Space Brothers is back again to make a joy-crowded summer even better. It’s packing a new opener and the return of a old acquaintance, so you know it’s gonna be good.

Just like that pancake

I don’t worry about Space Brothers occasionally making Americans the bad guys, as it did this episode when they made fun of  Mutta’s test scores. If it were another show, maybe, but this one has introduced a good number of deep, well-developed American characters (Pico, Brian, Damien etc.), including some African-Americans. And, this episode, a Grecian. Aside from one scene during the lunar crash arc where a JAXA guy mentally bashed NASA for following standard operating procedure, there really hasn’t been much of the xenophobia that can come up when many anime deal with foreign countries. The main reason my worry is there because there’s a very large catalog of things that are very xenophobic in the history of anime and manga.*

Mutta’s reunion with Deneil, complete with the fancy-dodge effects and a flashback for those who only started watching the show at its new time, was pretty much all there was to this episode. It is nice to see him stuck at the bottom of the rankings ladder with Deniel after his poor scores, as the series shines when Mutta’s doing his scrappy-underdog thing. Watching him tough his way through pilot training should be a type of fun we haven’t seen from the show in a little while.**

*Space Brothers is thankfully not Night Raid 1937, which glorifies some pretty heinous acts of state-sponsored terrorism. Nor George Asakura’s China, which denies the Rape of Nanking ever occurred.

**At the least, it’ll be less dark than an arc about learning that an old friend has a terminal disease.