Review: Unicorn: Warriors Eternal “What Lies Beneath”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Emma and the others pursue the mysterious fox lady, destroying parts of the city in their wake until they track it to an abandoned ship at the harbor. But they soon realize they’ve been led into a trap, keeping them confined on the ship as multiple dead sailors rise to fight them. What’s worse, Seng is cut off from his cosmic vision and soon finds himself slowly fading away. Edred tries to draw out more of Melinda’s memories to get Emma back to the Melinda he knows, but this is hampered by Winston, Emma’s fiance, having gotten onto the ship before it left port. After much convincing, Emma relents and uses more of her powers, summoning a giant monster squid to destroy the ship and the barrier, but now the squid is headed back to the town. The warriors head back, leaving Winston out at sea.

OUR TAKE

I think this might be the end of the first full day of the story, which I guess makes sense, considering we’re nearly at the halfway point. With that, we’ve established some patterns from episode to episode, such as the need for some zombified force to emerge at some point for the warriors to fight and the perplexing movements of the fox lady, but more than that, the main story continues to emerge: that of Emma/Melinda trying to better understand who she is versus who she wants to be. We’ve seen her immediately reject her current life when presented with Melinda’s powers and memories, but we also now see that all of this fighting and subsequent destruction is distasteful to her as well. The scene of her destroying a family’s house in pursuit of the fox gives her pause when using her abilities later. She also finds herself actually somewhat happy to see Winston when he appears later, though that could be just because Edred ends up acting pretty scummy in his methods of drawing out her memories. He and Winston seem to be two sides of the same coin, the coin of wanting Emma/Melinda to fit into the box each guy wants to be without hearing her feelings or allowing any nuance.

It seems like the answer to whether she is Emma or Melinda isn’t going to be that cut and dry, as neither identity alone looks to be very appealing. It might have been easy for Edred to completely absorb Demitri Dynamo, who may be effectively dead for all we know, or for a destitute orphan like Alfie to give himself over to Seng upon connecting to his greater cosmic awareness, but Emma had an alright life prior to all of this craziness, along with a maybe overly persistent fiance who is a continual reminder of that life. Not to mention Edred’s attitude of berating her until she fully wakes up is only serving to make him look like a jerk. Maybe that will be part of HIS arc, where he learns that if he wants to show he loves Melinda, he needs to accept this new version of her. I mean I certainly hope the message here is NOT that the real solution is to completely abandon one side of yourself in order to make a binary choice and fulfill a real restrictive role that was made up for you, but we’ll see. Also, did you notice everyone has eyes shaped like Pac-Man? It’s actually kind of distracting once you notice it. It’s part of the show’s very distinctive style, I know, but I think there comes a point where that ends up being bit of a detriment.