Metallic Rouge

Episode 12

Since I strongly disliked the previous episode, the smart money was on me enjoying this week's segment of Metallic Rouge's wild ride. That's just the way this roller coaster has gone. And sure enough, I thought “Mask Graveyard” was pretty good. The narrative starts moving again, the action is decent, there are gestures towards genuine emotional stakes, and, perhaps most importantly, it's not afraid of being silly. While it's far too late for the series to salvage its full potential, Metallic Rouge still delivers scenes that hint at the showstopper it could have been.

My favorite moment is an illustrative intersection of where the anime succeeds and how it still manages to undermine its strengths. I'm talking about Naomi sharing the fruit of fate—I mean, sharing her Id with Rouge. For a few seconds, the absurdly convoluted plot and setting trappings fade away in favor of a single gesture of reconciliation and trust shared between our two heroines. It looks good. It's well-acted. It satisfies the long and rocky arc shared between Naomi and Rouge, and it's great to see Naomi in particular finally reject her alien overlords in favor of asserting a small yet powerful sliver of selfless humanity. It lacks the romance and panache of a more sophisticated series like Brave Bang Bravern!, but it's acceptable.

However, the larger structural issues in Metallic Rouge eat away at the impact that scene could have had. The show's handling of Naomi has always been a problem. It has prioritized obfuscating her role and intentions instead of crafting a compelling arc for her and Rouge to follow. While we were aware that she remained in communication with the Visitors on their trip to Venus, we only now discover that she was tasked with destroying the planet should Rouge fail. That's a rather tall order. I don't mind Naomi being given one last chain to smash, and I like how this echoes Cyan's relationship with the Puppetmaster. We aren't given enough time to grapple with the weight of Naomi's interior turmoil. It feels like she resolves the conflict as soon as we find out about it, deflating its impact. If we learned about this ulterior motive earlier, or if the show had spent more time developing her character, this could have hit that much harder.

This episode isn't all wasted potential. Giallon becomes tolerable! Two factors contribute to this: Rouge and Naomi's exhaustion with his schtick in the first scene is funny, and later, he finally settles into his role as the archetypical Fool able to speak some truth to power. Per usual, he's not utilized to his full potential, but I'll throw him a bone for not boring me. The action scenes are also fun and efficient. The show handles these one-on-one duels well—enough to make you wonder why they didn't structure the story around Rouge fighting a new member of the Immortal Nine each week. If it was good enough for Utena, it's good enough for Metallic Rouge. Hell, any structure would have behooved the series' lofty ambitions.

I'll credit Takuya Igarashi's storyboards for helping this episode come together as well as it does. While he doesn't dig into the flashier theatrical tendencies that made his work on Utena, Ouran High School Host Club, and Star Driver (among many others) pop, he's a veteran who knows how to compose a scene well. I especially appreciate his ability to weave humor into otherwise solemn situations, like how Rouge's withered arm gives Naomi a disembodied thumbs-up from around the corner. The character acting throughout the episode is also well above par and helps sell the heightened drama, so the animation directors had their priorities straight. Metallic Rouge's audiovisual craft has always been one of its stronger facets. It's just a shame the writing hasn't lived up to that.

I have little faith that Metallic Rouge will solve institutional slavery next week. Rouge and Gene keep talking about a solution that will make everyone happy, but they haven't done any work establishing it. No matter what answer they settle on, it's going to disappoint. That's because the show's been more concerned with unwrapping its alien conspiracies and wagging its finger at the conveniently hard-headed resistance leader. Even the “gotcha” moments in this episode don't deliver. Gene acknowledging Eden as his father would have meant something if they weren't one-dimensional characters. And the cliffhanger is laughable when everyone I know (i.e., those who haven't dropped the show) had already surmised that Roy was the Puppetmaster a couple of episodes ago. If even I can figure it out, it's not a shocking twist.

We've had our good times and bad, Metallic Rouge and I. Quite honestly, I will be sad to see it go next week. It was frustrating, but in a way that kept me engaged throughout the season. Its flaws stem from an overabundance of ambition, rather than a lack of it. I'm biased towards projects like that. It's why I still retain some fondness for Wonder Egg Priority. But my fingers are crossed that Metallic Rouge doesn't completely crash and burn at the end as that show did.

Rating:

Metallic Rouge is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve is on Twitter while it lasts. He is not a biomechanical android in disguise. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.