Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Tide-Line Blue – episode 12

October 25, 2005 on 10:53 pm | In Tide-Line Blue | Comments Off

“Blue”

This is the final episode, and it concludes a good deal of the series, but it still feels penultimate. We really need the OVA to polish the story off.

(still, a little spoilery inside as I tend to get in “final” episodes)

It’s the final gambit, and Teen and Keel unveil their master plan. Unfortunately, the battle is too far gone and Gould and Aoi must bang heads in the most explosive way possible.

This episode had some pretty good moments, and it even had some damn good moments. Still, it was not quite enough. While I really enjoyed the Keel and Teen bonding, which some will argue was the series’ “point”, the depressing pragmatism of the situation solves nothing. I thought that it could all be ended in twenty minutes, but it was not quite.
I’ll cover the episode systematically, without much regard for narrative flow.

Normally I don’t care a damn for action sequences, with character driven scenes being my stock in trade. That said, the submarine and ship battles showcased here were genuinely exciting. Watching all of those explosions unlocked something inside me that I don’t normally feel. I won’t say it’s that “special feeling” that I reserve for only a few moments in anime history, but a high stakes alleged “fight to the finish” is naturally tense. This has not been a series for big set pieces, with only two before it, but they enhance the flavour of the show something fierce.

I’ve talked far too much about “right” and “wrong” in the course of this series, so I will just talk about Gould’s course of action and the great way in which it was executed. The launching of nuclear weapons and the world’s reaction was just right, an amazing feat in a show that has not always been precise. The launching scenes, in which Satoyama and Aoi thought that all was lost, were full of tension. For once, Aoi’s sadness seemed palpable and not just made up; Sakakibara Yoshiko nails these scenes.
Satoyama actually impressed me in the aftermath, when he realised that Gould deliberately released faulty nuclear warheads. His theory was that it was just an escape tactic, but I would personally say that Gould was trying to send a message; to put fear into people, to let them see that not everything should be accepted at face value.

I don’t think there’s anything more to be said about Tean and Keel, so I won’t say it; their behaviour at the end of the episode is supposed to be the conclusion, but the depressing pragmatism offered by Aoi is not strong enough to go out on. War is unavoidable; it’s part of being human. That’s what she thinks. You can’t end a series by saying “this terrible war will never end!”, so they’ll come back one last time (and hopefully in better shape: for a final episode, the characters were disappointingly off model).

The ED this time features footage from what is presumably the 13th (OVA) episode, that seems filled with rampant spoilers. Sure it’s nice to see Aoi dance, but some of the other stuff should have stayed behind closed doors until the next episode.
That’s the weird thing about this “conclusion” to Tide-Line Blue: it pretends that it is the series finale when it is nothing of the sort. They want us to believe that there is no more, when there are blatant issues that still need to be dealt with.

One more episode, I say; I will truly conclude my thoughts there, just as the series will conclude itself.