Sailor Moon Episode 42 - Sailor Venus' Past, Minako's Tragic Love

Once, a long time ago, I had this idea to try and come up with some clever title for each and every one of these episodes. That idea fell through once I realized the show already does that. That is, if your definition of clever is simply just stringing a long chain of words together to tell you exactly what that episode is about.

Kind of like what I'd hope to achieve, only way less satirical. Just another one of those coping mechanisms I'm not allowed to use because the creators beat me to the punch.

One of these days, I'll get around to posting something that isn't about this show, I swear. One of these days. Tonight is not that day.

Today's episode seems to be continuing the trend of things that really truly aggravate the hell out of me - 14-year-old girls dealing with boyfriends. Today it happens to be Minako's boyfriend. Some dude born in London.

Can I just give up now? Please? No? Oh god. We're doing this then. Okay. Oh dear god help me get through this. So according to the plot overview, some other girl comes in, tries to jack her man, and then turns into a butterfly.

... I'm honestly not making this up. She turns. Into. A butterfly.

Who gives a shit about her, I'm about to cry.

Because if I waited another 15 minutes (in episode time) to publish that, I might have already broken down and turned into a broken shell of a man by then.

It is night time in Tokyo, and the girls have broken into the arcade. Well, three of them anyway - Ami, Makoto, and Rei. What I don't understand is, why are they using this computer at this time? Is Ami's magical mini-magic-computer not good enough anymore, they have to break into an arcade to use one of their machines?

For that matter, why the arcade? Who would hide a computer system in an arcade? And how did they manage to get away with that, exactly?

Luna has many mysteries, none of which will ever likely be explained. Why? Because this is anime logic. That's why. It's just a thing, simply accept it as a thing because nobody thought any of this through at all. Outside of "well, this is a show for girls how can we appeal to them, who cares about rationalizing any of this shit."

Right. So the girls are searching for something, when suddenly Luna and Usagi show up, after having been looking for the 'doorway to the Dark Kingdom'. Which is not in a confectionary factory.

Oh dear god I am not even making that up either.

Now, here's my question: EVERY VILLAIN FREAKING TELEPORTS. So how does this work, exactly? However the plot needs it to, I suppose, with zero explanation whatsoever.

At least, that's what I say right before Ami reveals that monsters are coming in from the Dark Kingdom, and there has to be a point of entry for all of them. Oh, okay, so off-screen plot development? Right. That was great to know. Then they talk about how they have zero leads, and Usagi starts crying about being hungry, despite all the food she stole and ate at the place she just got back from checking.

So not only is she a total fatass pig, she's also a horrible human being who thinks nothing to stealing. Because as we have already noted, she is always constantly broke. Your princess is stealing food from the commoners. That is not my idea of leadership.

Finally, Minako and Artemis come back from... oh are you KIDDING ME?!

DID YOU SERIOUSLY... ARE YOU EVEN... AAAUGH!

Y'know, if I were an evil villain hellbent on world domination, I'm pretty certain I wouldn't be hiding my secret monster army door in a public bath or a bakery, because that would be idiotic. Besides, from everything we've seen from the other generals they can pretty much just conjure up whatever shit they want to and then immediately teleport wherever. Because that is just really convenient.

Though right as they get ready to go home, the computer goes weird and starts showing things. Like closeups of the sun. Then Artemis is all "I've seen this before" blah blah. Supposedly, spreading sun spots are occurring, just like when the Moon Kingdom was destroyed.

So... you're telling me the badguys are taking energy... from the sun?

... SO WHY THE HELL DID THEY NEED TO ABSORB ENERGY FROM HUMAN BEINGS THIS ENTIRE SERIES?!?!?!?! IT'S THE GODDAMNED SUN! IT HAS WAY MORE ENERGY THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

Right. Then Mother Brain starts getting electroshock therapy.

Just take a bunch of missiles and shoot it in the eye.
Repeatedly. Works every time.

Supposedly when the sunspots cover the entire sun, Metalia will be brought back to life. What do sunspots have to do with this at all? Is this something that will ever be explained? I mean, I'm no astrophysicist, but I am fairly certain that aside from some anomalous magnetic activity, sunspots really don't have very much effect on anything? So either they are causing the sunspots, or the sunspots are acting as a herald of some sort for her coming? How does that work?

The plan as it stands now is to have Metalia be revived, then jack the Silver Crystal and skip away into the darkening sunset. Then Kunzite drops a bomb: He's found someone that knows who Sailor V really is - a female Interpol agent, based in England.

Amazing how it only took you 42 episodes to come
to this conclusion. Shocking.

Then Metalia starts doing a glowy thing which freaks Beryl out, and Metalia says something about a man possessing the same wave of energy as she does? She must be talking about Mamoru Mask Endymion. Sure enough, she follows it up by giving him a dose of the Pink Floyd experience.

This makes me think of Black Hole Sun and I
have no idea why.

After that, Usagi wakes up from yet another nightmare and Luna lectures her about sleeping and all that, and she immediately begins stuffing her face with buns, and then starts choking after Artemis bursts through the window.

Do the cats care?

Not really. They just decide to sit around and talk about how Minako has gone missing, instead of the fact that their princess is choking on a steamed bun. Though she must not be choking that bad if she can keep screaming for water, before becoming miraculously cured.

And quite literally, nobody cared.

The story seems to be this: That Interpol lady called up Minako who then immediately vanished afterwards. Her name is Katrina, and seems that she thought she was dead. After learning she was still alive, she rushed to Tokyo, after hearing that she still transforms to fight crime and all that good jazz.

It's around this time she puts on the evil face and goes "so tell me about those other Sailor Scouts you run around with." Yeah because that isn't suspicious whatsoever. A request that is deftly avoided when Minako talked about some dude named Allan, and she shows her a picture of him with some other girl.

Despite the lady offering the (incredibly limited I imagine) assistance of friggin' Interpol, Minako is still firmly trying to stand her ground. Besides, it's not like non-magical folks have been able to deal with this up to this point anyways, odds are not even the mythical Interpol can really lend any help. After that, she tearfully runs from the room, and Kunzite shows up to pretty much go with Plan B.

Somebody is just a little bit impatient today.

With that he forces her to turn into a monster butterfly and burst out of the window after their target. Because this is a plan which has always worked before. Then she gets attacked by the magical butterfly lady who is threatening to literally kill Minako a second time. Cool. But we aren't even at the halfway mark, so what the crap is going on with the pacing here?

So she turns into Sailor Venus and prepares to kick ass a little bit early, and then comes the most idiotic thing I've seen all season.

Just. Just. Oh my god just stop already.

You already knew that Minako was Sailor V. You must have even known what she looked like before and after. Yet despite knowing all of this information, YOU ARE STILL SURPRISED THAT SHE IS ACTUALLY SAILOR VENUS?!?!?!?! Was not this entire plan hinging on the fact that she was one of the Sailor Scouts? I thought that was the whole point?

Oh my god people in this universe are literally too stupid to breathe sometimes.

So Papillion surrounds herself with magical butterflies and blocks her attack, laughing at how she already knows all of her attacks. Which again, how did you not figure out she was Sailor Venus?! Christ. Then she attacks her with the butterflies, pulling the young girl up into a very provocative-looking pose that insinuates total helplessness. As she looks down at the monster, she sees the locket hanging around her neck, and figures it out: She's Katarina. As if the whole "kill you a second time" wasn't enough of a clue?

At this point the plan is to torture her for the identities of her friends, but then Usagi plus cats show up on the scene.

I dunno, maybe the same thing you do every episode?

Luna has a better idea: Get on the boat. But Usagi has no idea how to pilot a boat! No worries, that's why we have a magical pen that immediately makes you into anything.

Including a sailor.

Oh my god. Please. Just stop it now, it hurts. It hurts so bad.

It's finally happened. We can all stop watching now.

Then the cats tackle butterfly lady, because clearly they are way more powerful than, I dunno, the freaking PRINCESS OF THE MOON KINGDOM. She gets dumped in the water, and Venus gets caught from the fall and they are now on a boat where Artemis explains how they found her. It wasn't very hard, they just looked for every hotel with a Katarina booked. Genius, that.

Sadly, this monster butterfly ignores the normal laws of physics, and just flies out of the water and catches up with the boat in no time. When we get back from the commercial break, the chase is on in earnest, but thankfully she can't catch up at full speed. So what's the plan? Why, to take shelter in a luxury cruise liner that's anchored nearby.

I don't know about you, but this seems like an incredibly
bad idea, given your enemy can FLY.

So they get up to the top, and look for somewhere to hide, and then their opponent finally shows up, but has no clue where they are. The girls go walking along, but there's nobody around, so it's the perfect time to start rooting around other people's past.

Six months ago, the Dark Kingdom was operating in London, and Minako went out there to go see what was up with that. During that time, she met and fell in love with some dude named Allan. Okay, sounds legitimate enough... except that she is near that very questionable age of why the hell is she travelling on her own. Or walking around with strange men late at night.

Anyway, she came across some dude with a little girl turning into a monster, while being chased by Interpol. Then she made her debut and fell thirty stories onto the poor guy's face.

RIDER KIIIIIIIIICK!

She saves the girl, the monster turns to dust, and Interpol lady becomes friends with her. Somehow, within the span of very few months, she managed to learn English. It must be very few because hasn't she been back in Japan for awhile now? Not even that, but they also managed to become the best of friends, and she was treated like a little sister and everything.

Dude, less than six months is not nearly long enough to develop those sorts of bonds. Because it was six months she'd gone to London... how long was she there before she met this chick? Then the whole 'dying' thing? Plus the time she's been back in Japan? Oh god why am I trying to rationalize this, it hurts.

Eventually, Allan and Katarina met, and probably started developing feelings for one another or something.

Well, one day, Katarina and V were all checking out this warehouse, and some dude drops a grenade in the room. Well, nice to know that even Sailor Scouts are susceptible to random explosives, right? The place violently explodes, sending Katarina flying into the ground painfully, and I have to wonder: Is this show trying to go grimdark on us suddenly? Because it feels like it is trying really hard to cross that line.

I'd have assumed she died too. I mean, that's a lotta fire.

Yet, amazingly enough, Minako managed to somehow survive and get away from the explosion with little more than scratches all over. Maybe a shattered elbow, I dunno.

Looking pretty good for surviving a grenade.

Then she sees Allan and Katarina, but before she can go out to talk to them, Katarina starts crying and Allan starts comforting her, which makes Minako want to do... nothing? Wait, your reaction to narrowly avoiding death is to not show up and be all "hey, I'm still sorta alive, woo!" but to feel bad because the guy you liked is comforting your best friend after being told you just died?

Even for teen-aged logic that just sounds utterly idiotic.

So because her best friends had mutual feelings for one another, she used the cover of being assumed dead to just vanish from their lives and limp back to Tokyo.

Look at that, we agree on something for a change.

Then the lights get turned on, and the monster shows back up, and Sailor Usagi is all "I'm in a bad mood", so she transforms.

Why she didn't just do that back when they were fighting before, I have no idea. I suppose that maybe Venus has had some time to recover, but she looks like shit anyways, after everything she's just gone through, so really what has been gained here? Sailor Moon says, screw it all, she doesn't care if the butterfly lady knows who she is, she is going to kick somebody's ass tonight and that is that.

Then the monster's arms turn back into blades and she starts zipping around, much to our heroine's annoyance. But hey, not like that's nothing we haven't seen before. She whips up an insta-win Tiara, and slaps that butterfly away, knocking off the necklace, which causes Minako to start crying again, which makes her ask Usagi to please turn her back into a human.

Isn't that what you've always done, though? But wait, are you seriously trying to tell me...

Oh come on, really now?

Oh but she stole your boyfriend? Who cares? For someone who wants to defend Love and Justice, you seem to have some very skewed views on what that really means. Despite her better judgment, she Refreshes the lady anyways, and there's a tearful reunion of the two now that everything is magically fine again.

Technically she is lady.

Then they all go back to the shore and meet up with the other girls, who just kinda look at Minako and go "well should we do something she looks kinda bad?" Usagi says, that's not the answer though, because Minako is far more mature than any of the rest of them. Probably because she went to London, had a one-way love, and got blown up and left for dead.

Yeah, sounds reasonable enough to me. That's a hell of a thing to go through. But really? Six months?

I don't think I'll ever get over that.

And just like the rest of the show, any emotional
attachments are dropped just like that.

I think the thing that really truly makes me sick to my stomach about this whole thing is that, by all rights, this could have been something good. All the elements are there, but now they are running into the complete opposite problem they had with the start of the show - the things that should be given the time are not being given that time, and the things that don't matter are being given all the time in the world. This could have been a nice little character arc if it had maybe been spread out across two episodes, maybe even three. Instead, it was all crammed into a single twenty-minute episode, and not truly given the attention it deserved.

There were so many missed opportunities here, hints at explanations of things occurring outside of Japan that are actually relevant to the plot. But just like everything else with the show, it is quickly forgotten or ignored, and instead we have to deal with forced melodrama.

So to sum up today's episode in a single word? Disappointment.

Maybe I could extend that to the rest of the show, but let me be honest here. I had zero expectations coming into this show, and as it stands currently, the show is pretty much failing to exceed those expectations. Every time it looks like it could claw its way up, they just go back and go "nah, nevermind, let's stick to the formula we had before."

What a waste.