Notes of Coppelion Episode 4

Beautiful sunset with incoming chopper and…wait, is that a countdown?

• In the last episode we met the scientist responsible for the disaster that befell the capital; also some kind of shady operation involving a stealth bomber is afoot.

• Summary of Episode Four: continuing where episode three left off, the team is on the chase after the mysterious plane; they try to shoot it down and score a hit on the second attempt. The plane crash-lands in a water reservoir; Ibara and company finds the crew dead. While investigating the plane, they uncover a disturbing fact: a company used the already contaminated former capital as an illegal waste dump. Meanwhile the professor wanders off, when they finally find him he is not wearing the protective headgear so a race against time begins to save his life. Ibara manages to inject him with Aether at the very last moment; then the professor and his associates are air-lifted out of the city, only the girls remain.

• My impressions: as much as I liked the previous episode, I have conflicting feelings about this one. Maybe I should stop expecting realism from this series.

• The first part of the episode was all about a high-speed chase through the streets. Or, to be exact, sometimes inside a warehouse or something similar. The anime portrayed the plane and the jeep traveling at similar speeds, which is complete bollocks. A plane has a so-called stall speed, at which the wings don’t generate enough lift and the plane will fall out of the sky. Now I couldn’t find exact figures for military planes (no surprise here), but I expect it to be on the order of a few hundred km/h; definitely not something a jeep can match. So while the chase sequence looks really good on the screen, it’s not happening in reality. The same goes for the flock of crows following the plane like crazy.

• Anyway, Ibara manages to damage the plane, and it starts descending and lands in a large pool of water. Incidentally, this pool of water is used to store hundreds of barrels containing radioactive waste. The crew of the plane escape somehow, but end up dead beside the reservoir. It’s not shown but I think they shot themselves to avoid capture and interrogation. The professor mentions that they are going to put out the flames and get away; which is just another instance of things that won’t happen. Even if they can land a plane in water (not impossible, but improbable as planes tend to break up on impact with water), they definitely can’t take off again. Well it doesn’t really matter as the crew die anyway. But if you had something hideous to hide, like an illegal waste dump, why on earth would you escape heading that way? Wouldn’t it be more logical to try to get away from that place so that the ones chasing after you are less likely to come across it? It just doesn’t make sense.

  Good for you; I still have a ton of them.

  The next thing that blew my mind was when they found a sticker that instantly gave away the identities of the culprit behind the recent events. I mean if you are dumping waste illegally, the first thing you would do is remove anything that could be used to identify you later on. But alas, our short-sighted mercenaries didn’t think so far. I don’t really like it when answers are spoon-fed to me as a viewer or to the characters, but this show does just that.

• Anyway, the professor wanders off as he feels responsible for everything that has happened. I think he’s about to commit suicide, and the vice principal might be thinking along the same line, giving Ibara the order not to let him die. I don’t really get how committing suicide would mean taking responsibility, it only seems the easy way out to me. But first they have to find him and soon at that. The answer as to where he may have gone comes from the old lady, and he’s soon found at a shrine nearby. This also felt like spoon-feeding the answer to the girls, but let’s ignore that for now, as they have a bigger problem on their hands: the professor took his protective mask off.

  That’s the radiation warming you.

  Thus begins the second part of the episode, a race against time…literally, as a ticking clock appears on screen, counting down from ten minutes. Seriously?! They expect me to believe that when exactly six hundred seconds will have passed, the professor suddenly dies? I don’t even…Well they did tell us in the last episode that Ibara injected the professor with her last shot of Aether, but come on. It’s not like the stuff he’s injected with comes with miniature timers that will render the molecules ineffective in exactly ten minutes. It should not come as a surprise that they make it just in time and inject him again with only two seconds left on the clock. The entire countdown thing reminded me of the western TV series 24 so much that I honestly wouldn’t have bat an eyelid if Jack Bauer popped up sooner or later. The professor is saved, however, and the vice principal and the professor have their emotional moment face-to-face… wait, why is the clock not ticking? The injection provides ten minutes of protection, so shouldn’t they get the professor in the chopper as soon as they can? It seems the rules of the world of Coppelion can be turned on and off on whim.

  

  The scenery, however, compensates the deficiencies of this episode

• We had plenty of drama and tears in this episode as well. The first thing that irked me was the vice principal’s speech about how no one wants to look after radioactive waste; yet they are fine with creating genetically engineered children. Then Ibara started ranting about how she screws up when they found the corpses of the mercenaries. She can’t possibly think that their dying is also her fault? It seems so.

• Summing it up, this episode failed to live up to my expectations. While I have nothing against the story itself, the way it was executed just seemed so off. I wonder how the next episode will continue from here.