English Dub Review: Girls’ Frontline “COMET 01”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

AR15 is still missing and with how strangely she’s been acting of late, Griffin knows that it’s imperative to find her and recover her quickly. Along with the AR team, a new team called Squad Negev is assigned to the search. But it doesn’t go as planned when another ringleader named Alchemist decides to unleash more Sangvis forces. And then when M4 and SOP2 run into AR15, things take a turn for the worse…

Our Take:

Thank goodness Girls’ Frontline is almost over! With only one episode left on the horizon now, we’ll soon be free of these walking talking assault weapons. But for now we’ve got an episode to talk about, and it’s a little bit of a doozy at the end. COMET 01 starts out as an extremely boring episode… until it’s not.

For the majority of the runtime it almost feels like a reboot of sorts. Like the show decided that viewers are so bored they need to randomly introduced an entirely new team of dolls to keep you from turning off the episode. Why is Squad Negev introduced in the penultimate episode all of a sudden when we’ve heard no mention of them before? Probably because they’re a popular group from the game that the show has no time to include in the plot, but decided to throw them in anyway to allow fans to see them before the end of the series. Regardless, it seems totally out of left field and I wish they weren’t here.

Because without their addition, this episode almost gets kind of exciting. After the slow start with everyone still searching for AR15 and yet ANOTHER Sangvis ringleader showing up (she’s called Alchemist this time lol), the last five minutes or so of the ep goes for the gold by actually moving the plot forward and doing it in a mysterious way that isn’t riddled with paragraphs of exposition.

M4 and SOPII are about to meet up with Negev in the Sangvis factory when the renegade AR15 sneaks up on them. At first, they’re excited to see her, but then we cut away from the scene and find out that they go missing. The pacing here is a little off, which is nothing new for the show, but it was still kind of exciting having a few minutes of intrigue in a show that has so little to be curious about.

After this ep, I’m most curious about AR15’s plans for M4, obviously. From what we can tell, she somehow knocked out both SOPII and M4, but left SOPII lying on the ground and robo-napped M4. In the short pre-ED scene, we see that M4 has awoken in a strange place with no memory of AR15 or her friends… and it looks like she may be about to switch sides if AR15 is indeed an agent of chaos working for Sangvis now.