Episode 8 – Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture

It’s become something of a tradition for me to start these reviews off complaining about how the week’s episode manages to completely undercut the tension of the previous episode’s cliffhanger. This week’s episode, “Ginto,” manages to avoid this by making the situation a bit worse before it gets better! Hooray! Plus, we spend a lot of time with Scissorman and Catherine, who continue to be the most engaging characters of the lot and plenty of cool Knightmare battles. My colleague Richard Eisenbeis, who has been enjoying the theatrical version much more than I have the TV cut, assured me that this episode was full of all the things I liked about Rozé of the Recapture, and he was not wrong.

So, why am I not happy?

I’ve put away my “lack of tension” drum for the episode, but there’s another one sitting right next to me called “piss-poor pacing,” and it is just BEGGING for me to bang on it. It’s nothing new, but I haven’t felt the issue this keenly since the second episode… which, now that I think of it, was also a prison break episode where characters conveniently bust through all of the guards’ defenses and reach their target in the space of a few minutes.

At the outset, things are looking bad for Sakuya. She’s in a birdcage-shaped glass prison cell, hanging from the ceiling via a harness designed by the world’s biggest pervert to emphasize her tits and ass. Scissorman taunts her via intercom about how they’ve figured her out, and they had to set up all this anti-Geass equipment (soundproof glass, microphones, cameras, and monitors? Don’t modern prisons have all these things standard?). They want to use Sakuya to use her Geass on test subjects, who will then be subjected to a bunch of experiments and finally dissected. He cackles with glee the whole time, and I really must recommend watching the dub because James Urbaniak is KILLING it with this role. The whole dub cast is strong, but he really shines here.

Scissorman works as something of a foil to Norland, who also shows up to utter a few syllables before leaving. However, I doubt the effect is what they intended since it mostly emphasizes how charisma-free Norland is. Rather than quietly menacing, he’s more or less a block of wood, occasionally breaking out of his routine of staring straight ahead to do something comically evil. His goals are completely opaque, and he rarely interacts with the main characters. He’s just… nothing.

In one of the episode’s most effectively horrific scenes, Scissorman presents Sakuya with a group of prisoners in straitjackets and collars and commands her to use her Geass on them. They all cry and beg her not to, and she doesn’t – they all know their eventual fates if she does. Scissorman, however, is not a man to be defied. The lights in the collar turn red, blood seeps from the bottom, and the prisoners are dead. They seem to have been decapitated with their heads on, but what exactly the collars did, we don’t know. It’s awful, but there are two problems with the scene: it’s intercut with scenes from the Knightmare battle, and once it happens, there’s almost no time to let the moment land and the prisoners’ awful fates set. Sakuya has a moment to contemplate whether she’s responsible, and the story immediately moves on.

Speaking of Knightmare battles! There are three going on! Ash versus a cyborg-ized Arnold, hearkening back to Jeremiah in R2; Catherine versus Haruka in a contest of speed and agility; and the Seven Shining Stars rank and file versus the Neo-Britannian forces. Supposedly, the three are all part of the same clash, but there’s so little sense of location that they’re completely disconnected from one another. They fight it out among featureless, empty gray city blocks, occasionally crashing into a building but mostly zooming around in the impossibly wide streets. There’s no care or thought into creating an interesting setting for a fight, no visual markers to make this feel like a place where people live. It’s just so… blah.

Haruka and Catherine’s fight is fun but has little bearing on the plot, so I’m going to focus mostly on Arnold and Ash. “Lavender” introduced the idea that Arnold treated Ash as a rival from early on, but Ash ignored him, and now his resentment from that, intensified by the time Ash almost killed him is infused into their fight. It’s a deft bit of characterization, giving weight and history to their relationship that is fully absent from other, more central character dynamics such as Sakura and Sakuya. Arnold mocks Ash for forgetting his real brother and the brutal way he died, allowing his memories to be rewritten by an imposter. Ash becomes confused, allowing Arnold to get the upper hand in the battle. Eventually, the two make their way to a riverbank, where Arnold pulls Ash out of his cockpit and uses his Geass canceller to force Ash to remember.

So… why did they need to torture all those people, including the freaky mechanical eye stuff, ultimately killing them, if Ash can just look people in the eye to negate it? Wouldn’t they be perfectly acceptable test subjects for Scissorman’s experiments? It’s not like their research was how to break a Geass since they’ve known how for over seven years; they’re trying to figure out how to create one. Pure malice isn’t an interesting motivation for a character like Scissorman, either. It seems to have been done primarily for shock value; it’s amazing how this show manages to find new ways to frustrate me over and over.

There’s a lot of fun stuff in the episode, but it’s so poorly paced that none of it lands. The subplots cut between one another without rhyme or reason, at times in the space of less than a minute. There are no interesting parallels or juxtapositions between what’s happening in one place or another, and no sense of continuity is built up. The episode ends with Ash pointing his gun at a restrained Sakuya, but I already know that he’s just going to shoot off her restraints because that’s the easiest resolution, and this show has never found an easy way out that it wouldn’t take..

Rating:

Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+, depending on your region.