Girls' Last Tour

Episode 7

This week on Girls' Last Tour, the show treats us to some followup on the girls' encounter with Ishii. While the aeronautical engineer is off starting anew in the concrete wilderness, our heroines raid what's left of her base for supplies. (This isn't as dickish as it sounds—she won't be back and it's mostly been used up.) Specifically, this means that they're looking for Ishii's potato farm. When Chii and Yuu learn that their bounty has been reduced to just one last crop, they decide to combine it with another discovery of theirs and revive a long lost human activity: the art of baking. Of course, antics ensue.

First, Chii and Yuu have to walk along a narrow pipe in order to get where they're going. While Chii is disturbed by the precariousness of their walkway, Yuu remains nonplussed. Once again, her characteristic physical bravery (or perhaps thickheadedness) allows them to proceed on their adventures, even when Chii's fear of heights starts kicking in big time. When it starts getting dark, they're led to safety by what could have been a tragic accident—Chii falls through the pipe to discover a walkway within. They follow it to the potato farm, where they pick up the one remaining tuber and continue on their way.

Eventually, this lands them in a room filled with a mysterious white powder. Perhaps unwisely, they taste it and are rewarded for their risk taking. It's some sort of potato-based starch powder, which seems to have worked as the basis for making dough at some point. It seems that they've stumbled upon an old food production room, where the machines are miraculously still working. When the two find some sugar, they realize that they possess all of the necessary materials for baking bread. Recalling how their grandfather used to cook for them, they decide to make some rations out of their newly obtained carbohydrate hoard. They have fun with it in a very relatable way, as the whole exercise becomes an adventure in the sensory experiences that accompany baking. From kneading the dough to the anticipatory warmth of waiting for your treats to be finished, Girls' Last Tour continues to be immensely relatable in how it captures small, everyday moments.

I'm glad that the girls have stocked up on food – based on their comments over the past few episodes, they seem to have been running low. Otherwise, this was a fairly cozy, antics-based episode of Girls' Last Tour, in contrast to last week's relative intensity and emphasis on worldbuilding. While it'd be nice to learn more about the world that they inhabit before the end of the show, if it remains in this sort of atmospheric slice of life, that'll be alright by me. It's also nice to see the show's events stacking up to the point where there are frequent callbacks to past events. Yuu drawing portraits of everyone using the bread dough was cute, and it was also neat to end on a reference to the temple episode (rendering Chii's face to resemble those religious icons), which is probably the best episode in the entire show so far.

As Girls' Last Tour enters its second half, and its airing schedule begins to overtake the approach of winter, I only expect it to become even more relatable. It's the perfect show for cold nights spend indoors under a blanket, trying to decompress before bedtime. It certainly makes me thankful to have a bed. No matter how much good Chii and Yuu manage to make out of their situation, I wouldn't trade my pillow (or constant access to sugary foodstuffs) for anything. I guess I'm with Yuu on that one.

Grade: A

Girls' Last Tour is currently streaming on Amazon's Anime Strike.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.