English Dub Review: Cop Craft “In The Air Tonight”

 

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kei and Tilarna find the fairy attached to a bomb at the roof of the building. Kei attempts to disarm the bomb when Zelada arrives to gloat, then seriously injuring Kei with his magic fire. However, Kei uses some latent magic in his gun (due to magic being based on personal feelings here and the gun having a special connection to him) to find Zelada so Tilarna can cut off his arm. But before they can arrest him, he jumps off the edge, seemingly to his death. That still leaves the matter of the bomb, but Kei is near death, so Tilarna decides to die with him and the fairy, who she apparently has known since she was a child. But the fairy sense that she’s a third wheel here and kills herself in order to provide Tilarna with the magical properties to make an elixir to save Kei.

With that, the case is closed, so Kei sees Tilarna off on her boat back to her world. But that night, he finds she’s elected to stay here as a detective and work with him for the foreseeable future as his partner, especially since Zelada might still be out there.. So, end of episode, right?

Well, no, because we’re not even halfway through. So, onto the next arc! Kei and Tilarna bust some Semanian thugs, though she gets a little excessive and cuts off a guy’s finger, which new Chief Zimmer chews them out for. But a casket with ancient runes is found in the criminals’ stuff, containing some sort of mummified Semanian corpse in formal clothing. It’s taken to Cecil (who shares war stories with Tilarna about dealing with Kei) to examine its origins and age. It seems harmless at first, but that night, it comes to life and drains the blood out of Cecil’s assistant, gaining a youthful appearance. Once Tilarna learns of where it was dug up, she races back to Cecil and fights the woman, who she identifies as a vampire.

OUR TAKE
The first…third(?) of this episode are a pretty frantic race to the end of the first story arc (and I assume the first novel), but ends up rushing through a lot of key scenes and information. Like did you know that Tilarna was saved by this fairy with no lines when she was a child? Or get a second to process that Zelada got defeated? Did you think you passed out for a couple seconds between the fairy deciding rather inexplicably to kill itself and that this would heal Kei from his injuries? I guess we just were not meant to think about these things because they just zip through it all.

Also interesting that the climax and epilogue of this have some notable similarities to that of the first Full Metal Panic storyline, wherein the two leads almost die together and then the one who was brought in solely for this mission sticks around to keep an eye on the one who was initially in that area. But that also was supposed to be the beginnings of Sosuke and Kaname’s romance, which was fine since they were the same age. But in THIS case…yeah, they SAY Tilarna is 18 in Earth years, but Kei’s gotta be in his early 30’s AT LEAST. So I’m really not digging the “flirting” angle that seems to be starting here. Their dynamic is plenty entertaining, especially when Tilarna is meant to be the “bad cop” in situations, but I really hope we steer clear of pairing these two up.

As for the beginning of this next arc, it looks like the new case won’t be dealing with more race war instigating extremists, but an ancient blood sucking vampire lady. And we get a better look at Tilarna’s White Cloak Power Up Mode! It’s good to see that we’re getting such a big change up in the threat this time, showing that this mash up of what is essentially “Magic Vice” is capable of variety and not going to be stuck in redos of the same enemies over and over. While people like Zelada can be an overarching villain pointing to a bigger, more encompassing problem, we can have these little things happen to allow for more frequent development for the main cast. We’re a third through the series already, but there’s only ever been six books of this series, so maybe they’re trying to cram them all into 12 episodes? Hopefully not, but we’ll have to keep watching to find out.