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| Plot Synopsis | Interesting and Fun Details |
| Episode Review | Character Development |
| Episode Analysis | |
Plot Synopsis
Blow Up opens with Brian J. Mason and his new bodyguards monitoring the progress of a combat Boomer which has obviously been released by Mason for some reason. Unfortunately, the AD Police are having a very difficult time combating the new BU-12B combat Boomer, and they're losing many officers to the machinegun and bazooka the Boomer is armed with. Almost as unfortunate, the Boomer is rampaging down near the Silky Doll, Sylia's lingerie shop on the first floor of the Lady633 building. The ADP finally dispatches two K-11 powered suits from a helicoptor to fight with the Boomer. After a running firefight where Leon's Road Chaser is damaged by the fleeing Boomer, the K-11's destroy the Boomer with point-blank machinegun fire, but not before the Boomer kills both K-11's and the pilots. At that point, Priss has been allowed through a traffic control gate by Nene, and Priss is given a speeding ticket when Leon refuses to cover for her. Nene's actions also get her in trouble with the Highway Patrol.
In the severly damaged Silky Doll, Priss suggests that the Knight Sabers go after Mason, who she blames for the recent rampage. Sylia won't allow it, and even squelches conversation on the possibility, because revenge is against the rules of the Knight Sabers. While the rest of the team are cleaning up the Silky Doll as best they can, Mackie takes Priss outside and shows her a new and improved motorslave, the Typhoon. After cleaning, Priss heads for home on her bike, but is distracted by a young boy, Sho, whom she apparently knows from her neighborhood. Priss takes a seat, gives him a hamburger to eat, and keeps him company while he waits for his mother to get home from work.
In the Genom Tower, a board meeting is in full swing. Quincy talks about the new Technologically Integrated City Project, a project which will rebuild some of the old sections of old Tokyo which haven't been rebuilt since the quake. Later, Quincy tells Mason that the reconstruction means creating economic strongholds for Genom. Mason indicates that the recently rampaging Boomers are his plan to drive down property values and to drive the residents out of the neighborhoods where Genom wants to build, and Quincy tells Mason that he would find another failure intolerable.
Some time later, Priss is spending time with Sho and his mother at Sho's birthday party. When Sho is off playing with the electronic toy that Priss bought him, his mother tells Priss about her dream of living with Sho in the country, where the air is clean. But the next morning, Priss wakes to find that Genom has purchased the land that she and Sho and his mother live on, and that Genom is not only evicting the residents, but demolishing the buildings without allowing the people time to remove their things. Immediately after finding this out, Priss loses her temper and attacks Mason and another of his Boomer bodyguards. Leon makes his appearance, obviously groggy, and after a couple of come-ons directed at Priss, again saves her from being choked by Mason's bodyguard by threatening Mason directly. Mason orders demolition to begin, and in an attempt to rescue what little money she had saved, Sho's mother is killed by falling rubble.
Priss naturally kicks over into revenge mode, and is about to go after Mason by herself when she discovers that the rest of the Knight Sabers are ready to go with her. Aparently they had heard that a certain little boy had lost his mother that morning, and with an inspiring comment from Sylia, the Knight Sabers take off for the summit of the Genom Tower. As ususal, Mackie is driving the truck which drops off Priss and Linna aboard their motorslaves. Sylia and Nene team up to jump up the outside of the tower using thier jumpjets rather than thier motorslaves. Engaged in combat, Priss and Linna make good use of their motorslaves to defeat several more of the BU-12B combat Boomers that the AD Police hasd so much trouble with in the beginning. Priss' new motorsave, however, has a slightly different control interface, which makes her combat a little more tense than it probably should have been. While Priss and Linna are dealing with the Boomers, Nene and Sylia start fighting it out with Mason, dressed in a powersuit of some kind, and his bodyguard Boomer atop the summit. After a surprisingly close combat between Sylia and Mason and Nene and the Boomer, Nene manages to kill the Boome and Mason is killed by Sylia, but not before he discovers Sylia's identity as a Knight Saber.
Interesting or Fun Details
- Priss actually shows a tender side toward people, specifically Sho and his mother, which is rarely seen.
- When Priss fires the rocket cannon from her Typhoon motorslave, the recoil from the beam mode literally blasts her back several yards and kills the BU-12B in a single shot.
- Leon confronting Mason says, in the english subtitled version, "Even a puppy can nibble and asshole like you to death", in response to being called a puppy.
- I'm not sure how Nene actually destroyed Mason's Boomer bodyguard atop the summit, but she did. It looks a lot like a point blank laser discharge, but it's not obvious at all.
- Sylia and Mason seem to either exchange memory or both have the same memories of hardsuits and Boomers as each other, as shown in the flashback scene between them on the Net.
- After the birthday party for Sho, Priss is walking back to her trailer when she pauses, and says rather wistfully "a dream...."
- This is the first time we ever see Linna not wearing her headband, when she's sprawled out at home after cooking Priss a dinner.
Episode Review Originally, I really particularly like this episode. I wasn't that impressed with the music, and the action, while fun, wasn't of the same calibre as Revenge Road, Moonlight Rambler, or Red Eye's. However, after watching this episode a few more times, I began to think that I wasn't looking at it in quite the right way, and Blow Up has been growing on me ever since.
First off, this episode is a lot like Born to Kill - it's a character episode with some action rather than an action episode with some character. What I mean is that this episode is mostly devoted to showing the viewer some of the inner workings of Priss and to presenting some social commentary while keeping the viewer's attention with action, pretty women in hardsuits, and comedy. Since I think that this is the episode's main purpose, I'd say that it succeeds and that it's pretty good for it.
The second reason that I like Blow Up is that that action is still a lot of fun, especially Priss' conflicts with the BU-12b Boomers at the end, and Sylia's combat with Mason himself at the end. In fact, Mason's discovery of Sylia's identity provides some very dramatic tension which doesn't completely go away after his death at Sylia's sword. After all, if Mason was able to discover her identity, doesn't that mean that other's might be able to, or might already know her identity? And if anyone doesn't think that there aren't pretty women in hardsuits, then why are you watching Bubblegum Crisis to begin with, or for that matter, why are you reading this review?
And the last major reason that I like this episode is that there are quite a few funny moments in it. I find Nene's battle with Mason's bodyguard to be downright funny, and I even find Sylia's rationalization of revenge to be funny, in a very black sense. Of course, Priss' complaining about Mackie not giving her the operating manual for her new motorslave and rocket cannon and her throwing a soda to Linna and Linna's subsequent reaction is amusing as well. There are other scenes which I enjoy for thier amusement value as well (such as Leon's come-on to Priss just as she's about to be evicted. He has such terrible timing....).
However, while I rather enjoy Blow Up, it's not my favorite episode. The depth of personal tragedy in this episode puts something of a major damper on it, and it's certainly not for everyone. The music is nice and generally fits the scene, but it's not as memorable or fun as Konya wa Hurricane or Mad Machine. Not only that, but the relative ease with which Nene was able to dispatch Mason's Boomer bodyguard was stretching things a little bit.
I guess that this episode is great if you want a more serious episode, but not the best if you want a "fluff" episode.
Character Development
- Priss: In Tinsel City, we are first introduced to Priss as a singer in a rock-and-roll group. Yet in this episode, we first see Priss blowing off a performance in Hot Legs because of the Boomer rampaging down near Sylia's place. This shows that, while Priss loves her music, she also has her priorities, and her friends and killing Boomers come before her music.
Priss also hates showing anything that even resembles weakness, as her disdain for accepting Leon's helping hand shows. This occured just after Mason's bodyguard choked her. Priss also finds doing chores to be a task best left to others - she refuses to help Sylia and the rest of the Knight Sabers pick up the Silky Doll, and she is obviously less than enthusiastic when she's doing the dishes for Linna later.
But most important, we see Priss' tender side in this episode. She cares for Sho when his mother isn't around, and she's the only person who Sho invites over to his birthday party. Not only that, but she shows that she has dreams just like Sho's mother does. The dreams may be different, but her admission that she has dreams at all is like a crack in Priss' emotional armor. Of course, the rest of the Knight Sabers know that she has that crack, but the viewer doesn't until this episode.
Ultimately, at the end of the episode, Priss helps Sho realize his mother's dream of living in h country.
- Leon: Leon shows his usual self in this episode, with a few changes and enhancements. First, we learn that Leon is an ethical officer. This was hinted at a lot in the first two episodes because of Leon's reactions to various actions that Chief Todo and others took, but until Leon refuses to cover for Priss' speeding ticket, the point to which those ethics go isn't really known. However, when Leon arrives at the summit of the Genom Tower, he also shows that he approves of the actions of the Knight Sabers, in this case the death of one Brian J. Mason. Mason had already shown himself to be power-hungry and dangerous to a lot of people, just the kind of guy Leon would love to see rot in jail, but dead is close enough.
We also learn a couple of interesting, if not necessarily particularly important, tidbits about Leon. First, Leon is not a morning person. Upon his arrival at the recently purchased Genom site, he indicates that it's too early for a riot and says so in a groggy tone of voice. We also learn that Leon's easy and practiced come-ons to Priss can happen any time that he's around her, regardless of the situation or location, be it Aqua City, a restaurant, or after she's been recently evicted. That also means that Leon isn't necessarily the most sensetive guy in the world.
By the end of the episode, a couple more things are apparent. First, Leon can be a very patient man when he needs or wants to be. Second, we learn that Leon is willing to let the occasional hardsuited vigilante go after Genom if it serves his purposes. He's willing to turn a blind eye to some things so long as none of his own people get hurt, but once a cop is hurt, he loses control and goes ballistic himself.
- Sylia: One of the more interesting things we learn about Sylia in this episode is that she's not willing to use the Knight Sabers' equipment for personal vengeance. Why this is interesting is that, even though images in Tinsel City and in this episode indicate that Mason was directly responsible for her father's death, she's still not willing to pursue personal vengeance.
But Sylia's willingness to overlook evil deeds by Mason ends when he is directly responsible for the death of Sho's mother. He's been responsible for the death of many other people before then, but proof positive was never really forthcoming. His indirectly causing the accidental death of an innocent and totally unrelated woman finally pushes Sylia too far, just as it did Priss. Sylia, however, feels the need to rationalize her act of vengeance by saying that "We're not doing this for you, but to save the Knight Sabers". Perhaps this is because she's the leader and must maintain her aloofness to the dilemmas of the rest of the team, or perhaps she feel's the need because she's supposedly above such emotional responses as revenge and hatred, but whatever the reason, Sylia manages to rationalize her killing of Mason.
- Nene: Here we are in episode three, and we're already way behind in character deveopment for Nene. Nene plays almost no role in this episode, with two exceptions. First, we are shown that Nene, like Linna, is selfish, but actually shows some selflessness when helping Sylia clean up the Silky Doll. Secon, when battle is raging atop the Genom corporate summit, Nene proves that she is at least vaguely capable of combat by somehow(and I'm still not sure how) defeating Mason's bodyguard Boomer.
- Linna: Linna really isn't developed at all in this episode, which after her major role in the prior episode, is probably a good thing. Time to relax and give some other characters a shot at the spotlight.
- Mackie: Mackie again shows himself to be a letch, but we learn something more about him in this episode - Mackie loves vehicles. It's not clear if Mackie was the one who rebuilt the Hurricane into the Typhoon, but his showing it to Priss reveals that he has at least some appreciation of vehicles. And Priss' comments that Mackie didn't give her an instruction manual on how to use the Typhoon indicates that Mackie had at least a hand in it's construction.
Episode Analysis There are a lot of issues presented in this episode, from hypocrisy to automation to power, but there is one overriding theme to this episode - Dreams, and how the hopes and dreams of regular people relate to their technological environment. However, I'll cover all the little issues first.
First, this episode presents the viewer with a picture of the internal workings of the corporate mind, specifically Quincy's and Mason's minds. Both of them are willing to sacrifice innocent people for the sake of their personal power. Quincy orders Mason to succeed in his acquisition of various tracts of condemned land in Old Tokyo, and Mason sets about doing so by releasing combat Boomers into those areas to sow destruction, chaos, and death, all of which have the added benefit of driving people out of thier homes, starting any demolishions early, and driving property values way down. It's the usual Machiavellian "the ends justify the means" belief that so much corporate and government culture has today. But the question is this: Is Mason's blatent disregard for human life any less disturbing than Quincy's hypocrisy with that regard? Mason is left by Quincy to be the fall guy, the man who gets his hands dirty, while Quincy stays high above the bloody plain and looks down, blithly ignoring the human suffering he knows he's causing. At least Mason does his own dirty work - he deserves only a modicum more respect for it.
In addition, the corporate culture shown in this episode is one which is willing to throw people out of thier homes for the sake of economics and "progress" I find it remarkably telling that the Genom tower is tall enough that it dominates the skyline of MekaTokyo. It's hard to see humanity as individuals from such a lofty height. All the better to manipulate them and sacrifice them as a Grandmaster would a pawn.
Before this issue, we never really saw the interior workings of a factory. We had seen research installations where the human beings outnumbered the Boomers and automated robots. But here we realize just how much of the world is truly run by machine. In the scene right before Sho's birthday party, we are shown the interior of a factory. All throughout the scene are machines. The only human being, and we're not even sure that it isn't actually a Boomer, is at a point where fine detailed work is done and decisions are made, and yet even there the human is more a part of the machine, only guiding a robotic arm which is doing all the work. This is an image of a world where the machines have not only replaced humanity in tedious and/or dangerous jobs, but a world where humanity is being reduced to the level of machines themselves. It's not a pleasant image, and it's not a pleasant realization.
A less important issue, but one which I feel should be mentioned nonetheless, relates to the Knight Sabers. I many cultures, women are portrayed as being more emotional but remarkably less violent. In this episode, the main women characters, the Knight Sabers themselves, are portrayed as being quite violent. Priss always portrayed that way, but now we see Nene and Linna, and Sylia too by the end of the episode, being willing to assassinate a man for merely damaging a lingerie shop. This is interesting because we rarely picture women as assassins, yet here the Knight Sabers are, totally committed to killing Mason for all the suffering he has caused. I do find some poetic justice that it's not Priss who kills Mason in the end, but rather Sylia, who has probably wanted justice for her father's death for a decade.
As I said above, this episode's main message is one of hopes and dreams. Genom is perpetually crushing people beneath thier ambitions, destroying lives both figuratively and literally without a thought for anyone but themselves. Genom was responsible for destroying the hopes of Irene in Born to Kill when they killed her fiancee. In this episode, Genom is directly responsible for not only killing Sho's mother, but also for the destruction of her dream of living with Sho in the country. In many ways, Genom's expansion is a metaphor for the demolishion of dreams by economic forces like greed, profit, and by the quest for personal dominion and power. MegaTokyo is a world where dreams are crushed more often than people are.
But there is something even more important than the destruction of dreams, and that's the fulfillment of them. Priss has dreams, and one of them is to be a singer. She has achieved this dream in many respects, as her continuing performances at Hot Legs attests. Sho's mother had a dream, and although she did not live to see her dream through, Priss was able to make it reality for Sho. At the end of the episode, Priss takes Sho to a building, perhaps an orphanage, in the country, just like Sho's mother wanted. While dreams may be crushed all around, there is always a reason to keep on hoping. And even if the dreams of the adults have been snuffed out, there is always the youth to keep the dreams and hopes alive. This is the purpose of this episode.
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Revised - September 21, 2000