Tesla Note Episode 4 - The Mafia Eat Lightning

You know, Tesla Note deserves more than its 3.79 score on MAL (as at the time of drafting this post). That isn’t to say Tesla Note is by any means good but all things considered it is coherent enough and interesting enough to at least warrant a 5 or 6. Sure it is a visual disaster but I’m coming to expect that each season as more and more anime go for heavy use of CGI and to be honest all the characters look creepy as.

Episode 4 picks up where episode 3 ended with a lightning bolt frying a guy in a car and the shadowy villains holding out the Tesla shard nicely so that the audience get a good look at its number. Yes, Tesla Note is returning us to spy-thriller mode this week and our little group of spies are heading to Chicago which of course means there’s a mafia war going on because why else would they go to Chicago (I apologise to everyone who lives in Chicago for that statement).

Tesla Note continues to charge forward though it is unclear if it knows where it is going.

On arrival in Chicago, our group decide the best course of action is to conspicuously sit in a diner across from the church where one of the mafia leaders is going to be and wait for him. It ends about as well as expected with the rival group shooting up the church and the spies getting targeted by pretty much everyone.

However, don’t sweat the small details. Tesla Note really just wants to let Botan have an excuse to cut loose and she’s about to get it. After determining that now that they are under attack anything she does is self-defense, she charges into the fray with Kuruma ineffectually following behind her. For all that he’s the more experience on the team I’ve yet to actually see what he contributes other than occasionally stopping a pick-pocket.

Botan of course can outrun bullets fired by the mafia (either that or these guys all learned to shoot by watching storm troopers in Star Wars).

Things of course go very wrong and Botan probably should have been squished as the church starts coming down but the blonde guy who has been showing up periodically and interfering finally reveals himself…

As CIA.

I find it weird that in the midst of all these made up secret outfits and groups that the American guys are CIA. More than that, the entire exchange with the two CIA agents is weird because the blonde guy starts out with the usual confidence we’ve come to expect from the snippets of him only to have the rug pulled out from under him by his own partner agreeing that what he is saying makes no sense.

Sure it is an amusing bit I’m just not sure what it is doing here. It really did bring the pace of the episode to a screeching halt and felt more like an exchange one would expect in an episode of Gilmore Girls.

Of course, they do point out that Botan and team aren’t particularly effective (let’s look at their track record of recovering exactly zero shards). Though, was the dying Tesla really just calling every random organisation to his death bed to tell them to recover the shards? Was this all just some prank the dying guy was playing on the world’s powerful?

Then we all get moving again courtesy of both teams receiving the same intel on where the mafia war had moved to and we get a final showdown (kind of). The story doesn’t really resolve here as we’re kind of left hanging for next week.

Honestly, Tesla Note isn’t very good but it also isn’t unwatchable and if the visuals had been better this one would be pretty average for the season. I do kind of like the spy antics even if they don’t always make sense and I’m pretty curious as to what is going to happen with all these shards once they find them (if they find them). So, for me, while Tesla Note isn’t going to win any prizes this season I’m going to keep watching for a bit more.

Images from: Tesla Note. Dir. M Fukuda. Gambit. 2021