Singing Soothes The Poisoned Teens
Astra Lost in Space Episode 4
Astra Lost in Space continues to be pretty solid entertainment. I am going to level a criticism at the attempted humour early in the episode when they first eat the candy flowers and the reaction shots of the characters. While it was nice to see some levity after episode three’s near crash sequence we’d kind of already covered that with Kanata sinking into the moss so I’m not sure we needed this and it just felt out of place.
However, now that I’ve got the criticism out of the way, can I tell you how much I enjoyed this episode?
The kids were exploring a new world and it really felt like it. They were testing plants for edibility, marvelling over the rising of a moon, getting scared and excited about the wildlife, it was really lovely to see. But exploration is always dangerous and the group face a very serious issue. While there’s food on this planet not a lot of it is suitable for storage and so they’ll be struggling to get twenty days supply put aside which is what they need to move onto the next leg of the journey.
They probably could have dealt with this issue even though it was clearly going to slow them down and they were going to need to stay on this planet longer but then Yunhua makes a choice. For a character we knew little about they certainly picked their moment to fill us in on her back story. What I find interesting is that we could blame her actions on putting the rest of the kids into the dangerous situation they find themselves in, however even if she hadn’t left the ship, the other kids probably would have been out looking for food and the end result would have been the same.
Yes, even though the planet at first seemed reasonably safe there was a clear danger that they overlooked and it very nearly killed them all. As usual I found the tension this episode managed to create quite thrilling and even though it has almost become certain that none of these characters are going to get prematurely knocked off, you still wonder if perhaps one of them might succumb at this point.
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On the other hand, the solution this time ends up being a little bit cheap and I think Kanata’s gamble was way too risky. But it is a minor point on an episode that otherwise was pretty compelling and I’m still thoroughly enjoying this story.
I look forward to the next thing that tries to kill these kids.
The full series review can be found here.
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Karandi James
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Images from: Kanata no Astra. Dir. M Andou. Lerche. 2019.
I’m excited about what tries to kill them next too. These poor, good kids though. They’ve all got major issues to solve with each other.
I know. I love how there’s a lot of dark stuff happening and they’ve all got issues, but the anime isn’t trying to be dark or edgy. The bad stuff is happening and they are dealing with it, or trying to, step by step. I actually feel pretty optimistic watching these kids.
The more I read about this show, the more regrets that I am having that I am not able to watch it 😢 Oh well, I hope it will become available at some point for me 😊
Fingers crossed.