Dreadnought

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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I don't know what to say here without spoiling – this series isn't making it easy for me to write about it.

As bad as things looked last week – there were plenty of avenues that were easy to see for things to work out. Not necessarily easily, but possible. It's still possible now, I'm sure, but it's not easy to see how. There's so much distrust in the air that even people who need to be working together won't. In fact, everyone's going out of their way to make it more difficult and less likely to work with each other.

Well, almost everyone. Kris and Michiko seem to be acting like themselves – although, since we've met them their behavior has basically been summarized by “try hard, ask a lot of questions, and be somewhat confused,” I'm not sure that it's that helpful. The rest – whether it's internally imposed, or naturally occurring, doesn't matter – are stand-offish, distrustful, and taking steps to isolate themselves.

The carefully constructed peace is in grave danger – the questions that need to be answered are: who started and/or is continuing to orchestrate the events that kicked off this unraveling? Who is gaining from all of this? If the answers to these questions are discovered, does anyone have the ability (singly or as a group) to effectively push back? I have my suspicions, but I'll have to wait and see.

This was well done, and an installment that had to happen – but it's hard to really judge this until we get more of the picture. I liked it enough, I'm glad I read it, but I'm not sure just how good a job this episode did. But I'm looking forward to seeing where things go from here so have a better idea.