Flashman Episode 46

"It's like the Earth is telling us to get out." ~Bun

The title of this episode is "20 Days Left to Live." So...be sure to count the fireworks and dance along at the end credits, kids!

The episode begins with a furious La Deus punishing Keflen. Two perfectly good Deus Beast Soldiers, and yet no dead Flashman. What's up with that? La Deus makes a good point. Once Neferu rounds the corner and sees Keflen's punishment, she cries out "Father!" and jumps before him, taking some of the hits. Shock! This takes Wanda by surprise, and confuses Keflen. Neferu explains that, as her creator, she looks at Keflen as her father. (I plan to go into this in the finale.) She then pleads with Deus to spare Keflen and let her use her genetic material to make the next Deus Beast Soldier. Deus agrees, commending Neferu's dedication.

The resulting monster, The Neferuss, is a cool design, a hulk. As with the past two monsters, it's one strong mutha. I'd really like for it to have resembled Neferu more, though. It has a Deus-like face and color scheme. Spoiler alert, in a couple of episodes, Keflen makes Deus into a monster and it looks similar to Neferuss, so that confused me when I was a kid. Izubuchi said he tried to work in a cat look to it to represent Neferu's leopard side, but it's only really reflected in his sketch, and even then it's just barely. (It's the head going over the Deus face.) If only it could have been more like Neferura...

Neferuss' specialty is that, no matter how many times it gets destroyed in battle, Neferu can use her lifeforce to resurrect it. Even after being Rolling Vulcan'd to pieces. Now, what's unique about this monster is that he pretty much goes after the Flashman with suicide attacks -- he grabs a Flashman and explodes, because he can just easily be brought back again. And this ends up causing some serious damage to the Flashman and they have to retreat.

The five stagger in pain, dirty and bloody, relieved to find a stream that they can get a drink from...only once they consume the water, they find themselves in even further pain. It's the next stage of the Anti-Flash, and it results in a nice scene that just lets all sink in for the Flashman. (The symptoms of the Anti-Flash apparently come in waves; Magu says they're for now past the previous stages of the shocks and the plants harming them. So, no, the show's not forgetting when you see Sara touch a plant or the Flashman grab Professor Tokimura in the next episode to save him. The symptoms are obviously going to return and become permanent.) They're hurt, they're saddened. The unfairness of it all. They've set aside any personal goals, like finding their family or meeting new people, for the sake of fighting Mess and protecting Earth. And this is their reward? The Earth means so much to them, we even see a scene of when they were first arriving, with Dai getting choked up and beginning to cry at the sight of the planet as the Round Base began its approach.

Magu tries to hide what he discovers from them, but Jin pushes him to reveal it -- they only have twenty days before they'll die. The performers not only do a great job conveying the rush of emotions that come with this hit after hit of bad news -- particularly Tarumi, Ishiwata and Nakamura -- but the scene is just filmed well, using the perfect piece of BGM. These long shots of the Flashman at this creek, the creek sparkling, lovely nature shots -- providing all of these wonderful shots of streams and greenery, the things that are beginning to harm our heroes...all add so much that it makes you miss the days toku dared to be artistic like this.

While the Flashman have been having their world pretty much literally shatter, Tokimura has been hard at work on building Kaura's own Gene Synthesizer in an underground hideout. He collapses from exhaustion, but is beaten back into working by Gardan, who's just a real asshole for being a newb to the show. Even when he first shows up and he's mouthing off to the people in the Lab ship via their monitor, you're just like "Who does this guy think he is?" Getting manhandled again, Tokimura is shoved by Kaura out of the way and begins to test the synthesizer, happy with what he hears. (But ordering Tokimura to give it more power.) Kaura's plan for this Gene Synthesizer is to interfere with Mess, specifically harm La Deus. To accomplish this, this hideout is in the proximity of a radio tower that they have rigged to send out his hellish symphony. As he plays -- he never had one lesson -- it reaches La Deus, causing him immense pain. Keflen recognizes it immediately as the work of Kaura and ignores Deus' orders to find and stop the source of the sound, instead realizing that this could provide Keflen with the moment he's been waiting for -- finding out what La Deus actually is and maybe overthrowing him. He wishes to himself for La Deus to keep suffering...

Magu catches onto the weird signal being broadcast, tracing it and sending the Flashman there. A fight with Flashman puts a brief halt in Kaura's plans, as he, Gardan and Tokimura make off with the equipment in Kaura's flying saucer. Before being taken once more, Tokimura quickly gets out to the Flashman that Kaura confirmed that one of them is his kid. The Flashman quickly pursue the ship by foot, but lose it, only to stumble into the sights of Neferu! And it's just like...damn, these guys can't get a break! They never had the chance to recover from the last fight, they went directly into a fight with Kaura, and now accidentally get mixed up with Neferu again! It's crazy.

During this battle, Red Flash finally catches that Neferu's the one responsible for constantly reviving the monster. At one point, he interferes with her process, blocking her resurrection beam with his Prism Sei-ken. Furious that they've caught on and can now stop her plan, she challenges Red Flash to a duel. It's not an overly elaborate duel, it's filmed quickly with a lot of fast cuts, but I still think it's pretty cool and it manages to still come off as big and crazy. It gets aerial at one point! And I love the red spark that the Prism Sei-ken gives off once it clashes with Neferu's baton, once again conveying its power. Eventually, Red Flash cuts through her as his Prism Sei-ken glows, and they both land, backs to each other, waiting to see who falls first in that old samurai fashion. Neferu drops her baton. She's weak from pain, calling out for Keflen, and taking a really nasty spill off of a cliff. (The stunt double rolls speedily all the way down a mountain in what's mostly one long shot.) Neferu comes to a stop, reaching one hand up in pain, finally collapsing, going dead. Back at the Lab, Wanda is shocked and it even gets a concerned reaction from Keflen. But, without Neferu, Neferuss has to be made giant and has just its one life remaining. (One cool thing, during the fight with Flash King, is that it pulls Flash King into other dimensions. I assume this is the monster putting Neferura's illusion powers to work and, if so, it's a nice detail.)

The episode ends with this really beautiful shot of the five's silhouettes against the setting sun. It's a great shot, done for reals, but it's a shame that the close-up shots of the cast look to be a colored lens on the camera to simulate the setting sun. But it's a nice scene where the Flashman are voicing their concerns for the future, really lost and uncertain how they're going to make it and be able to finish off Mess in just 20 days. And look at what's been happening -- Mess has been powering up! Kaura's off with his own agenda. Their backs are really against the wall, and you know it's not going to be as simple as gathering 20 special Bandai-approved prisms (now on sale) to save them.

I like Dai's line in this last scene. He's just making a calm, but impassioned plea to the sky -- a prayer to the heavens -- to just spare them any further pain going forward. I've read that this line was an idea by Kihachiro Uemura's that he suggested to Soda when Soda asked the five what they think their characters would say at this moment, adapting their answers to the script. Uemura's contribution is a good one and delivered nicely, when it could have been overdone. I'm just going to go ahead and say Metalder basically ripped off this scene, at the end of the first episode when he's staring at the setting sun and asking the clouds why he was born. Metalder's so worshipped that that's considered a classic scene in toku, but Dai did this before Metalder. And Flashman's is a more resonant, heartbreaking, more meaningful scene. Also, Jin's line to Sara, (who along with Bun, is most upset): "We don't have time to feel sorry for ourselves or complain. Our time now is too valuable for that." Pragmatic Jin. Between their upgrading opponents and the Anti-Flash weighing his team down, he has a lot on his shoulders as leader in these final episodes. And he ends up really delivering. He's just a Red you can always count on, and that's probably why he was my favorite as a kid.

The episode ends with a loud, clanging typewriter sound writing out "20 days remaining" on the screen. It's very jarring and disorienting and, even when I was a kid and didn't really know what was going on, there was just something spooky and unsettling about it.

While I think this episode is really good and well-made, filled with shocking turns, great performances and Takao Nagaishi proving once again why he's one of the best directors tokusatsu has had the fortune of seeing, this episode...feels a little overly concerned about catching you up. It tends to repeat information it's already told you, as if the show was afraid of the possibility that viewers missed a couple of episodes and it needed to restate some things. It's almost like a clip-less clip show in spots. Like, we've known from the start that the Flashman had to be one of the Tokimuras. The show's hinted long enough, and on both sides, that they all know it's a possibility. So for Tokimura to give this info to the Flashman, and they all react like it's news...it's a little weird, and again, I feel like it's presented this way out of fear of people missing a couple of crucial episodes. My brother, when I finally got him to watch all of Flashman, really hated how much they dragged out the Tokimura storyline. While I can understand feeling a little frustrated with the Tokimura plot, I think it's only this episode that it's unnecessarily stalled.

And I imagine the whole Tokimura storyline will probably test the patience of lot of younger and modern viewers. But I'd just like to again point out that it's intentionally been depicted this way for a few reasons. One is to highlight the tragedy of the Flashman's situation. You might think Japan's a small place, but realistically, it would be very difficult for the Flashman to just land and find all of their families so quickly. It would just be bogus if they all found their family by the end of the series and had happy reunions. Secondly, it serves one of Flashman's strongest themes and messages, which is that sometimes family doesn't need to be blood. By showing the Flashman meet and make connections with unrelated people, people who are similarly alone and who become a surrogate family member (or as close as a family member) is a really heartfelt and important message to convey, I think. It shows the capacity for kindness. Sara's bond with Miran, Ruu's bond with Kashima, Dai's with Sumire, Bun's with Kayoko -- I think all of those storylines had more weight and meaning than if they had just met their blood relatives and it was all tied up in a nice bow. That would just be too easy. I think there's something sweet about having each of the Flashman basically look at the Tokimuras as their own family, with the Tokimuras having the heart and being willing to let them all be a part of the family. And since Professor Tokimura wasn't going to rest until he had answers, doing crazy stuff like building time machines, you knew he'd draw attention to himself, so it's not totally unbelievable that the Tokimuras are often as involved as they are.