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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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| Unevaluated |
 Stretch
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[series:4399#628] | ||||||
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(Four episodes watched): This show was quickly looking good and may well wind up my favorite of the season, though definitely not because of the animation, which was a crude mix of conventional and CG (nothing like the illustration above). What was good about it was that it is genuinely funny and tells a strange but intriguing tale. The unlikely female protagonist, the totally impossible dilemma (an 'ultra high speed time/space displacement') and the dry humor all sort of reminded me of Read Or Die. A cast of eccentric, likable characters is assembled and they quickly get to work. As weird and unlikely as the problem they must solve is, they go about doing so in a believable and realistic manner (at least if you can believe Botan's skill as a disguise artist), which doesn't happen often. Botan is teamed up with Kuroma, a boy who considers himself 'the world's #1 secret agent' and resents having a strange girl as a partner. I'm surprised more thoughts didn't come to mind while watching episode one, but one thought was that this show was going to be a definite winner. As I prepared to watch episode two I figuratively prayed that it would be as fun as number one had been. But it soon became clear that my prayer was not being answered. Episode two seemed to make little attempt to be funny--there were only a handful of jokes, some of them rehashes of ones from episode one. I had been thinking that the humor was the best part of this show, but the message episode two was sending was that it would concentrate on action and intrigue. And the plot was painfully corny, too--a (black?) child pickpocket has gotten ahold of a Tesla Crystal, and he and his abusive father are miraculously redeemed by the efforts of Botan and Kuroma. Some other secret organization is after the crystal as well, but there's nothing eccentric and amusing about their personnel. The net result was that Tesla Note plunged from one of the shows I had the highest hopes for to one that I was wondering whether I should watch it at all. So, one good episode and one bad one. Would this series be mostly good with some bad episodes, or vice versa? I watched episode three in hopes of making up my mind once and for all--and got one that was better than number two but not as good as number one. During a break between missions Botan winds up using her ninja skills to deal with bullying at her new school. It was amusing but not really LOL funny, and it's hard to believe that a serious problem could be solved so easily in real life. I think this show will likely be a 'Watch'. The team is dispatched to Chicago when another fragment is detected amid a war between organized crime syndicates. They learn that they are not the only ones systematically searching for the fragments, since the CIA has a special team that is doing the same. This team's leader is the blond guy above, 'Mickey'. Some of the touches were sort of amusing but others were impossible to take seriously, like the way Botan and Kuroma's martial arts skills enable them to disarm submachinegun toting thugs without anybody getting seriously hurt. Last updated Saturday, November 13 2021. Created Friday, October 22 2021. | ||||||||
