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Terraformars
Episode 9

by Paul Jensen,

I'm not certain everyone working on Terraformars agrees on what the show is supposed to be. After a violent start that set its characters up as expendable cannon fodder, the series switched over to a more lighthearted tone with an emphasis on larger-than-life action scenes. In the past two weeks, it's abandoned that sense of fun in favor of a much darker character study. It's a good thing the script has more or less been able to keep up, because the animation sure hasn't.

Adolf wraps up his battle in dramatic fashion this week. There's thunder, lightning, and a whole mess of Biblical references, not to mention a sky-high body count. The whole episode is a dark, brooding affair that seems to wallow in its own bleak atmosphere. If you're searching for an uplifting way to cap off the work week, you may want to put this episode on the shelf until tomorrow.

Apart from a few moments of melodrama, the writing is acceptable here. Adolf is made to confront the tragedies of his life, and is slowly beaten down by endless waves of Terraformar soldiers. Seeing his crewmates risk their lives to help him is a believable way to shake Adolf out of his misery, even if it's accomplished with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. As depressing as Adolf's story may be, it's wrapped up in a satisfying manner.

The show's titular space roaches continue to be a source of intrigue as they display more and more signs of intelligence. Watching them raise a flag and attack with stolen net launchers is genuinely unsettling and raises a lot of questions. Are they just imitating what the humans are doing, or is there a fully established Terraformar civilization that we have yet to uncover? It'll be the surprise of the season if this series can pull some coherent social commentary out of the bag, but you'd be hard pressed to completely rule it out either.

While the writing manages to hold its own, things aren't nearly as positive when it comes to the rest of the production. It's all well and good to set a dramatic scene at night, but Terraformars really slips up on the visuals here. Instead of enhancing the mood, the lack of light just makes it difficult to tell what's going on. It's a gray, muddy mess that looks like someone accidentally turned down the brightness setting in the final edit. There's no sense of style or clever use of light and shadow, it's just inexplicably dark.

The only defense for this episode's poor lighting is that it helps hide some underwhelming animation. There are a lot of slow pans over static scenes and lengthy close-ups of characters staring into the camera. When Adolf uses his electrical abilities, the show takes a single still frame, shakes it around a bit, and throws in some lightning effects. These are the kinds of lazy, budget-saving shortcuts that you might see in a harem comedy that decided to toss in a fight scene for variety. In a serious action title, they're downright unacceptable.

This would've made for a decent episode if it weren't so hard to see what the heck was going on. When a dumb, fun action series tries to rely too heavily on sparse character development and sci-fi world building, it's not a great sign. A serious change in art direction is in order if the next story arc is expected to get the show back on track.

Rating: C+

Terraformars is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Paul Jensen also covers anime and manga at SharkPuppet.com.


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