Pluto: Episodes 7-8

November 10, 2023 11:47 PM - Season 1, Episode 7

Episode 7: Dr. Tenma attempts to bring Atom back at all costs. A government official advises a distressed Epsilon to evacuate since he's the next target. Episode 8: Professor Ochanomizu closely monitors Atom's erratic behavior. Dr. Tenma confronts his past and the truth unravels, triggering a world destroying threat.
posted by Alex404 (3 comments total)

Well we finished the series last night, and overall thought it was pretty impressive. Personally I like things when they're smaller scale and philosophical, so the hard turn into "world destroying threat" was... not exactly to my taste, but I think within the context of the show worked quite well. Overall I'd say... 8.5/10.

Some thoughts:
- Episode 7 was the first one where the structure of "let's learn to love this robot so we can murder him" left me feeling pretty impatient. Also it involves threatening orphans and a bunch of tropy stuff. It still ended up showing us interesting sides of the Epsilon character, and it was certainly a *twist* that he actually won the initial fight with Pluto. But from the high of the previous Episode where we side a widow-robot learn to process emotions, this one felt rather superficial. It was still good though... 7/10.
- It was the fucking teddy bear all along! I guess it's not really a surprise per se... I'm very bad at mystery shows. It did feel like Episode 8 was somewhat overstuffed with revelations... that being said it was still well paced. Apparently in the comics there's a bit more back story on "Roosevelt" (oh shit, I just realized "Teddy Roosevelt"), and how its egomania drove it to want to destroy the greatest robots, and the Bora project. I guess this might have been suggested in some of the previous teddy bear scenes, but I didn't really pick up on it. I feel like taking a minute to make this a bit more explicit would have helped.
- Similarly with the role of Thrace and its relationship with Roosevelt. The implications were clear enough, but having some of the main villains and actors only be introduced in passing in the final episode made it feel overstuffed compared the the more thoughtful structure of the previous episodes. I suppose on a rewatch I would catch the meaning behind the microscenes involving these characters... but I don't particularly love that kind of story telling.
- Again, I did prefer the show when the themes were personal/philosophical, but the show also did well by shifting gears into the cycle of hate and the wages of war. It wasn't particularly revelatory, but the messages were important, especially in these times. It was another interesting twist that Dr. Tenma thought he would wake up Atom with Gesicht's hate, but it was the fact that Gesicht resisted hate in his last moments that ended up saving Atom.
- I thought the whole, "I put 10 billion personalities into one robot" thing was rather silly, but the way in which dark emotions could wake up robots in a state of paralysis was quite interesting. Dr. Tenma is certainly something... I guess he deserves pity, but people seem oddly disinclined to hold his accountable for being a huge chaos agent.
- Did Atom make a plan with Brau1589 to have him kill Roosevelt, or was that something he did on his own?
- For some reason I was always a bit impatient with the show that we never really got to see much of Atom. Maybe this was just some weird nostalgia on my part for the old anime.

I guess I'm picking on the negatives a bit... for me the series didn't quite achieve what I had hoped based on Episode 1, but overall it was still pretty great.
posted by Alex404 at 12:33 AM on November 11, 2023

I think that Atom planned with Brau to have it take out the Thracian AI. I don't get how Brau, seemingly severely damaged and under guard could just go kill the AI. (I did like that it hadn't just killed a human, it had executed them. That sounds in line with how/why it took out the Thracian computer.)
I'm not a fan of having the enemy sacrifice itself so the hero doesn't have to, but I thought that it was well done here. It makes sense that a Pluto who'd lost his will to live would sacrifice himself.
Overall, I enjoyed it.
posted by Spike Glee at 1:27 PM on November 12, 2023

Overall: eh. It kind of collapsed into a singularity of dangling threads, plot holes, and unmet expectations. It was the Thracian AI all along? If Teddy Ruxpin could remotely control any robot around the world, apparently including Pluto, then why did it need Sahad? If Abdullah didn't know they were a robot, what was their plan? How did Hannibot Lecter, the Murderbot In A Maximum Security Prison That Anyone Can Visit At Any Time For Any Reason, get out and into the Thracian president's office?

But of all the dropped balls here, I think the most disappointing was the resolution to the Atom plotline. After building up the whole concept of how waking him could change him and might make him into a monster, he's just... fine. He's okay, everyone! He just needed a meaningful moment with a snail.

It was well directed and enjoyable, but I was hoping for something a bit more at the end, I guess.
posted by phooky at 7:01 AM on November 14, 2023