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Sailor Moon Crystal: Season III
Episode 38

by Rebecca Silverman,

How would you rate episode 38 of
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal: Season III (TV 2016) ?
Community score: 4.6

Last night, I woke to see the entire house limned in moonlight from an enormous full moon in the cloudless sky. All five cats were staring out the door into the night, the three white ones almost glowing, and I couldn't help but think of Sailor Moon. That probably just reveals what a nerd I am, but last night's moonlight seems particularly appropriate to the penultimate episode of Sailor Moon Crystal season three. While this episode could certainly have been done better – particularly the subtitles in key moments – it's also one of the more impressive in terms of getting the emotional intent of the story across.

When last we saw our Sailor Guardians, they were all helping Sailors Moon and Chibi-Moon to power up and become Super Sailors. We get to relive that before all of the Inner Senshi and Tuxedo Mask join the Supers in throwing everything that they have at what Pharaoh 90 and Mistress 9 have become. It's a good reminder that Tuxedo Mask has an attack (Tuxedo la Smoking Bomber), and it also gives us a decent idea of who has the most power at her disposal as the Guardians begin to drop one by one, unable to muster the strength to take out the bad guys. (Jupiter appears to be the strongest, with Chibi-Moon and Mercury at the other end of the spectrum.) At about this same time, the Outer Senshi run out of strength to keep the barrier going, and it looks as if the end is nigh.

Fans of magical girl shows in general will know what's coming next. It's the moment when the magical girl gives her life to save the world, and while Sailor Moon herself does it repeatedly throughout her series' five story arcs, making it lose some of its power over the audience, it's still a pivotal moment. (But if you really want to see this trope done right, take a look at Nurse Angel Ririka.) In this episode, it's not the actual sacrifice that's striking, but the smile Usagi gives everyone before she does it. As the screencap above shows, she shares a beatific smile that says she's sorry about what she has to do, but she will do it anyway. That one quiet moment drives the point home, followed by Tuxedo Mask's facial expression, a yearning look while he fights not to cry. The episode could almost have ended there.

But it doesn't, because we have one more major point to cover: the awakening of Sailor Saturn. This is the one place where I kind of wish the anime had stuck closer to the manga, because in Takeuchi's original, Saturn is chilling, especially when she swings the Silence Glaive at the end. She's still unsettling here, calmly explaining that Hotaru ought to have died and taken Saturn's spirit with her, but Professor Tomoe altered the timeline, creating a need for Saturn's powers. Her expression implies that she is above all the cares facing the other Sailor Guardians, here to carry out her mission regardless of the fact that it will be the end of them and their world. This lack of emotion makes her all the more frightening, and the name of her attack, Death Ribbon Revolution, carries the implication that when the world next turns, it will be at its end. While the busyness of the background, filled with wind and swirling purple fog/dust, does give everything an apocalyptic feel, it also isn't quite as striking as the corresponding manga pages, which were white and bleak. Of course, that's based entirely on what I find scarier – the absence of everything as opposed to a vision of destruction. But the chills Saturn gave me in the flashback where she destroyed the Moon Kingdom with their sparser depiction of the world was absent here, although the looks of terror from the other characters were quite effective.

So now the glaive has been swung, Sailor Moon has been swallowed by the darkness, and the world is done. This would be a good time to recall that death marks the start of a new world in many mythologies, as well as the fact that we have one last episode to set this world to rights. The impending last-minute save seems like a foregone conclusion, which leaves us only to hope that Sailor Moon Crystal does it right.

Rating: B+

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


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