Now, I can safely conclude that IS: Infinite Stratos is the series that uses many overused tropes found in anime as proven in this episode that my hunch that Charles is definitely a girl is right! Asides from that, we have more Laura brooding in a corner on why Chifuyu left Germany and started teaching in Japan and oh, more Ichika back story…
Like I said earlier, I was right about Charles being a girl and I can safely conclude that this show uses a lot of overused concepts in anime. Why? In the scene where Ichika learned that Charles is a girl involves a shower scene in which Ichika just wants to give Charles some body wash which ended up Ichika unintentionally seeing Charles’ wonder puffs. And after that scene, the two of them became silent and tried to go back into their normal lives like it never happened. See what I mean?
But the next scene was sorta typical on why Charles pretended to be a boy. Sorta typical because he was ordered by his father, the head of the Dunoa Company to enter the IS Academy as a boy for the sake of publicity, something that I rarely heard off but the events before she ended up pretending to be a boy is what I can say, unique. And so, it is official that I have a soft spot with Charles since I have a very soft spot with French women for no apparent reason.
As for Laura in this episode, it seems that they were able to flesh out more of her character in this episode. Asides that this episode further establishes why she is angry at Ichika, that is because of her extreme admiration for Chifuyu and thinks that she is the only person who can learn from Chifuyu we learned more that asides from Cecilia and Charles, she is also another IS User who specializes in long range combat.
Ichika’s back story of him being kidnapped by some people with no proper explained reason asides from the obvious that he is Chifuyu’s younger brother, is pretty common and most of the time, the one who ordered to kidnap someone in this type of situation is the ones who know the person’s whereabouts and that is the Germans. It seems that this series will receive some hate coming from the Germans if this theory of mine is proven.
As for the animation in this episode, it was mediocre, to be exact, the same quality of a regular episode of Marvel Anime: Iron Man. Yep, this episode has a short problem with the transition between CGI and traditional, but it is forgivable considering the action we saw with Ichika and Charles’ personal IS!
Overall, this episode broke how a typical 2-part episode arc of IS worked. Instead of having a climatic battle at the end of episode, we have a more character focus with Charles’ true gender being and her starting to act more natural at the end. Speaking of climatic, at the end of the episode, we saw Laura’s eye patched eye, which reminded me of a Geass…