Review: The Rolling Girls “Thieves of the Night”

There will be spoilers. I advise to watch “Thieves of the Night” before reading.

It took eight episodes, but there has been a huge shift in the dynamic of The Rolling Girls. The entire episode was about change. Whether it was the group, or one specific person, change hit in a big way. First, Ai and Nozomi have a fight that has changed the course of the group for the foreseeable future, with Ai ditching the group. Want to know the odd thing about that? It’s not even the biggest change of “Thieves of the Night.”

While it’s been hinted at quite a few times, and made it pretty damn obvious the last two weeks, but Chiaya is not everything you thought she was. She is the president’s daughter, and she is an alien. That made Chiaya seem distant, to the point where she left the group to do something on her own. On top of that, Yukina passed out on the beach while she was passing out missing person fliers for Chiaya.

We finally see what’s going on with Masami and Kuniko, and they’re still in the hospital. Kuniko is all healed but she’s afraid to go out without her Core Stone. Masami says she is going to try and get her a new one, because she’s putting two and two together about the president and the Core Stones as payment. We saw this going on from episode one, so it’s great that someone is starting to piece a plan together about the President, even though the viewers don’t know how a president, an alien, and these stones all fit together. Anyway, that leads Yukari to go to the President’s office and try to find one. There’s a slight problem with that plan though.

“Thieves of the Night” was a textbook definition of a setup episode. I wouldn’t be surprised if this story leads into the finale in three weeks, because “Thieves of the Night” tied up a lot of series plot strings, and gave us a whole slew of new ones. The only thing I didn’t like was that the fight in the beginning between Ai and Nozomi literally came out of nowhere and hit me over the head in the brick. It was so abrupt, and not even hinted at in the least. Fortunately, it doesn’t really drag the episode down, and it works to flesh out went on, and made sense for the sake of “Thieves of the Night.” I just would have loved some sort of a setup for it in the last couple weeks. Otherwise, it was a pretty damn good episode.