- This one opens with Inaho playing chess against Magbaredge for whatever reason, which had me sighing pretty heavily. I WONDER WHO WILL WIN?? Also apparently his robot eye can actually suggest chess moves to him, among other things. He gets shot in the head and miraculously survives, and he can’t even just get some sort of regular prosthetic eye rather than one that gives him a whole new array of special abilities? We already have one Cyborg Kirito, we don’t need another.
- So it’s confirmed that Inaho got his Aldnoah thing from performing CPR on Asseylum rather than just from her blood. Which… is kind of a weird mechanic, but whatever. More importantly, does this mean the emperor made out with each of his nobles to give them their Aldnoah powers? Probably not, but that’s my unwavering personal headcanon now.
If only the writer agreed
- At some point the first space battle wrapped up, which I honestly didn’t even notice and assumed we were seeing flashbacks for a while. Going to be honest here – I’ve never been good at following action scenes in stuff like this, especially space battles. So if it ever seems like I don’t fully understand what’s going on, that’s why. In this particular case, I figured whatever had happened to resolve it clearly wasn’t important enough to be worth rewinding. All they basically did was pause the battle so everyone could do a bunch of talking and then resume it later in the episode.
- Anyway, so Saazbaum declares that Slaine is his son now, which just reminds me how little we still know about Slaine’s actual father. Do we even know how he died? Maybe it was mentioned in the first season or something, but I sure don’t seem to remember it. I always assumed he was supposed to be one of the BIG MYSTERIES of the story, but maybe his son really is all that’s important about him, and we’ll never actually get to learn much else.
Saazbaum secures his place in the hall of terrible anime dads
- Some other stuff happens in this episode, but most of it is just talking or hard-to-follow space battles, so there’s not much else to comment… until the end, when we finally get our next big twist. Slaine kills Saazbaum, becomes a count, and sets his big plans in motion. But what exactly are his big plans? Maybe there’s more than he’s letting on to, but it sure seems like he’s still all about conquering Earth. Sure, maybe it’s better than just serving under Saazbaum…but as far as I can tell, he cares more about the class inequality within a single country than preventing them from invading an entire planet, which is still pretty fucked up. Furthermore, why did he even have to kill him and take over if all he’s interested in is reform on Mars? Saazbaum seemed pretty open to the stuff he was saying in the last episode. At this point, I at least wouldn’t say he seems like he was much worse of a guy than Slaine.
- And then of course there’s the question of whether or not Saazbaum even is really dead… to which I’d say the answer is “probably”. I mean, we saw his mech explode in space. Everyone sure seemed to think he didn’t survive. By all logic, he should be at least as dead as Cruhteo. But this is Aldnoah.Zero we’re dealing with here, so who even knows anymore.
