Macross Frontier ep 9
This was an excellent episode. Is it just me or have the last few eps been coming as bad-good pairs? For every episode with good art and writing, you have a farmed-out-to-foreign-substudio one. Watching this show on a weekly basis with other stuff in between (and being only casually into the show itself in the first place) probably lessens the dichotomy, but I can see this being really annoying if one were to marathon it. I think I can just wait for the US release for this series… not worth plonking down for the R2s. Unless it comes with a massive poster of Sheryl.
I liked this episode being it focused on a sub-character, namely Michel (Mikhail? what’s the real pronunciation? I guess it’s Michel to his “close friends”, and Mikhail to, um, his other friends, like Alto). Michel’s secret is a little undramatic compared to all the other stuff that’s been happening in this show; his sister was a sniper, and she killed herself after a fatal friendly fire incident. Michel’s been living in that shadow since, and I guess we can attribute some of his suave playboy persona to this personal demon.
We also find out a bit more about his relationship with Kulan. To be honest, I really like these two together, and that has nothing to do with Kulan’s loli form. Kulan’s a childhood friend and they have a long history. It shows up in their interactions which aren’t flirtatious but definitely far more familiar than friendship. That’s a real nice change compared to the Sheryl/Ranka/Alto new love triangle dynamic, or the highschool friends dynamic. And heck, Kulan’s interesting because she’s awesome in Zentradi form, and actually passably tolerable in Micron form :P
The best, but slightly weird part, is Michel talking to Kulan in his VF – that thing just moved so much like a human it was bizarre. Even held its head when Kulan (completely justifiably) slapped him. And you control those things with pedals and joysticks, ya know…
On a non-Michel note, Grace is moving up my books too. Anyone with cybernetic implants who can hack into military systems without batting an eye, and is voiced by cool-voice Inoue Kikuko rocks! Heheh.
So, what I want to know, and the episode hasn’t answered, is:-
1) Is Michel Zentradi? He’s got the ears for it, but he was Micron-sized when playing with Kulan. This doesn’t discount the possibility that he is a permanently Micronized Zentradi.
2) Where does the “Michel” pronunciation come from, since “Mi-ha-el” is the official?
3) Why on earth does Kulan still have her hair band on in the Micron chamber?! Geh -_-
I think where this episode succeeded was that it had a good amount of action thrown in with character development. I guess this one was meant to deal with “people’s reasons for fighting”, and offers Michel as the central character while touching upon Alto and Sheryl, emphasizing that everyone “has their own circumstances”. Ideally I would prefer this sort of thing to be covered slowly across a few episodes instead of crammed into one, but Macross F is a highly episodic format so I guess they are constrained to going through their checklist of plot points one at a time.
