English Dub Review: Mars Red “Frailty, Thy Name Is…”

Overview:

Maeda and Kurusu finish their duel. Plenty of flashbacks and what-if’s are interspersed in the fight. Kurusu has a lot of fighting ahead of him it seems. Does this show based on a play nail its ending?

Our Take:

This was an interesting series and as far as endings go I’ve definitely seen worse. It just felt like this show could have been a masterpiece. Unfortunately, the pacing near the end did quite a bit of damage. A lot of character threads were left dangling and even plot points involving main characters had too much ambiguity for my taste. There was a post-credits scene and I was super excited when I first saw that but it gave us nothing. Some of the characters were doing things like they were going about their daily life. All of this is being shown while Defrott gives another monologue, I love a good monologue but I feel this show could be described as “Defrott’s Monologues”.

The flashbacks during the episode were also jarring in their own way. A lot of it was events that never happened so it was more like what could have been. This was pretty bittersweet because getting to see what could have possibly been with Maeda and Misaki hurt. Then some of it coincided with real time events so that made it a bit confusing. For example, Kurusu cut off Maeda’s hand, and then there was a flashback to him losing his hand in battle but then he had it again later like I said confusing. He apparently lost it during the battle but when Kurusu cut it off it didn’t look like a prosthetic but that could have been something I missed.

The title of this episode is “Frailty, Thy Name Is…” which stays on with the stage play theme. This is a famous line from Hamlet but the full line is “Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman” which is a somewhat fitting title. It doesn’t quite fit in the same context as in Hamlet but the women play a huge part in this episode. During their duel, Maeda is often thinking back to Misaki and still confuses Aoi for her when she catches up to them. The show definitely wants us to know that these two women are definitely important to these men fighting to the death.

It was an interesting way to end the show. It implied that Kurusu would constantly be fighting and he might never see Aoi again. Either that or she would be really old when they eventually reunited. The episode proper ended with him giving his speech to the vampire unit soldiers. He gives them the same ultimatum that he gave all the other vampires in previous episodes. It was a poetic way to end but disappointing to me but I’m just not a fan of ambiguity. It was still a fun series and ultimately much better than I was expecting going in. I’ll get into all that in the season review though.