Uchuu Kyoudai – 34

「月夜の晩にパグとハグ」 (Tsukiyo no Ban ni Pagu to Hagu)
“Pug and Hug on a Moonlit Night”

Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether a scene is intended to be taken seriously or not. None of the astronauts wanted to be the first to remove their suit and who can blame them really? I can’t imagine the horror stories and misinformation are all that much different in the distant future than they are now. Even if you’re told that these stories aren’t true, that opening your space suit in a vacuum doesn’t, in fact, cause you to immediately inflate and explode in dramatic fashion, there will always be that slight doubt inspired by copious amounts of science fiction. Besides, opening your helmet in a vacuum would be bad for an entirely different reason – while you could survive exposure for a short time, hypoxia would set in after a mere fifteen seconds amongst other things.

For the first part of that entire scene, I wasn’t entirely sure what Uchuu Kyoudai wanted me to feel. They’d done tension in the past, and frequently done it well. But with the music going all out to be tense and the terror in each of the astronauts faces all I could really feel was humour. It’s a good thing that’s probably what they were going for, as emphasised by Hibito’s nonchalant undressing. But for a little while, it really did seem as though they wanted to inspire anxiety.

With their arrival on the moon, UFO discussion is back again. It seems most astronauts have seen something related and several have an interest in the subject in general. The series began with a UFO sighting and now Hibito has witnessed a strange flash on the surface of the moon – I wonder whether there will be any elaboration on this, whether there will be any connection, and whether the series will actually delve properly into that aspect again. I’ve been itching to know more about the UFO they saw during their childhood ever since that first episode and I would love to find out what it was they actually saw. The fact that it seems to come up every now and then gives me some hope on that front, but it’s still entirely possible its sole purpose was to spark their original dream and thus will never properly come to light.

I was both pleasantly surprised and disappointed by the skip to results day. I wasn’t expecting them to reach it quite so quickly – I’m used to Uchuu Kyoudai drawing things out so the skip is a nice surprise. However, I’m disappointed that we ended on another big cliff-hanger – that we’re not actually going to find out who’s been selected until next week. Uchuu Kyoudai seems to really like doing that on a frequent basis. I hope they actually tell us whether Mutta passes or not next week rather than focusing entirely on Kenji and leaving Mutta for a later time.

tl;dr: @MoombaDS – This week brings us some UFO discussion and the advent of the final results day. At least I think it’s final this time. #SpaceBros

Random thoughts:

• Those uniforms are so incredibly sci-fi!
• So much Hibito confectionary! It must be pretty awesome to have your name and likeness on pretty much everything.
• Poor Mutta, his luck always seems to work on such mundane things.
• I’m sure someone else will get this reference, but it seems to be eluding me.

Full-length images: 04, 05, 06, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 36.

 

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