Sidonia no Kishi Ep. 5: Can love bloom in the deep of space?

Only if you drink her goddamn piss.

Episode Summary
Basically, Nagate and Shizuka bond as they are helplessly adrift in our hero’s fuel-less Gardes.

Notes
• Man, the start of this week’s episode overlaps a ton with the end of last week’s episode. Shrug, it’s just kind of a downer to see that a couple minutes of a show you’ve been looking to watching is old content.

• Even though Nagate’s about to cross the line of no return, Kobayashi takes her leave anyway. She must somehow confident that he’ll succeed in rescuing Shizuka. If it were me, I’d stick around to see whether or not Sidonia’s most talented pilot would make it back to safety.

• This scene came out pretty nice:

The animation is not as smooth as it should be, but that’s the only thing I can complain about. Story-wise, it’s a familiar trope. Lovers constantly find themselves conveniently stranded in order for their relationship to develop. Most recently, we saw the same thing play out in The Pilot’s Love Song. Whether you’re stranded at sea or adrift amidst a sea of stars, it’s all the same.

• You have to question Nagate’s judgment though if he truly came for Shizuka despite his Gardes being so low on fuel. Yes, he’s the good guy, and good guys in these stories are almost always naively good, but c’mon, who would honestly put themselves in such a lose-lose situation?

• Nagate finds that he has to leave the confines of his Gardes once more in order to manually to open the “Higgs particle collection membrane.” As he’s doing this, I do have to wonder where the light source is coming from in this particular scene. There must be a star nearby, but you’d think the anime would’ve cut to it at some point just to let us know it exists.

• So during a conversation about combat rations, Shizuka’s breasts just happen to jiggle right in front of the camera. Oh, don’t think I haven’t notice all those conspicuous shots of the girl’s ass either.

• Damn, Nagate fell asleep fast.

• Aaaaand she’s naked. But there’s a good reason! She’s photosynthesizing! I just can’t help but laugh at the idea of a human photosynthesizing. But yeah, convenient way to get the girl naked in front of our hero. I have to question, however, if she really had to get completely buck naked. Sure, maybe just going topless isn’t quite as efficient, but would you really get buck naked around a stranger just to “eat” faster?

• Not that I want to see her breasts or anything, but it’s funny how Shizuka’s covering her chest even though she’s faced away from Nagate and he’s looking away from at her all at the same time. Why not keep your bra and panties on then if you’re going to keep covering your private parts? Or do they not wear underwear while they’re in those spacesuits? In any case, I know she’s covering herself for the sake of the “camera,” but story-wise, it just doesn’t make any sense.

• Talking about his grandfather, Nagate says, “He told me to do whatever needs to be done to survive.” I hope that includes pursuing a girl into the deep of space without adequate fuel to make the return trip.

• Hm, Shizuka doesn’t give Nagate a straight answer when he asks her why she became a pilot.

• On a more dour note, Sidonia seems to have left our two pilots behind.

• Huh, it only took Sidonia a week to remove the rubble from the disaster and return to normalcy? There are still questions about Sidonia that I would like answered. For example, what is the spaceship’s population? What’s the population distribution? What sort of manpower do they have in order to fix such a tremendous disaster in just a week’s time? I’m not doubting that it’s possible. It’s just that the story hasn’t given me the information I need to imagine how it’s possible. Anyway, we see shots of different locations throughout Sidonia, but they’re all conspicuously empty.

• Ichiro is one of the few adults in the story, and he seems to do everything from leading the control room to teaching the students history about Sidonia and the other seed ships. Again, I have to wonder how many teachers they even have on staff…

• We get a scene in which Lala, i.e. the bear-human hybrid, is arguing with Kobayashi. I know this is the future and thus anything is possible, including hybrid species. Still, it doesn’t make it look any less ridiculous that a woman is arguing with a bear. If Lala had perhaps looked a little less bear-like and more of a true hybrid between two species, I’d take the scene a little more seriously. She’s all bear, though.

• Wait, what? These two, along with someone by the name of Ochiai, are the last surviving members of an expeditionary force from six hundred years ago? Are they fucking immortal?

• Hm, we now get a little background information on how the Kabizashis actually work. I wonder why they waited until now to tell us about the spears and where they came from.

• Back with our two love birds, Shizuka advances a hunch that the Gauna are just trying to be friends with humanity. Well, they sure have an odd way of going about it… Still, we get some a neat shot of the first Gauna to ever be encountered:

You have to wonder why it was already humanoid in its appearance, but I have a feeling we won’t get the answers anytime soon. In any case, the idea that the Gauna is actually friendly but misunderstood continues to echo Ender’s Game. I naturally wonder again if the book had any influence on the creation of this story.

• I’m surprised Shizuka doesn’t feel more guilty about the fact that the guy’s doomed himself in order to retrieve her from her escape pod. I hesitate to say that he’s saved her considering their current predicament.

• The situation turns grim when the two of them run out of water. In fact, Nagate begins to suffer from dehydration, and there’s no other water supply aboard the Gard-… oh god, you’re not seriously going there, are you?

Why?

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

When Nagate’s health recovers, he points out that they might be able to filter water out of the mecha’s lubrication system or whatever, so they’re not really screwed just quite yet. Still, if the goal was to bond with a girl, you can’t get any closer than drinking her fucking urine. Yes, yes, her suit filtered her urine, uh huh, but we needn’t play dumb. She still blushed and everything, so don’t pretend as though there weren’t pandering elements to this scene.

• Then shortly after drinking Shizuka’s piss, Sidonia’s rescue team finally manages to locate our two castaways. Hah, what timing.

• Apparently, Sidonia doesn’t have enough room for 257 prisoners. I just can’t get a good picture of how big this society is.

• Too many boob jiggles, man. This ain’t Boogie Nights.

Closing Thoughts
Eh, it was an okay episode, notwithstanding the piss-drinking escapades.