I hope you watched the episode before reading this review because there’s heaps of spoilers below.
Kanata no Astra’s plot sure gets thicken quickly, as this week it drops two Earth-shattering (pun-intended) twists: the first being the disparity between Astra’s history and the Earth’s, and the second being the revelation of the traitor. Again, fair shares of great and not-so-great developments towards the Earth/ Astra plot. On one hand, I just love how the reveal doesn’t betray anything the show has built up so far. In fact, when the kids (and we) realize that the dead planet they tumbled right at the start was indeed the Earth, it all adds up in terms of significance. The journey has always been the journey from Earth to Astra, from one civilization to the next. If we’re talking about the leaf from ancient to new society, our kids walk that very step. Function-wise, this new flush of information makes sense how the kids came across the ship in the first place. On the other hand, Polina’s reaction to all that is just… so self-serious and I’m not sold one bit of that. Yeah, the Earth as she knows it might be destroyed, but if she aware about the comet hitting the Earth, she can figure out that they could’ve come from the new planet, right?
The most interesting point, however, is the divergence between Polina’s (ala our) history and the kids’ old era history. The big difference (drumroll… adds Polina’s stunned reaction) is that in Astra’s version there was a WWIII that spring off from the nuclear conflict in Cuba (any history buff will have a good kick out of this). That could mean that either 1) this is an alternative history that branch out from the world Polina knows, or 2) this is an implanted fake history the ones in authorization altered in order to hide something. I much prefer the first theory – and if that’s the case it means that whatever happens in Cuba at the time spilt the world in a profound way (I have Steins:Gate vibe all over again), but the second theory is more feasible in this case (Kanat no Astra is no Steins;Gate after all, nor should it be). What also interesting is how the new world is void of country or religious concept – although they do have land for the royalty and what’s not. For me, these details just show how far the new culture has advanced, or in better terms, how far they have been diverged from the original world as Polina knows it.
Polina also introduces the artificial wormhole, which is the ball thing that nearly killed everyone in our group. This is when Kanata no Astra addresses the things that it has been putting aside for awhile: the identity of the traitor. Well, I don’t see this coming but it makes sense to me that Charce is the one behind the scheme (btw, the argument that the last one entered the wormhole is the culprit has a lot of holes. Don’t buy it at all). Kanata no Astra has gotten to the point where it feels equally painful if any of the cast, anyone, is the culprit. He reveals that his mission is to kill and die together with the group (with the technology of the old Era – an interesting plot thread here), and that he is a clone of the King himself. I’m still not sure how significant that reveal would be, but it addresses the loose end that Kanata no Astra glossed over weeks ago: Aries’s true identity. This is another dense and overall satisfying episode for Kanata no Astra (I’ve lost count at how many episodes it skips OPs and EDs), and from the look of it, there’s still plenty more surprises in store for us in the next few episodes. After all, what kind of conspiracy do the adults hide?
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