That was incredible!  Gen Urobuchi does an amazing job at writings stories that contain solid plot twists and then wrapping them around unexpected deaths- just goes to show how well he does at writing engrossing anime series.  One of my favorite Urobuchi series has go to be Phantom:Requiem for the Phantom as that series took an innocent bystander and turned him into a emotionless hit man for hire.  Puella Magi Madoka Magica was a tried and true view of the mahou shojo genre with tenebrous themes throughout resulting in one highly unexpected death of the entire 1-cour series!  Interesting side note is he posted an apology on his twitter page regarding that series supposedly intended for kids.  Psycho-Pass illustrated themes of cyberpunk in the same vein as Ghost in the Shell, an homage to the film Bladerunner and took it to another level with the inclusion of the dominator gun- developing an entire 2-cour series around it!  Kill la Kill re-vitalized school-setting shojo series like Revolutionary Girl Utena and took an entirely different spin on it!  With animation similar to Gurren Lagaan, a powerful soundtrack by Hiroyuki Sawano and an filled it in with a very intense plot! Gen Urobuchi plays with a varied amount of themes such as femininity and fascism.  Aldnoah.Zero is no different when it comes to its motives.

This was an awesome episode!  Have to point out how the writers here took an entire recap scene and enhanced it so much more by adding in the Aldnoah Drive and everyone’s reaction to the Princess being alive!  Some series can handle doing recaps like this, Zankyou no Terror has so much going on in the grand scheme of things it needs every bit of time to tell its story.  Aldnoah Zero is lucky to be a 2-cour anime with how much it’s thrown at us so far.

More than half the episode moved so slow as it switched between Darzana and the other crew on what to do about Asseylum being alive and aboard their ship.  Perhaps the most surprising result of what happened previously was the capture of Slaine by Count Cruhteo.  Aldnoah Zero develops really bad situations for these characters to be in and adds in ulterior motives- this makes the plot for a mecha series like this especially with this episode very gripping!  Initially it was the impression that Count Cruhteo was behind the killing of Asseylum but at that moment where Count Saazbaum switched off his monitor I knew something was up.  They built up Cruhteo so well in this only to be killed off so quickly by the real enemy!  Did not see that coming at all!  It is a shame this show’s episode director couldn’t have written M3: Sono Kuroki Hagane.  As poorly developed as the characters have been lately in that series whoever did this Aldnoah episode could have done wonders to that series!

OVERALL IMPRESSION: 9/10

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