English Dub Review: Astra Lost in Space “Paradise”

After the Astra Crew recovers, they credit Yunhua’s singing for helping keep them alive, It’s a moving scene which helps further add to her character, but we also find out more about her as a person in the process and is thankfully less of a buzzkill now. To further symbolize her growth, Yunhua has her hair cut short which is often a traditional trope in Japanese culture to represent starting a new chapter in your life, but here it makes sense they would use it for her empowering dramatic change. After managing to find a stable food source and leave Shummoor, It cuts to planet earth as the authorities have all but given up on finding the missing students after an exhaustive search on the McPa planet.

And it’s here where the parents of the missing students also have a meeting and consider whether they should declare their children legally dead. Only Aries’ mom is genuinely concerned while the other parents pretty much have shown they’re simply terrible people who are quick to accept the decision to stop the search I mean aside from Aries’ Mother, you might be asking yourself “what the fuck is wrong with these other parents?” but to break things down logically, It’s understandable why most of the parents would want to cut their losses after 49 days, there is no plausible explanation to justify their survival and presume the worst, even if there are some things that don’t make sense, like the missing luggage. They don’t even question how did they die? Why isn’t there any damn trace of them? We even get a glimpse of The man in sunglasses that Funicia talked about previously who is silently sitting off to the side of the room, but the only parent missing is Luca’s father named “Marco” who is said to be a powerful and controversial government official.

When we cut back to the crew in space, the group has landed on the oceanic beach-like world of Arispade, which they consider a paradise. Food seems plentiful and Charce discovers all life on the planet reproduces through a something called “parthenogenesis” (In other words they’re an organic female species that’s capable of asexual reproduction). We even get a fun potential romance sub-plot for Aries as she has feelings for Kanata with Quitterie convincing her to try and confess to him. However, given how these work in Anime, they’re going to stretch this out I presume until possibly the last episode. Later that evening, the group has a picnic to celebrate their last night on Arispade but the episode ends on an intense cliffhanger when we learn that Ulgar’s got a bone to pick with Luca’s father and given what he had in his suitcase since episode 3, he’s not afraid to use it…

Our Take

Blatant fanservice and obligatory bikini anime girls aside, this was a much more solid episode than last week, with some good intrigue. However, while it was nice that we finally got to see how society is reacting to the lost team with all the parents in the same room, their meeting was kinda strange, it almost felt like some of them didn’t care what was going on. Their reaction was a little too composed but maybe they’ve just given up. While the parent’s reactions are to be expected, the school’s one is a tad strange. Though it’s funny how the “supposed” parental despair is juxtaposed to Team Astra relaxing on a resort world though.

Also while we still don’t know who the “traitor” is yet, the scene with Luca’s father during the Earth scenes felt the need to mention a “DNA” test, what’s that about? And finally, What did Luca’s father do to Ulgar’s family to make Ulgar put a gun to Luca’s head?? He looked quite shocked when Luca told him his family name.

Hopefully, we’ll get our answers in the next episode because that cliffhanger was pretty damn tense.