar Zweig (Uchiyama Kouki) leaving the storage room with a case whose contents he declined to enlighten about.

After Funi reveals that she overheard a man tell the Enchou-sensei of her orphanage “Put her on B-5 and we’ll illuminate (LOL) them all”, Kanata decides to come clean about the communicator – and what it means regarding someone in their group.  No one can guess why someone would want everyone in this group eliminated, but Ulgar does note that his father is the vice-principal of their school – and that Ulgar is enough of a black sheep that his father hides their relationship publicly.

All that was shunted off to one side, though, when disaster struck – literally.  Naturally the mind first turns to sabotage when the water generator is ruptured and the ship starts to depressurize – slowly, as it would in real life – (Luca to the rescue), but Charce shows the others pieces of a meteoroid, suggesting the hull was stuck randomly (and indeed, the ship’s deflectors were offline).  Even after Luca seals the hole, though, the anti-grav unit and thrusters are down as the main generator’s circuit board was damaged.  And with Shummoor having snagged the Astra in its gravitational field, that means more immediate problems than who the saboteur might be.

I think there are probably some dubious elements to the science here, but Shinohara-sensei does at least try to view these events through that lens.  We have gloomy girl Yunhua Lu (Hayami Saori) almost drowning when she swallows a floating water bubble (ironically, an Italian astronaut named Luca Parmitano almost died when his helmet’s ventilation system sprung a leak and his helmet filled with water).  Of course Yunhua should have had her helmet on and didn’t, but I could see a bunch of kids missing a detail like that in a panicked sequence such as this.

There’s also the random flying creature which stops the gravity system from kicking in even after it’s connected to the backup generator (which Aries had discovered earlier) – a result of a failsafe mechanism built into it.  It was Ulgar’s shooting ability – with Luca’s glue gun – which saved the day there.  And that case he took from the storage room contained a gun (not glue, presumably) inside it.  But the ship does manage to land safely on Shummoor, which is the most critical problem solved for now…