That thing came from that backpack. WTF.
TAAN: Well, it’s been far too long and I’ve accumulated too many episodes missed, and I’m too lazy to look at all the eps again and divide them, so I’ll just treat it like one big ep. So yeah. WALL OF TEXT GO!
Basically, everything starts with the find of some mysterious metallic objects on Nega Earth. After that, this giant metal thing appears, and every QEX mission ends up being interrupted by it. The thing is like some crappy retro sci-fi alien thing, or at least it looks that way. The strange thing is it’s made completely out of positive elements, which means it’s some kind of super QEX, so the colony team names it the neo-QEX. They renamed it later, but I forgot what it was.
This thing’s weird in that it oozes from the ground and then solidifies into this giant thing with laser tentacles, and then chases everyone using electromagnetic senses. It shows the capability to absorb positive elements from QEXs and integrate them into its own body. It only did it once though. At first, it’s completely hostile, attacking on site without provocation, but later, it appears suddenly to shoot sound waves and then disappears right after. In the latest episodes, both teams decide that the sounds were some sort of communication and try to respond back. It seems to work, but it goes off and eats Hannah and Homi fairly randomly, then retreats to an underground magma chamber, where it gives them strange dreams and then spits them out above ground again. maybe it was a form of direct mental communication or something? Well, it’s going to be explained later anyways.
In the latest eps, presumably using the data it gained from the two of them, it now appears to both teams as their respective absorbed teammate. Ren tries to shake hands with it, but he and Homi get treated to some really trippy stuff. Chihara doesn’t initially, for whatever reason, but by the second time they have contact randomly at the bottom of a pitfall, she does. That time though, they don’t meet up with the metallic whatever, but instead what looks like a mob of humanoid magma things, and talk through tentacles. Or something. It leaves them with a mysterious object.
There’s also this new backpack thing that Tom invented, which stores a large amount of these things that can transform into stuff, somehow. Basically, they get a bunch of personal transports that fit in a backpack. It’s so ridiculous though, I mean that one thing can create 2 types of ground vehicles, a submarine/subterranean laser driller, and a flight pack. And Juno copied it all just by looking at it so the Earth team has them too, and they have a flight pack as well. Also, it seems their elebiles are getting new weapon types (I wonder if the game will have this…). This anime’s getting far too ridiculous.
There’s also stuff happening within the ranks of the colony’s heads. The neo-QEX seems to give them clues about how the element dematerialization and stuff related to it works, so they want to pursue it. However, Hannah’s father has some kind of unknown ulterior motive (possibly regarding Mars) and wants to destroy it, or at least get all its data for himself or something. It also turns out Hannah was “manufactured” and therefore extremely good at everything. It seems Homi was too, but he was defective so they hospitably ditched him on Earth. According to a DNA test Homi did in secret, they’re likely to be siblings of some sort.
We also get a look at what happened in the past via Dr. Carr’s commentary of the whole element dematerialization event. Apparently, no one was able to get anywhere for years after the first loss of elements (2027, IIRC), until they randomly found a portal, which they designated AA-1. Even with the portal, no one knew what to do with it until Dr. Carr touched it as a dramatic gesture or something. She activated it and saw -something- which was apparently very important. Later, people began doing research on its teleportation properties until they got to the present.
Dr. Carr got ousted somewhere along the way, but she was driven by whatever she saw to continue researching, and searched for a second portal. She eventually found the one Ren’s team uses when she was pretty old, apparently, and something weird happened, creating portals in the brains of children across the world. It was then by design that she gathered Ren, Chihara, and Homi and made them element hunters. As for her true purposes, it’s still not revealed. What is revealed is a bit more on the dimensional filter lobe thing, or something. Apparently the portals in their heads create a “meta-brain” system, which grows with the portal use (aka getting positive elements from QEXs), which for some reason is good. As for the dimensional filter lobe, it determines how well you’ll be able to use the portal. If you don’t have it, you can’t go through, and if it’s not developed enough, you won’t be able to perceive anything of Nega-Earth.
The final important thing that’s been going on is that the element dematerialization rate has increased, and directly affects both Homi and Chihara in the form of their parents getting hurt. This somehow causes Ren to mature into someone who actually thinks and has good insight, but doesn’t really do much for Chihara. Also, I’m right in that it looks exactly the same as when an Alter user absorbs local materials to form his alter. Epic crossover maybe?
TAAN: At this point, it seems like it’s going away from just plain element huntingness and instead getting into an actual plot. It’s actually interesting, which although surprising, is not unexpected. I just wish it was like this earlier, cause most of the first season was pretty lame.
Because I’ve decided to go back to point systems, and also because I don’t want to go through every ep covered, I’ll give the whole mass of 8 eps a 8/10.
