Mawaru Penguindrum – Episode 17

Last episode on Mawaru Penguindrum we got Masako’s sordid backstory.  It actually didn’t seem that bad!  I mean sure, she’s a member of the 1%, exploiting the hardworking honest members of society and engaging in destructive currency speculation to enrich herself at the expense of the global economy.  I guess when you put it like that, the various rapes and bombings committed by the other members of the cast don’t seem quite as bad.  She could be spending that money on helping  those who need it, not buying expensive poisonous fish and magic amnesia slingshots.  Let’s hope she gets her comeuppance in episode 17 of Mawaru Penguindrum.

…thirty minutes pass…

Himari sure seems to be thrilled to be reading a magazine about "Men's Tackle".

We made a lot of progress in this episode.  There are still a lot of things we don’t know about what’s going on, of course.  Apparently the diary isn’t even the Penguin Drum.  They’re looking for some other mysterious artifact of power, the diary is extraneous.  If they got the diary, they could alter fate so that the diary was the Penguin Drum, but who knows how many hitpoints that would cost?  It’s hard to do the math on how expensive it is to make something the Penguin Drum when you don’t even know what the Penguin Drum is.  The biggest hint we have is that it’s something of Kanba’s, and that the Penguin Queen was keeping it secret in front of Shouma. Probably then, it has something to do with Kanba’s incestuous naked kissing, or his back street dealings with the shady penguin people, or both.

Battle lines have basically been drawn in this episode.  So much for Tabuki pretending to be an innocent bystander.  So we have Yuri and Tabuki in one camp; Kanba, Shouma, Himari, and Ringo in another camp; and then Masako is her own disruptive force.  It would make sense for her to lose her battle in the parking garage, because that would cut the factions down a little, but given that she is taking a minigun up against a crossbow, odds are in her favor.  Which is good; she’s really starting to grow on me.

And then there is the pink-haired doctor and the Penguin Queen.  It’s hard to tell what faction they fall into.  The pink-haired doctor seems right now to be lending his aid to Kanba and the others, but perhaps what he’s doing is more like exploiting them? The Penguin Queen is aiding both Masako and Himari; maybe in a more perfect world those two factions would be allied, could collapse into one.  But Kanba is being stubborn, and refusing to let Masako help him, and turning to the pink-haired doctor instead.  This might be the source of a lot of strife down the road.  The pink-haired doctor doesn’t seem like a good guy – he’s electrified by the thought of starting wars, and by the thought of people killing each other over their misguided notions of truth.  Which might be in character for a God of Death, but then, to hell with Gods of Death.  If you wanted to be a good guy you should have been a God of Happiness, Flowers, and the Better Nature of Humanity Made Manifest.