Goro knows how to please a man, and pleasing this man involves Shirley in swimsuit + twintails + thighhighs.
This was probably the best “filler” episode of Code Geass yet, perhaps even better than the Leouche chasing after Zero’s helmet episode. And, yet, it wasn’t entirely filler, much like the previous season’s festival episode wasn’t complete fluff either. What worries me, though, is that what followed the last festival episode was none other than that episode title to strike fear in the hearts of men everywhere, “Bloostained Euphie”. And we all know what happened there.
It’s a testament to Goro’s own personal directorial philosophy that always creeps up in his series (that I’ve seen, so far), in that he’s not necessarily afraid to cut loose and just have fun every once in a while, as he did in this episode. He does it in Scryed (that entire series was about cutting loose and having fun, and it was all the better for it) and Planetes (where he added in comic relief characters that were not present in the original manga, infuriating some but ultimately making the series much more fun to watch). It’s also important to point out that Goro is good at both humor and drama. I don’t quite think Code Geass would be quite as well-liked as it is if it didn’t accomplish both with aplomb. The zany humor of this episode, for instance, don’t really feel out of place when compared with the rest of the series, and the scenes surrounding the festival scenes remind us of the seriousness of the situation, which only accentuates the absurdity.
Still, intermixed with all the absurdity are the chunks of plot, such as C.C. mentioning her…brother? Cousin? Something? V.V. to Lelouch. I’m guesing that all the Geass powers possessed by those in the employ of Brittania come from him in some way or form, which means that there’s much more working under the surface of Code Geass than a simple rebellion. It’s kind of a shame that they haven’t touched on this very much either in the first season or this season, but I’m guessing that sometime soon things are going to Come Clean. It’s likely that Lelouch, for all his scheming and outwitting, is actually playing straight into the plan of C.C. who might be an even bigger manipulator than he is, and they’ve hinted at this since the first episode of the first season. And God only knows what C.C. wants.
And it’s just too damn cruel to play the Nunnally card like Suzaku just did, but it’s just proof that Code Geass R2 is going to be less a season of Lelouch winning effortless triumph after triumph (or maybe I’m just rusty on my first season) and more like an actual chess game between two shrewd players of the game, where the relative ranks of the two players are constantly in flux with every move made. And that’s how actual real-world situations are, atlhough on a much larger scale, as everyone tries to out-maneuver everyone else before they get out-maneuvered themselves. Politics is tons of fun like this, and this is why I don’t really follow the news too terribly closely: one, it’s often too complicated for any one person to figure out on their own, even if they had something like Wikipedia to back them up and provide information on the actual facts; and two, Shirley Fenette is not parading around in a ridiculously hot outfit. But that’s beside the point.
The point is, things are getting much more complex for Lelouch these days. And he thrives on complex situations. He’s quite the dangerous man.
Anime wa Bakuhatsu da! 