Macross Frontier 12: Ranka Drew Blood

The only blood drawn in the entire episode.

Ranka turned out to be the only deadly weapon in this little revolt. Her one little twinkle of the eye and all the men dropped all their guns with one of them even exploded into an eruption of nosebleed—the only blood drawn despite countless of shots fired.

On the story front, it’s obvious it was Grace who poisoned Sheryl. Poor Sheryl, for the first time, experienced events completely outside of her control. She barely had enough strength to even say, “I am Sheryl Nome.” Despite all her planning, she could not keep Alto away from Ranka on his birthday. At the end, Sheryl had unwittingly handed over her originally intended gift for Alto of flying-in-open-sky, into the hands of Ranka, who flew with him in her place instead. The galactic fairy had suddenly become helpless.

This scene of Alto screaming in anguish as he plunged the dagger, reminds me of Shinji’s own with the fourth angel in Evangelion.

On the other hand, Alto experienced his recurring theme of innate nature versus cultured nature: His blood is that of an actor, but he desire is that of a pilot. Obviously, in this episode, Ranka’s cultural lesson in music had overcome the Zentradi’s innate thirst of blood. And similarly, under Ranka’s singing of Aimo, so did the pilot-wannabe actor triumphed. It would be interesting to see if this same theme would extend to Ranka and Sheryl in the later episodes. Already, we see that Sheryl is not as strong as she appears to be and that Ranka is not as helpless as she was before.

Lastly, the music in this episode was simply amazing. As incoherent as the rest of the episode was, the music saved the episode just as Ranka saved Alto. Usually in an insert-song scene, the scene remains the focus with the insert song enhancing the atmosphere; however, in this case, it was more like the songs were the focus and the scenes were just there as support instead. Near the end of the episode, I wasn’t caring so much about what had happened in the story as I was just enjoying the music.

Watch out, Mikuru beam!