Basquash! – 20

Summary:

With Lunatec’s redevelopment plans shelved, Dan, Sela, and Navi are free to practice on the streets of Turbine City. While watching them, Miyuki and Flora manage to get Haruka to talk about herself and James. Back when she was young, Haruka took a kindergarten trip to the border between the light and dark sides of the moon. She had gotten lost and entered the dark and forbidden side of the moon, and that’s when she saw giant footprints on the ground. That led her to become a shoes designer, and James was the first person to listen to her story about the footprints without laughing. This was the start of their relationship, and Flora suspects that she still likes him. Miyuki’s attention is then turned to a noise from Dan’s Bigfoot, and she watches as it crashes onto the ground. Upon inspection, Miyuki finds that its drive system is broken, and while she can repair it, it’s a symptom of a larger problem: the pilots’ abilities are exceeding the machine’s capabilities.

What’s more, Miyuki has seen dangerous rises in the power reactor output, and she wants to do a complete upgrade, but she can’t with their current equipment. Her grandfather reminds her that she would also need some special data on the power system, and the only place to get it is Area 0, the Bigfoot holy hand and the place where her father died. The group arrives there after a short drive, and Miyuki’s grandfather is able to access her father’s research data. Miyuki, however, wants to work on this by herself in order to become a better engineer, and she’s so occupied with the work that she neglects sleeping and eating. Her grandfather doesn’t mind letting her push herself though, and he tells the others of how his son tried to evolve the Bigfoot drive system by recreating the legendary giants via machines, but it led to an accident. When Miyuki finally takes a break, she explains to Dan that her grandfather wanted to improve people’s lives with Bigfoots, so it really pained them to hear about what happened to Coco. Dan, however, reveals that he doesn’t hate Bigfoots anymore, and he points out that they wouldn’t be here today without them.

Miyuki eventually finishes, and Dan, Sela, and Flora are able to try their upgraded Bigfoots that now have very smooth movements. Seeing them in action, her grandfather even compliments her on a job well done, and he recognizes her coming of age. By the time the pilots return to rave about the upgrade, Miyuki is already asleep from exhaustion. Meanwhile, Rouge is lost inside her own conscious, but her memories of Dan suddenly start disappearing. She then wakes up and finds herself in a lab with Thousand watching over her. Rouge realizes that she’s crying, but Thousand tells her not to worry about it and suggests that it was because of a sad dream. Back on Earthdash, Miyuki leaves flowers at the spot where her father died, and she feels that Dan and friends and their Bigfoots will reach the moon someday. A little later, as Dan and Navi are packing up, they are alerted by Sela to a press conference being shown on TV. In it, Violette and Citron announce that Eclipse is disbanding following their next concert in the Skybloom Kingdom.

Preview and Changed ED Sequence

As you can see above, they changed the ending animation again, this time to add more focus on the Eclipse girls. It coincides with Eclipse’s return to the story and the culmination of Yang/Lunatec’s plot (whatever it is), but more importantly, Rouge is finally back. I’m not surprised though that her memories of Dan appear to have been deleted, and this probably sets up for an ending where Dan has to remind her of him and her memories come back in the heat of battle (or in this case, Basquash) or something. I’m not expecting anything horribly original from this, but maybe they’ll surprise me.

As for this episode, it was mostly Miyuki focused with a little bit of Haruka stuff at the beginning. I like the character development that they’ve given to both of them, and there were some nice scenes, but the lack of anything MiyukiXDan along with the conclusion of Miyuki’s story – and I assume this is all the character development she’s going to get since we’re already at episode 20 – seems to indicate that they’re not going to have her fight for Dan’s affections after all. You might remember that back in episode 13, I was critical because Miyuki’s frustrations about Dan’s relationship with Rouge came as an afterthought, and here we are seven episodes later, and it looks like they’ve decided to abandon that subplot. They shouldn’t have even bothered in the first place.

In any case, it looks like the story might be headed back to Skybloom next time, and we’ll see more of Flora’s father and the Eclipse girls. However, there’s no new episode of Basquash next week thanks to the 12th IAAF World Championships in Athletics. Episode 21 will thus air August 27th, 2009.