Kanata no Astra Episode 4: Mushroom kingdom
Published on July 25, 2019
I feel like this series is getting the point of being hit-or-miss. This episode was fun, with character development that I appreciated. But the resolution for the main conflict felt unsatisfying to me, seeming to come out of nowhere. In addition, the scientist in me wants to call out the leaps of logic that the characters are making as well. To put it another way, I'm all for character focus, but also I want to be able to take the characters seriously.
I can somewhat understand what Kanata was going for here, but this line about not investigating the traitor in the group makes me curious. Immediately after saying this, Kanata comments about wanting to know who the traitor is, which makes the line come off as a joke. Is this rule meant to be taken seriously? I wonder if this scene is meant to be an acknowledgment that ignoring the problem will be impossible.
This planet seems to add the dynamic I was curious to see in this series. I'm not sure if this will end up being solved next week, but I'm looking forward to seeing how the crew handles the next leg of the journey. I think the series would have benefited from making resource management a more omnipresent issue, but I feel like I'm satisfied with at least the idea of it put forth.
It might be because I sympathize with Yunhua's self-deprecating behavior, but I got the sense that the episode didn't give her the best treatment. Her attitude made sense given her mother's treatment of her, but I think her character shift is undercut slightly by Kanata saving the day yet again. I appreciate that Yunhua is able to find her voice (literally). I guess I just would have liked to see her do more than just guess that the mushroom she found was an antidote.
I'm all for the concept of a mushroom planet. I think the idea is quite interesting, and the world itself looked cool. However, I think that the characters in the show come off as being too sure of themselves for the new environments they're exploring. I'm all for coming up with an educated guess, but I felt like Charce's conclusions in this episode take some heavy logical liberties. Maybe that's just me.
This is a weird gamble for Kanata to make. Typically, predators in nature are kept in balance by decreasing numbers. Since their prey is a limited resource, they can't proliferate as easily as them. This idea that the Pole Trees can somehow sense a poisoned animal feels like a weird take on keeping an ecological equilibrium. I almost want to think that it's a better ending if Yunhua's singing played out from Kanata's suit and caused the mushrooms to bloom.