Flashman Episode 5

EPISODE 5

Is your refrigerator running? Well, then you better send Dyna Blue to stop it!

Now THIS is a fun stab at a comedic episode. Quirky as heck, showcasing a bizarre Mess attack, while acting as more of a fish-out-of-water styled story for our heroes, rather than focusing only on their super abilities. The latest Beast Soldier manipulates electronics and machinery, resulting in some of that Poltergeist-y mayhem that Toei was so fond of putting in toku episodes of the period. (This one has more effort going into selling the idea -- when the monster is causing the refrigerator to bulge out, it's a pretty good effect -- it's latex that bulges out, but looks solid and metallic when it settles back into its normal shape. Not an expensive effect, but it works.)

It's a nice change of pace that the heroes are brought into the situation not by their routine patrolling, but just by accident. In this episode, the Flashman are just kind of exploring town to get accustomed to it. The guys are separated from the girls, with Sara and Ruu just driving around. They eventually find themselves in the middle of a chase between policeman Tachibana (guest star Koji Unoki, the already-mentioned Dyna Blue) and a speedster refrigerator.

The episode is just these three getting into one chase after another, as the Beast Soldier hops from appliances to even automobiles. (Ah, who am I kidding -- it's Sara and Ruu who are doing all of the work. Tachibana's mostly in a constant state of disbelief at the fine mess he's in, and is prone to fainting.) Sara and Ruu are on their own as the guys of the Flash team are learning the hard way the perils of public transportation -- they're stuck on a train, having to wait for the next stop, and being new to this Earth place, they're not even sure where they're headed. So, they're going to be a while.

There's a lot of fun bits in this episode, like Ruu riding along with Tachibana by riding on the top of his police car, Ruu saving Sara by grabbing her and levitating, Yellow and Pink snubbing the guys when they finally arrive and do the team pose (and making them fight on their own), the Beast Soldier taking over Flash King (with the solution being to have Magu fire at them with the Star Condor to remove him) AND the debut of Yoko Nakamura's earwormy song for the soundtrack.

Before any wisenheimers criticize this episode's plot, I need to point this out: Mess's plan wasn't to take over the world by making fridges move -- Wanda says that this was just a test run for the monster's power. People often criticize the toku episodes that feature this particular villain plan, but the way it's presented here at least hints at the damage it could cause. We don't know the full potential of the monster, because the Flashman stop it in time. But it can take over ANYthing mechanical. We see that on a smaller scale with the household appliances it uses to attack Sara and Ruu, but we see it on a bigger scale when it takes over Tachibana's car, and then an even bigger scale when it takes over Flash King. The amount of damage it could have caused, depending on whatever it took control of, and the danger it presented was serious.

The final scene of the episode is Tachibana comedically reacting negatively to the appearance of Sara and Ruu, remembering the weirdness of Ruu's levitating. Sara and Ruu thought they made a bud, and he rejected them. And it's done in a humorous way, this entire last scene has a lightness to it. Jin tells them to not worry, that even if people react that way to them and their abilities, they themselves are still Earthlings. Earlier there had also been a scene where Tachibana was trying to get Sara and Ruu to tell him their names -- they don't know their real names or their last names, so "Sara" and "Ruu" was met with confusion. So, in this last scene, we get the narrator telling us "one day, you'll know your last names, Flashman!" It's an all-around light, bouncy, pleasant and optimistic ending. Think of where Flashman goes and this ending takes on a depressing angle! When I watch this episode and get to this ending, I'm always just like "Poor Flashman. Them bastards don't know what's in store for them." They get SO dumped on throughout this show.