Volume Eight of Eureka Seven to me was about Holland and Talho. Sure, some big plot things happened, revealing the big bad evil plans of Colonel Dewey (just a colonel?), but evil Dewey stuff is kind of backburner to me at this point when watching this show. What makes Eureka Seven awesome to me are the relationships it sets up, literal ones and figurative ones, and how they build episode after episode. The phases of these relationships aren’t entirely settled in tidy arcs, rather each phase just pushes something else along, which with a fifty episode series there is time to have characters avoid each other for multiple episodes before they come to the table. For this set of episodes the heart of the material was Holland and Talho straightening things up between them. It’s been a long time coming.

(Spoilers Up to Episode 34 May Follow)

Things have been rough between Talho and Holland for the length of the Eureka Seven and likely have been rough long before we first see them. Holland has built this wall to keep Talho out, not that I could really blame him since she’s constantly on his case, which in a way was how Talho put a barrier around herself. Obviously, there had to have been a time when things were good, but I can’t remember getting much of a hint about that until episode 33, Pacific State. By the end of that episode, Holland admits to Talho how much of a loser he’d been and reminds himself of why he’s doing what he’s doing. This brings them closer together.

I’m glad that the show has enough episodes to give things time to breathe before revealing the next thing. At the end of episode 34, Inner Flight, Talho tells Holland that she carries his child. I think she does this to save him from thinking of himself as expendable, that they have a future to share together. It’s no longer an ideal or idea he’s fighting for, but something that is now personal and real. Holland was ready to sacrifice himself to thwart Dewey, which would have been a cheap sacrifice since that’s all that was left of Holland. He had nothing else, which isn’t the case anymore.

This set of episodes really helped me to understand Talho a lot more. I wasn’t particularly fond of her as a character before she changed her outward appearance to match her inner change (episode 30). Sure, I recognized her importance as a crew member and how a lot of what goes on in the ship filters through her, but now I can look back and get why she was behaving the way she did. She’s not just some chic who’s bitter that her relationship has turned bad and can’t yet let it go, dragging this cloud wherever she goes. Talho is way more than that now, kind of beautiful now that she has let the past go to hold onto the future. I like how Kate Higgins subtly changed Talho’s tone now that she’s a new person.

It’s great to see Renton and Eureka take a step back from the drama for a bit. Renton and Eureka’s relationship is pretty much settled business, by that I mean pretty much the only thing that could affect it are outside forces, and really there’s nothing left there to explore without something from the outside invading. It kind of does a little bit in episodes 31 and 32.

Every now and then the show teases with Domenic and Anemone bits, but that’s a relationship I might be reading too much into from some wall papers and images I see on the net. I don’t know how much of that imagery is actually story based.

Eureka Seven is a show I love more with each disc. With all the recent talk of how anime is often crap (which I agree) and how we should hang our heads (I don’t), it can also be worthwhile (we wouldn’t love this crap if it weren’t), even when there’s robot goodness. One of the extras on the DVD is a brief interview with Crispin Freeman (Holland). He touches upon the philosophical, religous, and mythological references in Eureka Seven, among other things. It’s an interesting interview if you’re like me and missed the references completely. For someone with a BA in English and three credits short of a philosophy minor, I’m shockingly illiterate.