Sailor Moon Crystal: Season III

Episode 36

Last week the Sailor Guardians stole a corpse from a hospital. This week they make the brilliant decision to take the elevator in a building controlled by an evil entity. “Making intelligent choices” is clearly not one of the powers conferred upon them by their guardian planets. Of course, if Hotaru's dad was better at making good decisions they wouldn't be in this particular mess anyway – this week's episode he treats us to a monologue about how he saw his family's accident as a gift so that he could further his research on creating ultimate life forms, and when a random evil egg fell from the sky and transformed his mild-mannered lab assistant Kaori into Kaolinite, a transformation she made really eagerly, I might add, he just tossed his morals out the window and followed them into the abyss of evil. And how convenient that his badly injured, unconscious daughter was already laid out on the operating table! Tomoe essentially goes from leading contender for this season's Worst Dad in Anime award to Convenient Plot Device.

That's really been the problem with this season of Sailor Moon Crystal, although we could argue that it's an issue with the original story itself – characters are treated as devices rather than people unless their name has “Usa” in it. This week in particular the Inner Senshi feel like monster fodder as they relinquish their role of Sailor Moon's bodyguards to the Outers and commence a floor-by-floor inspection of the former school. While this isn't necessarily a dumb choice – daimons really can pop up anywhere and an unexpected one could be a major problem – it also feels like a continuation in the current trend of shifting attention to Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto over Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus, rendering the Inner Senshi less and less relevant to the story. Yes, the Outer Senshi are more powerful, but the original five girls have been together for a long time, and you'd think that they'd be more reluctant to give up their coveted position close to the princess. There's also the issue that Mercury's technological and medical knowledge is likely to be very useful when confronting a mad scientist in his lab; it would have made much more sense for her, at least, to stick with Sailor Moon's group.

Despite all of this, Sailor Moon herself is the main Guardian this week, with her having to gear herself up for the fight against Tomoe (and later Mistress 9 and Master Pharaoh 90) without the support of Tuxedo Mask or, later, the Inner Senshi. During their ill-fated elevator trip, Tomoe/Pharaoh 90/Someone Evil does something to make it look as if the elevator has vanished, and Sailor Moon finds herself falling through space. In what is one of the most important moments of the episode, she fears that she is all alone, something she has almost never been since awakening to her powers, and certainly not since her power up, which is, as we are reminded, predicated on having her companions. She's never seen herself as particularly strong, and now with no one but herself to rely on, she's forced to try to see herself as the Outer Senshi have described her: a light in the darkness, bringing hope to others. If she can do that for her friends, why can't she be that hope for herself? It's one of the core moments of any magical girl show, the time when the magical girl herself must realize that she has to believe not just in the power of her friends and friendship, but ultimately in herself. This isn't one of the most impressive instances of that central realization, but it does happen, allowing Sailor Moon to overcome the darkness, if only for the time being. For her, this will be an ongoing process until the climax of the fifth and final story arc, but this step has been an important one on that journey.

Chibi-Usa is also beginning to make that journey this week, and for her the first step is continuing to believe in Hotaru. We don't always get to see the magical girl teammates go through the same process, so it's interesting that Hotaru and Chibi-Usa are clearly using their belief in each other to parallel each other's realizations of their own power. This makes Hotaru interesting not just as a magical girl of death and rebirth, but also as one of the only Sailor Guardians to get her own version of the magical girl's journey. Her cool Sailor Saturn costume isn't the only reason she's a lot of people's favorite.

This is a pretty full episode, which unfortunately means that nothing really gets the time it needs/deserves to be developed well. There are a lot of scenes of people standing/floating around while explanation or dialogue happens, but in general the art itself looks a bit better, with fewer cases of off-model derp face in the background. The subtitles actually look a little better for the first half of the episode before having their usual issues towards the end, so that's a good sign. (Let me pretend it is, anyway.) We're really coming up on the climax of the Death Busters storyline, so with any luck things will flow more smoothly next week as the focus (hopefully) shifts more to Chibi-Usa and Hotaru. Sailor Saturn can't be held back much longer, and it's looking like a little rebirth is just what this story arc needs.

Rating: C

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal: Season III is currently streaming on Crunchyroll, Viz.com and Hulu.