Hey! Remember Usagi's family? They showed up last episode! Usagi has a younger brother! He has another episode focusing on him today, but this time with creepy dolls added to the mix too.
This episode starts out with Nephrite telling Gay Jadeite "fuck you + kys", which is apparently part of Gay Jadeite's evil plan. Then it cuts to Usagi bullying Shingo for having a girlfriend, which is - as we all know - incredibly embarrassing. Some girls confront him about why he's so mean, and the answer is that he got bullied for having a girlfriend. He then gives this girl PTSD by not accepting her creepy doll. Usagi promises to go beat the snot out of him.
We then cut to the genius 8-year-old in her dark bedroom with panning shots of all her other creepy dolls; a scene which feels like it was written for a teenager and not a little kid. Obviously, this means she's going to be the next target for Nephrite's evilness. I've got to credit the writers here for somehow coming up with some compelling astrological technobabble here.
Nephrite drives along in his fast car - which I fucking love, by the way - to talk to the little girl doll maker so that he can install a monster in her ugly ugly doll. The expression transition here is clearly meant to be horrifying, but they animated it in what is one of the funniest bits of animation in the whole show so far.
Again, we have this weird tonal dissonance in that the episode feels like it was written for a teenager but then changed later on to focus on a younger girl, with her suddenly becoming a workaholic and assaulting her own mother. The episode ends up with a random tangent of Rei/Mamoru, who apparently continued the dates after the last time, as a particularly contrived mechanism to allow Rei to appear at the museum where the showdown happens.
I essentially see no reason for this episode to focus on Usagi's brother; it's like his last episode except in reverse. It would've worked just fine focusing on the doll maker side character instead. The only reason Usagi's brother was even added was seemingly to let Usagi end up at the museum, but they already had Rei/Mamoru used as the excuse for Mars.
The tone is all over the place here today. The dollmaker is a kid? Why? It feels entirely written around her being a teenager or younger adult instead. Also, Usagi's speech has the music in entirely the wrong places.
I give this episode a 2.5/5. It's forgettable and uses a forgettable character, the tone is completely wrong, the set up of the characteers is contrived, and the music is completely wrong in multiple places. I like the creepiness factor of the dolls, though.
Jump to Top