Captain Earth focuses on Daichi Manatsu, who stumbles into a secret organization when he returns to Tanegashima after being gone for several years. He had made friends with a boy named Teppei when he was younger, but had no idea that Teppei was part of this organization. It turns out that Daichi’s father, who died when he was younger, also had ties to this organization. Near the end of the first episode, he makes it into the organization’s headquarters, and is given a gun by a scientist named Peter Westvillage, which allows him to pilot a mecha known as the Earth Engine. As the series progresses, Daichi and Teppei, along with Hana and Akari, become a team known as the Midsummer’s Knights.
Episode 22 sees Daichi, Teppei, Hana, and Akari trying to link up the Kivotos to the Blume with an Entangle Link. This has some risks associated with it, though; when Hana has to focus on the Entangle Link, she can’t use the Blume’s weapons or to help steer it. In addition, it’s not known if Daichi and Akare\i can survive the Entangle Link. During the episode, there were several “death flags” that were veing presented, and I found myself worrying about what would happen to these characters.
Salty Dog decides that they cannot allow the Blume to launch and that they must retake it, no matter what. They launch the Garm Impacter, and use this, along with Cerberus, to attack Daichi and the others. Daichi launches in the Earth Engine in order to protect the Blume. The Entangle Link begins while Daichi is fighting Cerberus, and Hana finds she loses control over it and can’t stop it.
And if this wasn’t bad enough, the Kiltgang are gathering a massive amount of libido, and it appears that all seven of them are planning to launch an attack at the same time. The Kiltgang decide to go after the Blume before it can launch Operation Summer, but something unexpected happens right at the end of the episode…
I have to say right now that the ending of this episode made me go, “WTF?” It appears that the Blume crashes into the Garm Impacter and that the four on board have died; yet, this is followed by Daichi waking up in his bed at his uncle’s house and thinking that what happened leading up to this point had been a dream.
However, I don’t think they’re ultimately going to be playing the “it was all just a dream” card for this series, especially since there’s still three episodes remaining. First off, the preview indicates that while we see Daichi go through the same things we saw during the first episode, he’ll be running into things that will try to trigger his memory of what happened. Also, it was stressed a couple of times that it wasn’t known if Daichi and Akari would be able to survive the Entangle Link. My guess is that Daichi is “trapped” somewhere due to the Entangle Link, and that he’ll need to find enough pieces to jog his memory over everything he’s been through up to this point. Perhaps if he regains these memories, he’ll be able to get out of where he’s currently trapped and return to where he should be.
That’s all just conjecture, of course. I’ll have to wait until I can watch Episode 23 in order to find out what, if any, of conjecture ends up being right.