Unbreakable Machine-Doll Episode 10
What They Say:
In the mechanized city of Liverpool, a Japanese student and his beautiful female companion enter the most prestigious magic academy in the world—the place all puppeteers dream of going. There, students use automatons and living dolls to fight against each other in the quest to become the world’s best puppeteer.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As the series continues on, Unbreakable Machine-Doll plays with its cast fairly well as we saw in the previous episode. With some events going up in scale while also keeping it personal with its focus on Henri and Charl, we got a lot of setup and character movement the previous time around that culminated in a situation where Raishin and Henri are in a real pickle and Yaya can’t do much at the moment less her situation cause more strain for Raishin. Because of what she is and how people have learned more about her, the trust level for her has shrunk a lot and that makes her somewhat impotent at the moment, which at least some of the adults are able to get her to realize before she goes off head first into some dangerous situations. There’s some mild movement at the start here, but mostly it’s just reaffirming where everyone is as it gets going again.
While these events play out above ground, we do get to spend a good bit of time with Raishin as he’s in a literal hole and getting further underground with Henri as the opening becomes less accessible. The two of them have some decent time together and we do see how Henri has some serious issues about how others view her in relation to her sister, but it helps that he sets her right as best as he can and the two can move forward a bit. Which is done even more when they eventually come across the Headmaster and his guardian Magnus down there as well. Raishin reveals a bit more about his past to her, which for her young age certainly makes an impact, and that helps to create a better bond between the two that’s obviously more serviceable for when things go bad. As they invariably will.
All of this kind of dominates the episode before things sort of just revert to normal as everything above ground calms down and they can all leave the hole they’re hiding in. This does lead to some cute if awkward fun between Raishin and Yaya over who never sleeps with who and the unzipping of fly’s, but it’s all kind of anti-climactic when you get down to it as you expected something else to happen. We do get a bit of material that starts to push us towards the confrontation that’s to come, but like the past arcs everything here just feels kind of murky. And that’s with story and animation style since so much of it takes place at night or in dark places. The lead-up towards the end here certainly has its moments, but once again I find myself trying to figure out why to care about what’s going on.
In Summary:
While I continue to get the impression that this show will work a lot better in marathon form, the week by week view of it has only lessened my opinion of it overall. The strong start feels very weak now as events move in curious circles without fleshing out the world or really doing much for the characters themselves. We get some cute moments here, largely revolving around Yay, and we have a couple of decent moments between Raishin and Henri that helps to clue us in a bit more about him and his real mission. But it just lacks a sincerity to it that would make it work in an engaging way, largely because the nature of the world and place they inhabit has not felt cemented enough or real enough for it to fit well. This arc could have some decent material left in it, but I’m not expecting much in the final two episodes to come.
Grade: C
Streamed By: FUNimation
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.