Henshin Inspection presents Going Ultra. This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer.
Join me as I talk about Ultraman Blazar Episode 10, which is called Parent and Child.
Okay, so, I have to be honest and say I did not like this episode.
I have no idea what this episode's supposed to be about, or what's going on.
I don't understand what Blazar did with that golden cocoon, or whatever it was that he made out of his...
...prismatic javelin. I don't understand what's going on with Blazar becoming more active or activated when Ol' Gento's living or...
...Ol' Gento's doing nothing. He was watching the news or something at home, doing dishes, and then all of a sudden, boom, his eye glows, his left eye glows all blue.
Oh, that's the eye that's... cool. And then he is spilling stuff and whatever, and then multiple times...
...the Blazar stone is shown to be shining in space or whatever, and I guess Gento senses that.
It's even unclear what's going on visually. The visual language of the show, which is usually very clear, is not making it clear what's going on at all with Gento and Blazar.
And I'm a little confused by that. During the middle of the fight, Blazar was for some reason at war with himself.
Yeah. Anyway, he's stopping his hand, he's grabbing it, he's pulling at his head, jerking himself around, and at one point he's laying on the floor, which is in the thumbnail that I made for this.
He's on the floor fighting with himself, and I don't really know what's going on there. It kind of feels like an unintentional encapsulation of this episode,
which seems to be directionless or going in two different directions at the same time or trying to and not doing a very good job of it, and I really don't understand what's going on.
The only way that makes sense is if Blazar wanted to save the parent and child the whole time, and Gento didn't realize that, so as soon as they transformed, he started off attacking and trying to kill.
And then Blazar had to pull back, pull them, pull himself, whatever, back from attacking them and killing them.
Like I said, that's the only thing that makes sense, but I'm having to guess, I'm having to put that together, and I'm not giving a lot of clues, I'm just giving a lot of... not much.
Yeah, it was kind of strange, so I don't really get that. There's no story, there's no context, there's no explanation, so it doesn't make sense to me, and I want it to make sense.
If you can, let me make it make sense to me, because I just don't get it. It could have been interesting, but the pieces aren't put together.
If you want to look at it a little more closely, or look at the rest of the episode for the context, you have Gento with his family, his wife and his son, and there's a connection made between this kind of a parallel.
The Kaiju has a child, Gento has a child. Gento's child sees that the Kaiju is just protecting its baby. Blazar, maybe, I guess, seems to see that the child is just protecting... or the Kaiju is just protecting its child.
I don't even know, did Gento try to save them, or was he trying to kill them? Or was it the other way, was Blazar trying to save them or kill them? I don't know, it is very unclear to me, and maybe next episode in the beginning they'll talk about it or something.
But there's this dual nature thing going on. You also have in Earth Geron, Teruaki and Yasunobu. Teruaki in the back, Yasunobu in the front.
Their faces seem to be telling different stories. Yasunobu seems to be thrilled to be attacking this Kaiju parent and its baby, and Teruaki seems to have some hesitation.
So the two of them are kind of at war with each other. They are cooperating together and fighting in Earth Geron to kill this Kaiju, mother and child, let's just call it. And that kind of parallels Blazar fighting with himself over what to do.
But they're on the same page, I think, basically, in Earth Geron. So maybe that means that then Blazar and Earth Geron, or the GGF, are against each other and not going to see eye to eye and going to have conflict.
And the director, or whatever he's called, looks furious and it looks like he's thinking, I'm going to have to kill Blazar. Like, I will not let this thing, this alien thing, protect these Kaiju when I'm trying to kill them. He's trying to save them.
I will not allow that to be. The only good thing about that is that Blazar didn't actually have to fight Earth Geron in order to save the Kaiju. Kaijus? Is that what you say? Anyway, he didn't have to fight Earth Geron to save them.
But if he has to next time because he feels he needs to, or Gento feels he needs to, I don't know, then that'll definitely escalate the conflict between them.
That's kind of already been set up by him saying, you know, we don't know if we can trust this alien and this is more evidence that we can't trust this alien. But, so, like, is the episode about that? And if so, why can't that have been in some other way?
Just Blazar himself fighting with himself makes him look like an unstable weirdo, which I know I said deadly weirdos are my thing in my heroes, but like he looks really unstable.
And you could say like, yeah, we don't know if he's going to be a danger to himself or others and we're going to kill him before you can kill any of us. And that is a semi reasonable response.
So, like, I don't know, like, the people working on the show are not dumb. They...
My own baby Kaiju interfered, so I don't know where I was. Other than this doesn't really make sense. I could see overall for the overall arc of the show, this is setting up tension between Blazar and the GGF, but it doesn't mean anything yet.
And I don't know, I don't really feel like there was a beginning middle end of the story. I don't quite know how Gento's family factors into this.
And I don't know. I like the idea of Ultraman not killing Kaiju. I like the idea of Ultraman not always destroying them. Always killing them. That's the truth. Let's not play around. We're not children, right?
Even though we're watching children's television. I like what Ultraman Rising did. I like what Ultraman Z did with King Korn. I mean, what's the actual name? You know, he said the Korn Kovnik.
Anyway, you know who I'm talking about. Protecting that baby, especially in the last episode, or second to the last episode, where he was literally protecting that baby who...
Anyway, watch Ultraman Z. It's a great show. I like that. I think that's wonderful. I think it's beautiful. I love how in Ultraman Rising we got to see a different type of take on Ultraman, where yeah, Ultraman's here, Kaiju are here, they exist on this planet, there's a Kaiju island, and it seems like...
Hayao? Hayao is his dad, I believe. Ultra Dad. It seems like back in his day, in his heyday, he was sending the Kaiju away from Tokyo and back to Kaiju Island, somehow.
And so that means he was killing them only when he had to, or only when he failed to get them away. And it seems like Ken's probably going to do that same thing. After all, he helped raise Emi, and definitely defended Gigantron, or whatever her name is, Emi's mom.
And Ultraman Rising definitely seems to have a different take on Kaiju, and I think it's one that's needed, because I recently watched Titan Goji had a... I don't know, some sort of retrospective on Ultraman, just like an overall thing, and apparently Eiji Tsuburaya said that the Kaiju aren't evil on purpose.
It's that they're too big for this world, and it's not their fault that they're monsters because they're just too gigantic, and they can't really exist in this world alongside humans. And that's kind of something that... is it Yoko?
Yoko's the science girl. Yuki, I guess it's... no, I think it is Yoko. Yoko's the un-wrestling girl from Z. She tells Haruki at some point that basically kind of the same thing, like Kaiju are just too big, they just don't fit in this world, and unfortunately we have to kill them, and if we don't kill them they're going to kill all these other people, and I'm willing to take on that responsibility and do that hard job. Are you? And are you okay with that?
That kind of thing. Haruki was dealing... well, anyway, I won't go into spoilers, but that's something that she said, and apparently Eiji Tsuburaya himself made this very similar comment, which I'm sure Takuchi used for Yoko to express to Haruki.
But I'm... you know, maybe I'm galaxy brain, maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm thinking, but Tsuburaya, you created Ultraman. You're the father of Ultraman and all these Kaiju. If you don't want him to have to kill them, you don't need to make him kill them. You can set it up some other way.
You are in control here. You can make Kaiju smaller, you can make a different way for Ultraman to seal them, to put them away, to take them away, to put them somewhere else, but as far as I know, throughout the Ultra Series, that's never really happened, and that's why...
That's why, you know, I talk about being an author. I'm writing children's books right now that are magical bugs that battle monsters on a small scale, and I've even thought about doing like a Super Sentai Power Rangers type thing, and I thought, well, why do they always have to be giant? Why can't we have like mini-dabbles?
Because all the destruction of the city and things like that, while spectacular, and I mean that like it is a spectacle, like really doesn't make sense. That's why Angel Grove had the abandoned warehouse district, and you know, but like in Ultraman, we get to see all these buildings destroyed, and yeah, the people are evacuating or whatever, but like, that's crazy.
It really is crazy, and then that's why in Ark, episode three or four, where there was the guy who's a construction worker trying to build all these homes in this forest, and it sounds like, but dad, what about the Kaiju that lives here? And he's like, yeah, what about the Kaiju that destroyed the homes of humans? And these humans have to live somewhere too.
Like, that's a real good question. That's great. But at the same time, you're the creator of the stories. You don't have to have it go that way. And I'm thinking about Kaiju in my stories and some of my stories, and I'm thinking, well, I can do this a better way. I can do this a different way.
I can have Kaiju have meaning to the world, and I can have Kaiju make sense. Like, I can write a story where there is a guardian deity Kaiju of an area, and I can make it make sense, and I can have it work. And I would think that you would just make every Ultra series be in a different universe, or you're in a different whatever, and tell slightly different stories with them, justifying different ways that Kaiju can exist, and justifying ways that Ultraman doesn't always have to kill them. He can defeat them. You know, an exciting battle where he defeats them without killing them.
Conrad Forze. Conrad Forze. Conrad Forze did this beautifully. The original Conrador, he killed every one of those cyborg, I think. They were his brothers. They were innocent victims, enslaved to Shocker as cyborgs. Mindless cyborgs. Their minds were wiped. Their bodies were used for Shocker's evil purposes.
Their souls, if there was a conception of soul in the original, I don't know, were trapped in these bodies that were meat puppets to Shocker's evil will. And, like, Conrador Spirits talks about how...
Not Fujioka, that's the wrong guy. A Rider One, sorry, that's all I can remember right now. How he's, like, upset that he's got the blood of his brothers all over his hands. And Shin Kamen Rider even did that a little bit in the first scene where he is washing up in the cabin or whatever.
And I think that's interesting and beautiful. I don't think it's deconstructive in, like, you know, looking down on our heroes. I just think it's a different way to explore these ideas and explore this heroic media. And, like, yeah, for adults, killing people all the time, killing creatures all the time is fine.
But for kids, like, we don't want violence to have to be the answer. We don't want death and destruction to have to be the answer, right? So why can't you structure your story that you're making up anyway in a way that it isn't just, let's kill? And I'm not against... hold on. I'm not against things that are asking to be killed being killed.
And you can interpret that however you want. It's a reference from a book, George McDonald book, great book. The Princess, no, a Curdie and the Princess sequel to The Princess and the Goblin. And anyway, I think there's something to that.
And obviously there's a little bit of that ethos in Ultraman as well. So if you disagree with me or not, you're disagreeing with the show you like. Or if you disagree with me, you're disagreeing with the show you like as well. And we can have a larger conversation about that. But, like, it doesn't make sense. And I want to do better than that. And I'm trying to figure out a way to structure my ideas and structure my story so that it makes sense.
And I don't have to have this blood drenched hero, because you don't always need that. Will that happen sometimes? Yes. Does it always need to happen? No. As the author, you set the world, you set the context, and you get to determine what the stakes are and how those are dealt with.
And I just kind of see, like, the confusion, like I see some confusion in Ultraman generally, and like in this episode specifically. And maybe it's a commentary on the Ultra series and how it insists on, you know, Supro, Supra productions, insists on having kaiju who are like cute and marketable and people have little figures and dolls of and stuff like that.
You know, kaiju girls and whatever. Kids don't look at that one, okay? Anyway, like, there's like a schizophrenia, sort of. There's a negative duality where, yeah, we love these kaiju, they're so cool, and the Ultraman are so cool, but like, we have to kill them. Like, all we can do is murder these things.
And it's not murder, it's killing itself defense, but it's strange. It's just very strange to have that be the way things are and just be okay with it? I don't know. I don't think it's too simple. I don't think it's too complicated to make it a little more nuanced and to do things in a different way.
And I think I got interrupted with my Fourze tangent. Fourze had the ability to redeem the people who were forcibly turned into monsters, and I thought it was absolutely beautiful. And it's cathartic and healing, and it'd be great if Ultraman could do something like that too.
And maybe there's an Ultra Series out there where they do something like that, where people who are in distress or something are using a mind with kaiju cells or kaiju energy or whatever, and they become the kaiju and then the Ultraman defeats the kaiju and then turns the person to normal.
Like, if that's out there, great. I love it. Tell me what series it is, I'll watch it. But if that's not the case, if there's no series, then there you go. Tsubaraya, please take my idea. Please take my idea and please do something with that.
Anyway, I've gone on way too long. That's all I have to say for now. Until next time, folks, take care and keep being Ultra. And if you're not Ultra, get Ultra. Get on my level.
This has been a Story Over Everything production.