The last battle ends, but was it a good end? How Evil is SSSS.Gridman episode 12?

SSSS.Gridman
Studio: Trigger
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Mecha

The Gridman Alliance continues their battle against the evil Alexis. Gridman and Gridknight continue fighting their enemies… I thought they got them all last time, but I guess I was wrong.  Anyway, Akane became a kaiju so that’s a thing that happened. Gridman didn’t really get a chance to fight her though. Anti did most of the work.

Anti tore the thing’s mouth open and freaking jumped inside of it. Oh, and it gets even better. Anti managed to rip Akane out of it, so that’s pretty weird. I was under the impression that the Kaiju body was a part of her. Then again Anti’s damaged eye doesn’t show up when he’s Gridknight. Oh, but it didn’t end with Akane’s defeat. Alexis somehow fused to her, becoming like Gridman. and then he proceeded to use Anti as a mop until Gridman arrived in his true form.

With Gridman’s arrival, the battle becomes an all-out one on one duel. Both sides seem to be equally matched and neither side seems to be making any progress. That is until Gridman manages to break Alexis in half. No, it’s still not over.

Alexis regenerates himself back to full health and starts to beat Gridman to a pulp.  With the battle, now one-sided, Gridman is pulling out all the stops but it just isn’t working for him. Every move he makes, Alexis just counters and this goes on until the point that Gridman starts leaking energy. Okay, now bear with me. This is when things start to get a little confusing. Gridman somehow figures out that his true power is to fix things and ends up using his new discovery to fix the city and defeat Alexis all with a single Fixer Beam… sure.

I just got to say that’s stupid and I love it. Also, that makes Gridman a bringer of order and life which means Alexis is the bringer of chaos and death. It’s kind of poetic if you look at it that way. But Trigger isn’t that subtle. So Alexis had to use Akane because he, himself, doesn’t have the power to create, only to destroy or steal things.

Oh, even though Alexis was defeated by the creation beam he didn’t die. He was only shrunk down into a cube thing to make him easier to bring back to the Hyper World. I should explain that too huh? The Hyper World is where Hyper Agents like Gridman come from. Alexis is apparently one too so he’s going back to be imprisoned?

And while we’re on the subject of other worlds, Akane is also from another world. So, I guess that explains her powers at least. But it’s a little weirder than that too. You see she’s actually from the real world. Yes, the one we live in. When I first saw the live action footage I may have overreacted a little bit. (Voyager: …A little bit?)

You see, there’s one type of ending that I absolutely despise and it’s the “It was all just a dream” ending. At first glance, this ending appeared to be just that so, naturally, after watching other emotionally charged shows, I got… a bit peeved. But after looking at it again (I can neither confirm nor deny that Voyager influenced that decision) there was one thing in particular that caught my attention. A certain pink case that Rikka gave her in the show is in her room. Also, the whole thing is just one big call back to the original series, so that helped too. I will say that the way it was done can be a bit confusing. That’s the biggest problem other than maybe needing to be a bit longer to develop things a little more. At least we got a pretty good ending though.

Overall I’d say this episode is about as Evil as a Villian (9). It’s been pretty consistent through it’s run. I can’t say that I hate any part of it but it did make me worry… a lot. If you have time, check out what Voyager’s up too. Well, that’s all I have for you today. Thanks for letting me waste your time, people.

SSSS.Gridman is on Crunchyroll.

Keep It Classy,
Evil Bob