It’s the third episode of ‘Sailor Moon Crystal,’ and that means it’s time to introduce the third senshi! Enter Sailor Mars!

The episode starts with an intriguing mystery. People who take the 6:00 bus near Rei’s shrine disappear. Now, ordinarily, you would think that would cause people to stop wanting to take that bus, but the people of Toyko are fearless and they continue to do so with an impressive body count adding up. When Mii-chan, a little girl that frequents Rei’s shrine, is spirited away, it’s up to Sailor Moon and friends to save the day! You know, in that clutzy serendipitous way that Sailor Moon always does.

While chasing down the bus, she transforms into a stewardess for no reason other than that it’s the job of stewardesses to keep the passengers safe, and it’s lost in the netherworld without the help of Luna and Sailor Mercury. Good thing she won a pair of watches at the arcade earlier that day, because it turns out those watches are communicators that Sailor Mercury can use in order to find Sailor Moon. Even more lucky, as Jadeite easily takes down the two of them with his ice powers, it turns out that Rei was Sailor Mars the whole time! And what? Her powers are fire! Sucks for people with ice powers, huh, Jadeite?

Of course, that’s the charm of Sailor Moon. She’s not one to plan, she’s just one to act, and while it lowers her chances of survival to about 1%, you still just love how earnestly she puts her heart into everything, even when she’s terrified.

There are a lot of pluses for this anime following the manga as closely as it does. One being that it doesn’t follow in the same footsteps as the original anime with Rei and Usagi not getting along from the very beginning. Rei is still the driven, focused and the powerful girl she always has been, but there isn’t that hint of maliciousness that always seemed to be unfairly directed at Usagi.

Her transformation sequence is nearly identical to the one from the nineties, only it is the same 3D model they’ve used for the other two sailor scouts, and her legs are bit more preposterously angled.

There isn’t much left to say about this episode, other than it really brought a –frankly– messy chapter (lots of text and overlapping images) in the manga to life in a way that really engages the audience.

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