Ultraman Blazar ep 23: The Threat Approaches

Blazar finally turned on the booster towards the climax. This episode pushes the story forward by quite a fair bit and also give us a glimpse of the potential final boss’ first form. The character focus also shifted back to Captain Gento and Blazar, but this time, it’s not a positive development.

Gento was shown to have been overworking himself, with the constance appearances of the Deltandals, SKaRD deployment as well as fighting as Blazar. Gento’s body is pushed to the brink and has suffered severe fatigue. In addition, becoming Blazar constantly has caused him lose his bone density. In previous shows, many instances we see the human host not suffering too much side-effects, but that’s because they don’t constantly transform as much as Gento does in a short time. And there are instances where the human host has to increase their nutrition intake to make up for all the fighting. But Gento didn’t show any of the sort, if anything, he might have skimped on meals to get more work in. Despite everyone telling him to rest fully, his position as a captain won’t allow him to be completely mind-free about things.

What I find funny is that Blazar literally punched Gento with his own fist to get him to go see the doctor. This shows that Blazar cares about his host and will take “drastic” measures to “protect” him in a way.

And then we get to the Kaijus of this week…or rather that’s what things seem like. We got 2 Taganulars – one in Japan and one in the US. While it was thought that they were trying to attack Earth again, but it was soon revealed through an incredible investigation that they are actually aiming their attacks at something in the great beyond. The thriller and “detective” element in this episode was amazing. The suspense, the dialogue delivery, and that funky typical over-zealous IT guy is the exact recipe for this type of episode. They also leverage the space science as much as possible this episode, making the beam shot in the previous episode actually hit something and not just a random shot. The revelation was pretty well done. I didn’t expect it to be connected in this way, and now the 2nd Wave, 3rd Wave thing makes sense.

The only thing left is to connect the GGF experiment to V99 – which we now know is the space Kaiju Valaron. His design is pretty grotesque – probably the most “gross” design in quite a long time. His glowing eyes are also quite intimidating. He definitely give the “Alien” vibes the most.

This episode also raised the question of Blazar’s and SKaRD’s loyalty to the “public”. Even though the GGF sorta got the gist of why they did what they did, the normal people would definitely raise some big controversy when they saw that Earth’s sole protector protect the Kaiju instead. Well, all things will be cleared in due time, and the true plot will be revealed soon. We have 2 more episodes left, so the next one will probably be the prelim battle against Valaron’s first form.
AARON

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