© TriF/ “Mecha-Ude” Production Committee
Following last week’s excellent cliffhanger, we immediately receive an explanation for Yakumo’s survival one hundred years past his apparent death… in that he didn’t survive after all. In yet another twist, his gradually disintegrating corpse has been puppeteered by Alma’s sibling Fist the entire time. How did he disguise the smell? Mecha-Ude (perhaps thankfully) isn’t interested in exploring such minutiae. Like Alma, Fist doesn’t need a living human source of arbitrium to function, and Yakumo’s shambling corpse is useful merely as a mobility aid.
Fist plans to open the gateway back to his home planet, bring his people across, flood the Earth with arbitrium, and enslave the entire human race – essentially the reverse of the Kagami Group’s plan. Fist’s ideology is in diametrical opposition to Alma’s – to Fist, individual humans are irrelevant, little but tools to achieve Mecha-Ude supremacy. While Alma has mourned the loss of his friend Yakumo for over a century, Fist has ridden his rotting body like a fleshy mech-suit during that entire time.
Fist offers the usual villainous “join me” speech to Alma, and when he doesn’t play ball, tears him from Hikaru anyway. Their combined powers allow Fist to “inherit” Ordela’s powers. Although Hikaru somehow manages to seize Alma back, in the next scene, Fist once more retrieves him, which makes me think that some scenes were probably removed at some point during production. Several Mecha-Ude episodes have had this problem, a significant reduction in narrative connective tissue, conspicuous by its absence. Such brutal script editing was probably necessary to cram this increasingly packed story into twelve standard anime episodes. amazing a properly fleshed-out 24-episode Mecha-Ude would have been?
Sick of people and mechs getting in his way, Fist brutally injures poor Hikaru, who attempts to protect the solid metal Alma with his squashy human body, putting him out of action for the rest of the episode. Thankfully, action queen Aki’s on hand to take the reins with some satisfying violence. She’s not had as much to do in the past couple of episodes. Shame it’s taken Hikaru’s mortal injury to bring her back into the spotlight. We even meet random new Kagami Group characters, with Kayano wondering where all the weirdos suddenly appeared from. Quen complains that his Kagami Group equivalent is ripping off his character design. I appreciate Mecha-Ude‘s sometimes bizarre metatextual humor.
Capping off the episode is a long-awaited reunion between Aki and her sister. There’s no way the series could have ended without them both taking on a powerful enemy together with their twin, Mecha-Ude Sinis and Dex. There’s a real punch-the-air sense of excitement to the scene, mitigated only by the tragic final image of Hikaru’s corpse… Things have escalated even further, and I wonder where Mecha-Ude intends to go next.
Rating: 4/5
Mechanical Musings:
- Meru‘s back, and she’s now fully aboard the fujoshi train, rabidly shipping Hikaru and Jun. When Jun says he needs to be with Hikaru, Meru smiles and replies, “You sure do!” God bless her deranged little heart; I love Meru. She lives in a different world from everyone else; not even meeting a sentient, speaking metal arm distracts her from the path of True Love Hallucinations.
- Amaryllis came back! Again! Surely she’s dead this time? Surely?
- Now that Hikaru’s no longer among the living, will Alma now take the opportunity to pilot his rotting meat puppet? Or will the power of friendship help Alma revive Hikaru, perhaps by truly derizing with our protagonist rather than just his hoodie?
Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.
