Review: Rocket Girls episodes 11 & 12 (completed)

Okay, now I'm irked. Episodes 11 and 12 continued to deal with the big space mission done in conjunction with NASA. That's fine. Seeing the girls go out into space without pre-breathing, I can handle. There's nothing overtly wrong about these episodes, until the final fifteen minutes of 12.

Okay, there's going to be spoilers after this point - but... well, tough.

Anyways, onto the spoiler material, the big conflict here is that when their capsule returns to earth, it will burn up during re-entry, killing both the girls because they're too high. That's good, solid science - the Apollo missions had to deal with that (a fact that the show lets you know). And they come up with a solution about bouncing off the atmosphere a few times to slow themselves down. Makes sense.

So, for whatever reason, they don't have a laptop with notepad in the computer, and nothing to write with, so they give the rentry vector to Askane to memorize, which she does. But, it seems that everyone forgets that Askane loses consciousness at 4g's and the rentry maneuver is to be done at 6. Well, everyone but the audience that is.

Well, the rentry doesn't show the final few moments, just Yukari letting go of the control yoke, and then they cut directly to the Director talking about the girls.

Which left me wondering, are they dead?

It's a cheap ploy, and one that I can only guess they put in because they had to fill an extra ten minutes of air time, and well, who knows. It was just a very disjointed ending. The series would have been much better served with something different. Something less, serious.

And it was as I feared, they did start taking themselves seriously towards the end of the anime.

The other thing that frustrated me is that it was so short. I guess I can understand - after all, there's only so far this gimmick can run, but I kind of hope for some OVA (direct-to-DVD) episodes in the future.

Especially, if they don't take themselves seriously. My suggestion is that this would be a fun anime to watch once or twice, but beyond that I can't see a real reason to own it on DVD.

Episode 11 & 12 get a 2.3 and 1.8 out of 4 while the whole series gets a 2.6 out of 4.