English Dub Review: Space Battleship Tiramisu “Blueness/The Last Volume”

Subaru’s feeling blue this week.

Compared to its stunning premiere, more recent installments of Space Battleship Tiramisu have shown the consequences of their short runtime. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of anything resembling a story, with the show clearly being content to simply let funny things happen around Subaru and assume everything will fall into place. There’s only one enemy ship in this entire episode, and it’s quickly forgotten about to focus on how piloting a pink ship shaped like a woman threatens Subaru’s masculinity.

The story centered around this ship, the Primavera, is essentially one long joke about it being too girly for a man to fly. A late appearance by the narrator almost saves it by explaining that Subaru’s immaturity stems from spending his adolescence isolated in space, but I think this would’ve been more effective had there been some overt criticism. Although comedy is subjective (and the initial setup admittedly felt flimsy to me), any joke starts to have diminishing returns when there are no attempts at variety.

In fact, this feels particularly like a missed opportunity given there were ideas from “The Last Volume” that would’ve supplemented “Blueness” well. Since the show felt the need to distinguish between the two stories in the episode title I will here as well, and this distinction leaves them both feeling anticlimactic and underdeveloped. It’s obvious at this point that Space Battleship Tiramisu is at its best when the bizarre connection between Subaru and his cockpit is examined, and “The Last Volume” hints at this with his new mecha. There is variety and subtext here that were sorely missed in the episode’s first half, however, it never really seemed to be building to anything. As alluded to above, the only tension in “The Last Volume” comes from Subaru being stupid and nearly crashing into asteroids, with its deus ex machina conclusion feeling incredibly lazy.

The main issue for Space Battleship Tiramisu this week was creating two ‘half-stories’ from similar ideas, leading to an inconsequential whole. I genuinely hope the variety of humor, and worldbuilding that made “Fly in Space/Naked Dance” so memorable return soon, or this show will start to feel like a one-episode wonder.