Episode 18 –
I’ve been mentioning in my Mouretsu Pirates posts on how Marika, our young pirate captain, is “too perfect” as a main character. She makes level headed decisions, always leads her crew to success, and has yet to really make any glaring mistakes or problems. The previous episode had the first sign of that setup changing up a bit, where Marika made a more emotional and rash decision in deciding to help out her upperclassman, Jenny. She was captaining a novice crew and was diving into a battle headfirst against a gargantuan, Goliath of an opponent. Her almost whimsical decision to not weigh the pros and cons, the potential dangers, and on top of that, not even having a proper strategy to engage the enemy, was an extremely brash move on Marika’s part. While this could have been a perfect chance to showcase and explore Marika’s flaws and shortcomings as a captain, unfortunately, Mouretsu Pirates seems to have this very nasty tendency where it doesn’t really stress the characters and try to provide any character development for them. Instead, this show loves to have happy, convenient conclusions that seem to work on the assumption that “everything will work out somehow”.
This is easily seen throughout the entirety of the episode, everything from the actual battles, to the “strategies” that Marika and her crew pursued in this dangerous conflict. In the battle, as expected of having a giant interstellar corporation as the opponent, Marika and her crew quickly realized that they would be no match against the opponent in terms of raw firepower. So what’s their strategy when they are under heavy siege? “Hey, let’s just have the pilot conveniently dodge everything they shoot at us while we go sip some tea and try to think up a strategy”. There is absolutely no sense of true “danger” to the situation, because it’s quite obvious that the characters aren’t in real danger if they can discuss strategy at a nice, slow pace. The strategy the girls thought up was admittingly sound, trying to make up for their lack of firepower with a more covert style of information warfare, but this was also based on the assumption that they would “somehow” get some interesting dirt/info to blackmail their opponents with. What would happen if they found nothing? Well, they would have been screwed.
And then there was the escape of the Bentenmaru when it was surrounded by enemy ships. The decoy idea, in theory, is a fantastic little trick to have up one’s sleeve. However, in practice the idea sounds absolutely ridiculous. According to the episode, the “decoys” were missiles launched from the Bentenmaru that emitted the same signal as the Bentenmaru. For one, if you were the corporation pursuing the Bentenmaru, why the heck would you rely purely on a signal that an enemy ship emits? Visual confirmation of targets would have made this method absolutely worthless, and not to mention, if ship IDs/signals were this easy to copy, there would be rampant identity theft in the interstellar world. The decoy idea here is essentially an extremely poorly thought out deus-ex-machina plot device, where it conveniently saved the Bentenmaru crew.
And then let’s not even talk about how Marika pulled off her “win” in this situation. When she decided to capture Jenny’s fiance, it just so happened that he was organizing a faux rebellion against the interstellar government. Talk about convenient. And then, on top of that, she just “happens” to get some info on her opponent’s dirty secrets, bribery, and whatever else could be used for blackmail. And thus, the conflict that Marika brazenly didn’t think through ended with a happy ending, where her novice crew conveniently won the matchup, Jenny gets to go to Space University, and all is good in the world. There were no real gunfights, nobody was injured, and there was never any real threat to Marika and her crew.
The critical message to get out of this arc seems to be that “ok, go ahead and make decisions without thinking of the potentially dangerous consequences, because yea, it will all work out somehow”. It’s a blatantly terrible setup that makes it extremely difficult to take much of any conflict out of this show seriously anymore. If there’s one positive that we’ve gotten out of this arc, it’s that Marika has come to a realization that she is far more reliant on her crew than she thought. Her genuine feelings of thanks towards her crew in that phone call in the closing moments of the episode were touching, if only for how much emotion she put into her heartfelt thank you. That was the only redeeming aspect to this entire arc, and aside from that one scene, it’s quite easy to see how disappointed I am with this outcome.
Overall Enjoyment: 2.0/5
Screenshots are later in the post.
Distant Paradise 