Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

If anyone is interested, I'd thought that I'd bring up the fact that on youtube, someone has posted clips of Ultraman: Towards the Future (mainly the climactic fight although in the first episode, either five or six, and the last episode, the person posted up the whole thing).

You have to type Ultraman Great in order to get to them.


Just thought that I'd bring that up.

I think this would be my least favorite Ultra series, were it not for The Ultimate Hero.

And, thanks to the magic of getting stuck late at work, I had time to fit in one more episode tonight. Actually, I would have had time to watch several more, had I known at the outset just how long I'd be sitting in this edit bay...

Anyway, episode 9, The Biospherians, was another step-up. The show definitely got better once it dropped the Goudes arc and moved into more standard, original-series-style one-off monster stories.

The frustrating thing is that the Goudes storyline was exactly what should have made the show work. It was a unique concept, and offered a thematic core and the potential for a lot of good character dynamics, but they completely wasted the opportunity.

I probably won't watch any more until I come into work on Monday. Hopefully, it maintains this level of not-too-bad...

Alright, I watched the final four episodes at work yesterday.

Tourists from the Stars was pretty bad. As with a lot of episodes, there was some interesting conceptual stuff, but it all had to be rushed, and in this case the result was that the emotional content for which the episode was striving felt completely unearned and that leads to utter cheese. And Ryugolo is the worst looking Ultra monster I've ever seen, bar none.

The Survivalists should have been a really good episode. It had some of the strongest ideas - including the moral conflict over how to deal with the monster - but was another case of the story just not being conveyed effectively in the runtime allotted. We dive in with too much already going on, and leap from point to point without any of the required connective tissue. And, as with a couple of other episodes, the ending is an ambiguous cop out.

The two final episodes were probably the best of the series - for what that's worth. By spreading the story out, they were able to give it a much better pace, and devote at least a little more exploration than usual to the concepts at play (although still not enough exploration, particularly in the final leg of the story); and, as the series went on, it the acting definitely got a lot better, so there are relatively few cringe-worthy moments in these final episodes.