BEM Episode 6 Review: Gravity

An overpowered loli, a cursed moon man and Sonia being all over the place: these basically sum up this week’s episode of BEM. Even though it had a solid story this time and a good focus on Bela, it still had many animation hiccups and plot inconsistencies.

Plot

After another murder, the police are starting to investigate two members of the ‘From Enceladus’ circus that appear to have some sort of superpowers. Thinking that they might be humanoid monsters makes Sonia inspect them further. The suspects are a young little girl named Harazy and a previous astronaut named Val Titan that were both held in a military hospital and experimented on. Roddy asks Bela out on a date to see the circus act and after the show they have a weird encounter with Val and Harazy where a muscular man tries to hurt them and Bela witnesses their powers for the first time. Being framed by the government for murders that he didn’t commit and accused of kidnapping Harazy, Val is hunted down by the police and Bela tries to help him escape. Unfortunately, he was tricked. The military kills him and takes Harazy away, where it was revealed that that was the initial target of Felt after all.

Episode Highlights

Roddy, get a hint: So this guy finally gets his dream girl out on a date and during the whole show he couldn’t even see that she was bored out of her skull. Roddy, my man, when you are out with a girl for the first time and the only things you hear from her are tedious sounds like: ‘Ehhh, Hmmm, Oohh’, you need to understand that something is not going very well. At least, Gravity Man and Harazy saved the day.

Sonia, get your shit together please: I cannot stand looking at her anymore. She is so badly written and so lost in this plot. She questions the Unseen Council yet she still follows Felt’s orders. She knows that the humanoid monsters are on their side but does nothing about it, and her character is established as ‘the one that goes against the tide and does things her way’. It’s so frustrating to see her wondering around and just being there completely incompetent. She is either there for the sake of witnessing things and not doing anything about them or just being Bem’s damsel in distress. If you sit down and think about what she did in this episode, you will see that her character has absolutely no value to the plot’s progression. And might I add that she once again managed to survive a huge explosion just by hiding behind a car? Come on, this is so ridiculous.

Bela, what did you fix? So when they are walking in the sewer (and a random guy appears to be walking there as well, but I won’t even comment on that), Bela says to Harazy: ‘Give this to onee-chan’ and then she is like: ‘There, it’s all fixed’. Tell me now, what exactly did you fix Bela? The only thing that was different about that doll was that it was clean when she gave it back to Harazy. But how exactly did she clean it in split seconds and with what? Did she made a supersonic sound to get rid of the stains? What the hell happened in that scene.

Themes & Trivia

Enceladus: Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn. It is about 500 kilometers (310 mi) in diameter, about a tenth of that of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Enceladus is mostly covered by fresh, clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies of the Solar System. Consequently, its surface temperature at noon only reaches −198 °C (−324 °F), far colder than a light-absorbing body would be. Despite its small size, Enceladus has a wide range of surface features, ranging from old, heavily cratered regions to young, tectonically deformed terrains.

Comments

Bela throws herself in front of Val to protect him and exactly the same thing happens to her, like they did to Bem in the previous episode. She goes in, she gets hooked, and then a magnetic field traps her. Belo and Bem come to her rescue and they escape. Now you would think that they would have figured out that the same thing might happen again and come up with a better plan to deal with the situation and you would also think that Felt would have more cards up his sleeves to get these humanoid monsters. I am sorry, but that whole scene was a joke.

Humans hurting humans.

At least now we have some sort of solidity in the plot, compared to the randomness of all the previous episodes. Let’s see what direction this show will take from now on.