Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-24993958-20181026055523/@comment-25936766-20181031033044

Ok, finally got a break from college and found the episode on an anime bootleg site. Finally watched the episode. It overall felt good. Part by part my thoughts are:

1) Had fun moments, though the "standing around and talking" parts were not as fun as the one at the Mistral Central Station that was shown in the IGN clip.

2) The Manticores are freaking jobbers. Appearance-wise they look comparable to Alpha Beowulves or even Major Ursas, but they go down easily and inconsistently. In some shots they take a couple of hits then die, in others they die in a single hit, and there's no real indicator that the hits in the latter cases are any stronger than in the first cases.

But overall they still go down like mooks despite their Mid-Boss appearance. Which is sad. But not as sad and disappointing as the Sphinx. It's worse than the Nuck (granted, it's not a finale boss, but still).

I mean, all it did was scream loudly, send Manticores at everyone, and the fireball at the end. Other than that it was a total waste of it's abilities when it came to the fight against it.

Qrow spends most of the time fighting it but we don't really see the Sphinx fighting back much, if at all. And at the end where the heroes go kill it, it literally just stands around like an idiot while letting Blake and Yang tie the longer-than-expected bow around it like 5 times.

Imagine if the Sphinx had taken flight while it was being tied up like that. Bye bye Gambol Shroud, nice meeting you (then we get the long-promised GS upgrade). But no, for such a commanding Grimm apparently using it's wings in combat is beneath it. Hell, it didn't even bother trying to bite Weiss when she got up to and stood right in front of it.

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3) What was Qrow's issue with the turrets? He kept saying that they made the passengers afraid, but that honestly sounds like drunk bullshit.

The Grimm were already attacking by then, screaming very loudly, shooting fireballs at the train as well as stomping on it. That alone will scare the passengers. Activating the turrets would not make them any more scared, it would make them less scared because it reminds them that they have protection, the turrets would make them feel more secure and safe.

The Grimm were already attacking the train, so the Grimm attacking the turrets makes little difference, aside from the fact that it kept their attention away from the actual cars with the actual people inside.

And their plan of having a Jaune-boosted Ren calm down and silence the entire train to solve the "passengers are afraid" problem didn't need them to turn off the turrets either. In fact, the turrets themselves would've been silenced, making them far more effective.

So yeah, what's the deal with Qrow? Dudley the Bozo Huntsman did the smart thing.

4) Speaking of the turrets, I found an inconsistency. It's in the fight where the Manticore shoots a fireball at the turret and destroys it. The problem is, the turret isn't destroyed or even hit. It literally pops out of existence the moment the fireball hits it.

If you look at the turret, it's painfully easy to see without the need to slow down the video, because the turret disappears before the smoke rising out of it's remains actually appears, and the fireball's explosion is actually smaller than the turret it hit.

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5) Speaking of the Bozo Huntsmen, Dee had a pretty cool weapon for a one-shot guy. An electrified spiky mace.

Too bad he failed an Awareness check.

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6) Speaking of Huntsmen, we finally got to see Qrow's scythe in real action and......it also became a jobber of it's own. The Sphinx doesn't even flinch from any of the hits it gets, and none of Qrow's slices feel like they have any impact, or in some shots that they even hit the Sphinx.

Given Qrow's supposed Scythe-wielding skillz and how much the scythe's been teased until now, I was expecting it to kick more ass than that.

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7) While I liked the episode, I felt it was going way too fast.

Things escalate very quickly. It goes from a fun trip to a battle in a matter of minutes, and then goes from a simple battle to RNJ and RWBY separating from each other right afterwards, and then it goes to the train crash inmediately, and then it goes to the "Maria shows up" stinger without any real pause.

It feels rushed, not in terms of production but in the sense that it's like MK was hurrying things up ASAP instead of taking their time, not even with the scene transitions. The pause between "train goes off the rails" and "everyone gets up and Maria walks out the train" is so brief that both scenes lose most of the impact they had.

I know Vol.5 was criticized for taking an eternity to get the plot moving, but I don't think getting the plot moving this fast is the right way, even if it's much better in comparison.

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8) One or two things that annoyed me, though smaller. The ep starts right in the middle of the train fight, and then it inmediately and without any pause goes straight to Adam killing the WF mooks because mom said it was his turn on the fancy chair. Then it goes to before they even got on the train.

For starters, Adam's scene is so disconnected from everything else in the episode that it feels like a non-sequitur, just thrown in for the sake of not doing it in a later ep.

And then there's the way the In Medias Res idea was used. Since the ep started with the fight, and then went to RWBY on the station, I honestly thought RNJRWBY was already on the way to Argus and had just been defending the train once or twice, with the train making stops at multiple stations. It made sense.

Then it turns out that the hadn't even gotten on the train. It's a smaller thing and it's not really anything that hurts the episode's quality to an extent that one should care about though.

9) Speaking of annoying things, Ozpin's a total useless moron. It has been 2 weeks since Haven, and in all that time he never told anyone that the Relic would attract a swarm of giant flying fire-spitting cats?

Again: '2. Weeks.' And he never bothered to tell anyone about that detail before they got on the train and thus were outside Mistral's safety. It's not like it's some deep secret that no one should ever know about like the Maidens or the Gods, and even if it was RWBYNJR are already on the ball anyway.

"By the way, the Relic will attract Grimm, so we better stay on our toes till we reach Argus", WAS THAT SO HARD TO SAY PROFESSOR OZPIN????

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10) Also, to anyone who argued that Yang "definitely did not fully forgive Blake yet for abandoning her at her darkest hour"; to anyone who thought that Yang wouldn't be all smiles and hugs from the get go with her until a couple of episodes into the season....

.....This is all I have to say about that.