Space Brothers Episode 73
What They Say:
Mutta comes up with an idea to prevent vehicular accidents on the moon. Will NASA accept his proposal?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Space Brothers hasn’t been unfocused lately, but it’s been working on what are largely secondary concerns in some ways. With the previous episode, we started to see more of a shift into some more serious material, with Hibito struggling with the EVA aspect of his job after the lunar incident where they went into the canyon and nearly. And we also started to see the other side of the coin with Mutta assigned to working with an engineering team because of his background to try and find a way to fix it so something like that doesn’t happen again. It’s a smart decision to make because of his real world exposure to engineering that isn’t specialized like a lot of the guys here. And it was just fun to see the old crew for a little bit from Japan getting drawn in and quite excited about it all.
The show spends a surprising amount of recap time here in the prologue, sprinkling in a few other elements as we get closer to Mutta and his team doing their presentation for the higher-ups, which admittedly comes rather quickly after Mutta was assigned to the team. With the connections he’s made, especially back in Japan with the Kaguya II satellite, he’s able to bring a lot of data to bear on his proposal and make something that definitely can make an impression. Though there are certainly quirks with the speech and the way it unfolds, especially the nudge that Mutta makes that should make it a given that he be assigned to a lunar mission, we get some welcome flashback along the way to the days prior in seeing how Mutta’s plans actually unfolded and some of the quirks of conversation between everyone while he worked and they played cards.
Coming up with a lunar navigation system certainly makes the most sense and with the way it’s been built around the world, presumably even more so since this takes place in the mid 2020′s, there’s a lot of options for what can be done, especially as Mutta brings in his old auto company crew. Delving into the flying car aspect and what that can mean, which to someone like me goes back to the 2001 film with some of the lunar flyers it had, it’s an amusing full circle in its own way that’s only made more fun by seeing some of what happened previously in Japan for Mutta. It provides some fascinating views of what happened then, the dream that he had and how others came to it but also found resistance because of protocol definitely shows why his frustration was like it was. Having it all come full circle with some of what they created then and what Miracle Car company can do now is really a lot of fun to watch come together.
In Summary:
Space Brothers focuses exclusively on Mutta here when it comes to the new things going on and that works very, very well overall. Bringing more of Mutta’s past and seeing the way he had drawn people to him then even in difficult work conditions was very well done and ties well into what he’s experiencing now in a different way. With NASA looking to expand what it can do, but not realizing some of the potential because of agency disconnect, getting Mutta to find a way to bring it together and expand on what his personal project of the moment is works really well, especially since there are some even bigger bits of potential that can come from it. It’s not a huge presentation or flashy, but it hits all the right notes and definitely makes for a good transitional moment for Mutta.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.