The “Last Exile" Diaries

I first watched Last Exile back in the early 2000’s when it was on Anime Unleashed on TechTV (even before it became G4). I thought I had watched the whole show, but when I thought back, all I remembered was a bunch of scenes of Claus, Lavie, and Alvis being suddenly interrupted in the middle of a conversation by the commercial break bumper, and then a really loud commercial for The Screen Savers or some sort of credit adjustment service. Now that it’s on Crunchyroll, I figured I’d revisit it, especially since I’ve heard it gets really good later.

Thoughts on Episodes 1 - 8

Last Exile might get really good later, but my goodness, does it start out slow. The story pacing for the first eight episodes feels really strange. First we spend two entire episodes watching this huge ritualized airship battle while the main characters, Claus and Lavie, try to deliver a message to the airship fleet’s commander, Duke Mad-Thane, from his wife and daughter. After this, the pacing suddenly becomes really fast. Claus and Lavie return home and then, during a vanship race, run into a dying pilot, Ralph Wednesday, who hands off a little girl named Alvis to them for delivery to the Silvana, a legendary ship captained by Alex Row, a tall and dark man of few words with a cool cape. Claus and Lavie’s home is destroyed by star-shaped ships from the mysterious Guild, and they run away and manage to deliver Alvis to the Silvana, but then aren’t confident in how she’ll be treated on board and decide to force their way onto the ship to see her. The ship comes under Guild attack and Claus impulsively asks to be allowed to take out one of their specially modified vanships that has a machine gun, where a Guild noble named Dio observes him with interest and eventually goes out to fly against him. Lavie passes out from the g-forces of one of the crazy maneuvers that Claus goes through to evade Dio, so Claus isn’t able to shoot down Dio because he’s out of ammunition and needs her to reload. Finally, after the battle, the Silvana docks at a floating casino and Lavie and her new friend Mullin Shetland, who helped her and Claus back on Mad-Thane’s ship (the Claiomh Solais, just like the wand in Little Witch Academia) in Episode 2, ends up clashing with the captain of another ship called the Goliath, which brings them into a ship-to-ship duel that the Silvana easily wins, despite the Goliath’s attempts to cheat.

Whew! After the really slow first two episodes, the pacing for Episodes 3-8 goes breakneck, and you just sort of get swept along by it. That means the show stays exciting and made me want to keep watching, but at times I was really unclear on why things were happening. Claus almost seems like a stoner most of the time; he’s half-asleep, barely reacting to anything, doesn’t seem all there, and yet he very suddenly develops a deep and abiding attachment to Alvis, to the point where he risks death and gets the tar kicked out of himself all so he can see her and make sure she’s being treated well. Lavie at first is the more sensible voice of reason, who advises caution, but after acting standoffish towards Alvis, she also suddenly decides that she really wants to get on that ship and find out what’s happening. It also isn’t clear why the mechanics crew decides to beat the crap out of Claus when they later suddenly decide to be kind and helpful. (Tatiana’s influence, maybe.)

I do understand why it’s written like this. The writers needed to set up the world, which is actually pretty complicated. So far it seems like each nation has a ruler, with nobles who finance gigantic airships, and they go to war with each other, but the Guild, which seems to have highly advanced technology and live in the upper atmosphere, prescribes a set of rules for warfare. The nobles also live on floating cities, and the commoners all live down below on the ground, where it’s apparently hard to find good water or decent food. (Though Claus and Lavie’s food looks fresh enough.) The first two episodes are mostly setting up the world by showing us a battle, the rules, the Guild allowing infractions of the rules for mysterious reasons, the Anatoray nobles’ suicidal devotion to chivalry, and other foundational concepts. And with Episode 8 finally stopping and giving us a chance to breathe, I’m hoping we’ll get to learn more about the characters at a slower pace and maybe get some insight in hindsight on why they did certain things that they did.

Aside from the story, I absolutely love the art style. The CG used for the ships is really terrible (I’d like to blame the show’s age–it’s from 2003–but the CG in Fate/Zero looked just as bad, unfortunately). But I loved the steampunk art design and the sepia tone over everything that makes it look like an old photograph. There’s an artist named Range Murata who worked on this that I used to be a huge fan of, and now I remember why. Last Exile is from the early digipaint era, and some of the shows from that era look really awful today, flat and garish, as if they were done in MS Paint. Even Love Hina looks pretty bad compared to more modern shows. But Last Exile, like Haibane Renmei, overcame the pitfalls of early digipaint with an amazing art direction.

Episodes 9 - 14

Things continue moving at a fast pace in these episodes. Claus and Lavie enter a vanship race where they have to fix up a wreck and fly it. Dio enters just to fly against them, but through a series of circumstances he ends up on the Silvana with them just messing around. Lavie decides that she can’t be Claus’s navigator if he’s going to fly a fighting vanship since she doesn’t want to be involved in such a thing, and retires to join the mechanics group. Meanwhile, Alex Row enters into some intrigue against Dio’s older sister, Maestro Delphine, and bids in an auction on a relic known as the gate to EXILE, one of four mysterious items known fittingly as mysterions. Someone threatens his life over this, and he just barely makes it back to the Silvana with the gate.

The emperor of Anatoray demands that Alex surrender Alvis to the captain of the Urbanus, but Alex refuses, so they fight. Meanwhile, a little drama is going on between Claus, Tatiana, and Tatiana’s best friend and navigator Alister, who is getting disenchanted with Tatiana’s constant grumpiness. (She really is a grump.) Alister volunteers to be Claus’s navigator when Alex picks him to fly escort on a parley mission to the Urbanus, and Tatiana gets her back by picking Claus as her navigator during the battle. They end up crashing their vanship in the desert, and we find out that Tatiana graduated top of her class from the military academy and has apparently been lying to her parents about what she actually does, telling them she’s on a normal ship where everything is hunky dory instead of a weird black ops rogue ship that seems to be working to overthrow the government and establish a new world order.

Meanwhile, Lavie has a flashback while lying unconscious in bed, showing us how she and Claus learned to fly from their fathers. Claus’s father was a noble who decided he liked slumming it with the ground peeps, and came down to live next door to Lavie’s dad, who looks like someone you’d find in a sports bar yelling about the Browns on a Wednesday night. They were tasked to deliver a peace treaty to the Disith, but were killed. The episode hints that the Guild killed them on purpose so the war would go on. It also hints that Alex Row knew them and that he was the one who gave Lavie the goat toy that she later gives Alvis.

The show is still refusing to really explain anything, and the shine is starting to wear off. I’m still with the series at this point on the strength of its world, but I’m finding the characters are underwritten and the air battles aren’t nearly as exciting as someone thought they were. I had a rough time with Episode 12, where the Silvana and Urbanus fight for the entire episode. Every battle pretty much comes down to ships rendered in terrible CG flying around a snore-inducing sky filled with grey smoke and fog and clouds. Too often, the show substitutes vagueness for real story and character dimension. Even though Episode 13, which is just Tatiana sleeping in the desert having flashbacks and feeling sorry for herself while Claus actually tries to get them out of there, doesn’t tell us a whole lot about Tatiana; it just gives us random tidbits of her life before the Silvana, without enough details about the world to really understand the import of most of them. The show keeps on doing the same thing with Alex; everything he does is cloaked in a guise of mystery, and yet people keep following him blindly while he does weird, self-destructive things with no explanation. Someone on the writing staff seems to have thought they could make contrived backstory dumps more subtle and interesting by making them incredibly vague, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

The relative bright spot when it comes to characters is Dio. He at least is fun to watch, and mysterious in a more organic way, because of his weird behavior. Lavie, who was my favorite of the earlier episodes, has pretty much been demoted to side character. These two are the only characters with real panache. Claus is lifeless as a lead; he’s constantly half asleep, drifting through life without really driving the plot forward, no magnetism or ambition or determination or anything else that would make him interesting to watch. Tatiana is constantly grumpy for no good reason, and Alex is always being mysterious with his awesome cape. Personally, I think Mullin Shetland should’ve been the lead. He’s more lead-like than Claus is.

I really wanted to see more episodes like Episode 8 going forward. That episode was a lot of fun, showed us more about the world, and let us get to know Lavie a little better as we saw her unleash her rage and break a chair over a guy’s head. There haven’t been any more episodes like that. I’m still sticking with the show. 26-episode shows almost always start to drag around this point, near the Episode 12 - 15 mark. Little Witch Academia, which I loved, started to drag around this point. Evangelion had “Weaving a Story”, aka the most boring clip show imaginable, around this point. The problem is that those shows had some amazing self-contained episodes in the first half, like “Orange Submariner” for Little Witch Academia or “Both of You Dance Like You Wanna Win!” for Eva, that were great character episodes or interesting story concepts or just really funny. Last Exile has been a bit of a slog up to this point. I still don’t feel like I know any of the characters, except for Lavie, a little. It almost feels like the show is so eager to get its continuous plot out that it breathlessly charges forward and never stops to let us really feel like a part of the proceedings. I’m still giving it a chance for now, but the shtick is starting to wear thin. If it doesn’t start to pay things off within the next few episodes, or at least hint at how it’s going to eventually pay things off, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stick around.

Episodes 15 and 16

In Episode 15, Claus returns to the ship and everyone assumes he and Tatiana had sex. Lavie can’t look at him and won’t talk to him because, as is becoming increasingly clear, she’s in love with him. (Hoo boy.) Tatiana becomes all lovey-dovey and starts blushing and looking away whenever someone mentions Claus, the exact opposite of how she was before. (Kuudere.) Alex comes clean with Claus and tells him that he knew their dads and their vanship was actually his vanship, not their dads’. Sophia, the motherly first officer, is revealed to be the princess of Anatoray, daughter of the emperor. She is called to take back her position and tries to get Alex to ask her not to go, but he doesn’t care and tells her to leave, so she does. Before she leaves, she randomly kisses Claus on the lips (isn’t he like twelve years old?). We are also informed that Disith has fallen. I think the weird scene at the end of Episode 13 where sticks fell out of the sky was supposed to represent the fall of Disith.

In Episode 16, Sophia returns and becomes princess again. Her father tries to kill her, but her guardian, a former Guild member, stages a coup and kills the emperor first, allowing Sophia to take the throne with the support of the former captain of the Urbanus. They fight off the remnants of the Disith fleet, and the Guild decides to destroy Anatoray. Meanwhile, Alex decides he’s going to go off and kill Delphine finally since she killed his girlfriend / wife Euris, who it seems was also a princess. He gives Claus a chance to leave, but Claus says he’s saying. When he tells Lavie she should leave, she says she’s also staying, because he is.

I said last time I was going to stick with Last Exile, but I honestly don’t think I can do it anymore. The world and art are still amazing, but I can’t beat around the bush anymore: the story structure and character writing are absolutely terrible. I’ve given up the idea of the show actually becoming good; its sins run too deep at this point. The show keeps on dumping all these major events on us in quick succession without motivating any of them properly. Making Sophia a princess all of a sudden comes off as a bunch of writers who have no idea what they’re doing and needed something to happen so they could fill up another 12 episodes. And that’s how everything that happens in the show comes off, at least the things that aren’t needlessly mysterious. Now that we know what Alex’s motives are and what he plans to do, all the mystery seems totally wasted, because what he wants to do and why he wants to do it isn’t interesting enough to warrant all that mystery. If the Guild had actually been set up as a real power, that might have helped, but we know pretty much nothing about them except that they have advanced technology and white hair. We don’t even know what they supposedly did that made Alex hate them.

The way the characterization was handled in these two episodes was inexcusably clumsy. There was no slow build of respect from Tatiana, no decision to start treating Claus a little better; she goes straight from scorn to sopping puppy dog eyes. Since we’ve never seen any kind of relationship between Sophia and Alex, his refusal to ask her to stay has no weight. We don’t know what he’s denying or throwing away by letting her go. We have no idea what they’ve shared or suffered together, what their history is, and so it means nothing that Alex lets her go to us, because their relationship is nothing, and he’s not giving up anything. Subjectively, I also found the payoff incredibly uninteresting: all the female characters are in love with the male characters, and the male characters are oblivious. So we’ve spent 15 episodes of boring air battles and badly motivated plot happenings, watching a lifeless protagonist with no charisma, and in the end what we get is the first five minutes of every harem anime ever. This isn’t something they can just recover from by throwing in a flashback later. You can’t flub what should be large, profound moments in a character arc like this and then make them suddenly work by filling it in later. It doesn’t seem like they even intend to; the summaries of the next few episodes sound like action episodes, with Sophia and her fleet helping out Alex in his fight against Delphine.

I’m trying to remember where I got the idea that this show was good, and it’s not coming to me. If this was the first anime I’d ever seen, I might be transfixed by the art alone, but even that has its warts, with the awful CG ships mixed in with the 2D animation. The only character I was ever interested in was Lavie. I liked her spunk and her slightly cynical attitude. I liked being able to relate to her frustration in Episode 8 at the constant escalation of events. We’ve lost that at this point. There’s no one I can identify with, not even at a general human level, because everyone’s emotions change on a dime, no one has a clear motive for anything they do, and Sophia is suddenly making out with Claus. The story just keeps galloping along, and there are too many times I find myself asking what the hell is even going on. That makes it a struggle to get myself to watch this show anymore. I don’t think I can do it. I’m dropping the show.