Black Cat – episode 6

November 20, 2005 on 11:23 pm | In Black Cat | 1 Comment

“A Targeted Cat”

Wow, this stuff is all over the place: transparencies! Invisible swords! Insect curses! Black Cat is at spoiler point, so don’t read on unless you want to know. Or unless you read on other blogs what was going to happen around about this time three episodes ago (thanks, spoilers!).

Train and Sephiria begin their epic battle, but Creed quickly becomes the more apparent threat. Train gets to run free, but Creed becomes more obsessed with the idea that Saya has poisoned Train’s mind. She has to be stopped.

So he stops her.

The first half of this episode was something akin to pure madness, with an abundance of fancy camera shots and the introduction of a collection of new plot elements: the Forbidden Continent … invisible swords! Seriously, invisible swords. Thing is, I’ve got an idea where they got the inspiration for that.

Now that I’ve got the silliness out of the way, I’ll talk about the straighter parts of the episode. One should never take the word of a character who says that she has cast aside all emotions to get where she is, because that will always mean that they’ve got the capacity to change.
In this way, Sephiria showed that she has her limits as a trained killer; the role of Chronos in the episode ends there.

The way that Itagaki jammed the Saya and Train being happy scenes in was highly suggestive of bad things being ahead; he wasn’t wrong, but the fact that Train could run from being at Sephiria’s mercy directly into a contest with Saya was a jarred direction, trying to get in a few last moments of fun before she met her tragic end.

The fun and games were slightly unnatural, but Train’s apartment scene was somewhat tender and Saya hinted that she knew that Train’s comrades were up to little in the way of good. In this way, this one scene, we get more of an indication of Train’s change than anything else in the series has done so far. Here is the reason for everything that has come so far, and the pivot to make Sven and Train truly co-exist.

The “ramune scenes”, as I will call them, were an excellently directed culmination to the arc of Saya’s life. By presenting the attacks on her exclusively from the perspective of Creed, with one sided dialogue and, most importantly, time lapse, there is an excellent sense of pleading, desperation, humanity and lack thereof. This was easily the best scene of the series so far, beating out all that has come before by a large margin.

Martyring Saya makes Train’s cause more defined: vengeance is always something best exacted on behalf of the dead. Yet, given Saya’s own philosophy and how it affected Train, how will he reconcile his goal with his thoughts? I suspect that Sven may well be able to help provide some perspective on all of this.

Black Cat looks like it’s beginning to pose some far-out story ideas, but the excellence of this episode makes up for any silly shortcomings by a long shot.

1 Comment

  1. true that! this is my fav episode because it is a event that is a building block of the whole story.. i heard that black cat season 2 is coming out soon but .. i don’t know if its true.. well see, because there is many unexplained things in season 1

    Comment by TUNAFISHISGOOD — December 11, 2007 #

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