Watching 'Astra Lost in Space' Episode 9

I will be honest: I was originally going to hold off on talking about the currently airing shows till the next anime season. However, now that I have seen the latest episode of Astra Lost in Space, that plan was thrown right out of the window. This show has consistently been throwing me for a loop, subverting my expectations, shocking me, and generally entertaining me throughly. And even by the standards of this show shocking me, this episode takes the cake.

As we are diving into the show at this point, here is a bit of context so that you know what is going on. A group of students are sent out on a school trip for a week. When they arrive, they encounter an orb that throws them thousands of light years into space. Finding an abandoned ship floating in space, they conveniently manage to find a path that leads them straight home. The show makes pit stops along the way at the various planets so that they would be able to restock on their supplies, and on each planet there has been a set of unique obstacles. Along the way they have been getting closer as a group of friends, so much so that after spending nearly three months together, they are closer to a family than anything else. With each episode that passes and the they learn about each other, they find that there are a lot of things that connect them to each other; and with each new discovery they get deeper and deeper into a larger conspiracy.

We start off the episode with the realization that not only are the adopted sisters Quitterie and Funi actually clones, but that all of the members aboard the Astra are actually clones—specifically, of the single parents that they had been raised by. This revelation is hard to accept for the characters, as such they show just how resistant they are towards this idea. However, the more they talk, the more they start to put the clues together that support this theory, and the more they start to agree that they are. This is an episode where almost everything happens on the main deck of the Astra, yet the interactions and what the characters are talking about was so interesting that I was riveted. In fact, I did not even realise that 20 minutes had actually passed.

Following this revelation, Kanata, the captain of the ship as appointed by all the crew members, goes to each of the members individually, and tries to comfort them in whatever way he can. This segment was wonderful to watch, as you get to see how the characters are conflicted, and how they are trying in their own ways to deal with the information that had been given to them. We stop short of Kanata talking to Aries because she is opening up to Polina, who they found on the previous planet, and who was also stranded in space.

The episode is titled "Revelation," and because we got through the heavy part, along with how everyone is dealing with this new piece of information, one would think that this was in fact the revelation. HOW WRONG I WAS!

During the final few minutes of the show we get to see the crew get ready to celebrate finding Polina. There there is the added piece of joy when we see that Zack and Quitterie come out to the crew and announce that they are getting married. The happiness that radiates from this scene is brilliant. Not only that, Zack managed to get the long range telescopes working, and so they are able to look ahead to get a picture of home. The wins keep on stacking up at this point in the episode. Then Polina enters the bridge, ready to celebrate, and she gets emotional seeing home again. Polina wonders why home is looking so different, why the continents are looking so different—naturally, someone from Earth would notice differences to the position of the continents, I suspected that she had been in cryosleep longer than first expected.

THEN THE BOMB DROPS.

She asks them what home is, and to what planet they are heading. They are heading home towards Astra.

I was blown away by this twist. Looking back, it was evident that they never said what planet it is, and naturally so. Home is home, especially when you are all from the same place. Now hearing this made me stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up, pace back and forth holding my head, and sit down again. Then decided that I needed to type this up, and put it out there so that I can find some way to calm down. My mind was completely blown. I was considering the possibility of parallel universes, or the idea of time repeating itself over and over; however the previous episode shut down any of these thoughts. This episode opened an entirely new can of worms. I am constantly blown away by how the show goes from strength to strength. So much so that this show has become one of my most anticipated of the week. I never would have guessed that there would be two huge revelations such as this in a single episode.

I actually cannot wait for the next episode to come out.