CROSS ANGE Rondo of Angel and Dragon

Episode 20

Anime has plenty of strong heroines, but they do not come any feistier than what Ange has become. A man proposes to her and offers to essentially make her the co-creator of a new world and she answers his by stabbing him in the hand and shoulder. That he can just rewrite his personal reality to get out of it after the fact is irrelevant, because she's going to keep trying as long as Embryo is not successful in brainwashing her – something which, as we find out this episode, he has done before with a strong female pilot of Vilkiss.

That's one of a few important revelations to come out this episode: what really happened with Alektra (aka Jill) and Embryo. It happens when she tries to go out after Embryo on her own but gets stopped by Hilda, Rosalie, Vivian, and Tusk. She believes that the reason the previous attempt at Libertus, ten years ago, failed was because Embryo brainwashed her into being his lover for a time. This is hardly a surprise, though, as the writing has been suggesting something like that for several episodes now. A little more surprising is Rosalie's admission that she actually does love Chris and Hilda's failure to deny that she loves Ange, though whether platonically or romantically is unclear at this point. (The way she teases Tusk also suggests that she may be bisexual rather than a lesbian, but that is a comparatively trivial side point.)

The biggest reveal, though, is that Embryo's “tuning” ability is apparently based on having discovered the long-sought Theory of Everything in physics and learning how to wrap control of those fundamental forces up with a song; presumably the specific vibrations of the song have something to do with it, especially if his “unification theory” is a derivative from current superstring theory. Even so, it is pretty dodgy science, but at least the series is making an effort to make it sound plausible. His big plan involves using Aura and the Ragna-mail to merge the original and new Earths together (we saw a test-run of that back in episode 16), and he is seeking to do so because he is not satisfied with his initial utopian experiment; he found the old world too violent, but by removing the greedy impetus that he saw as the inherent flaw in humanity, he created a new humanity that was too complacent, too dependent on being giving things, and thus stagnated. And that has frustrated him to the point that he wants to try a different approach.

Well, now. Moralizing about society and human nature in broadly-painted strokes is hardly a rare feature in mecha series, so it is easy to let Embryo's discussion on that point just slide by as typical evil mastermind talk. In this case, however, the social commentary seems a little more pointed. Combine Embryo's observations about the way humanity is with the Light of Mana with the way things have gone on the original Earth and you have two dramatically contrasting views about the direction that humanity could take, neither of which is ideal. One path is to radically reinvent humanity biologically, which has the downside in humanity essentially not being human anymore. The other path is to eliminate strife, poverty, and other ills, but that has the big downside of humanity becoming so enamored with that existing luxury that it ceases to advance and develops an intolerance against anything which threatens that luxury – in other words, the Norma. (I have to wonder if a poke at certain elements of Japanese society isn't intended here.) Both are cynical views, but nothing has been more par for the course for this series than crass cynicism. Embryo's hubris is, of course, that he thinks he can single-handedly correct that; what makes him a slimeball is that has no morals about toying with the hearts, minds, and bodies of young women as he figures out how to accomplish his goals. This is, after all, a man who pledges romantic loyalty to one woman and then just moments later proposes marriage to another.

A lot of other stuff is going on here, too, in what is a very active episode. Hilda gets put in charge of Libertus, Momoka rescues Riza after Sylvia whips her some more, Salia makes desperate movies to hold onto the only thing she thinks she has left, Embryo tries to brainwash Ange by manipulating her pleasure and pain centers, and Salamandinay and her squad shows up again at the end. (We all knew that we had not seen the last of them, didn't we?) The liberally-scattered fan service – lots of lingerie, some nudity, lesbian kissing, Ange squirming and touching herself as she tries to endure the pleasure sides of Embryo's manipulations – make this possibly the most fan service-intensive episode to date, although since most of it happens in other contexts it does not feel like it has such a strong concentration as it actually does. Hence even though it actually has very little action, episode 20 is nonetheless a very active episode.

Rating: B

CROSS ANGE Rondo of Angel and Dragon is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.