Alright. We are down to the wire here with ‘Sailor Moon Crystal,’ so let’s get to it!
Sailor Moon and her guardians defeat Beryl, but not her new boy toy, the Dark-powered Prince Endymion (Mamoru) in their headquarters. Queen Metalia then whisks Endymion/Mamoru away to the Dark Kingdom’s headquarters in a cave… in the North Pole… which, seems a bit odd seeing as there isn’t any land in the North Pole to make a cave. It’s just ice and ocean. But in the world of Sailor Moon, five scantily clad girls find a cave, don’t freeze to death, and begin the ultimate show down with Queen Metalia.
Divided from Sailor Moon because she warped with Endymion/Mamoru, the Sailor Scouts had to fly up and find the cave on their own (a power I wish I had because, boy, would I travel EVERYWHERE if I knew that I could soar to the North Pole in what looks like less than an hour). The Sailor Scouts meet their former lovers, Endymion’s generals, Zoisite, Kunzite, Jedeite, and Nephrite one more time, and are able to remind them they were once good people. Their memory is short livved though, because Queen Metalia is apparently capable of being in two places at once, and while she’s making things hard for Sailor Moon, she kills the generals in one fell swoop of squiggly black and maroon lines. The Sailor Scouts weep for about five seconds, and then steel themselves to move on.
Meanwhile, Sailor Moon is trying to fight the dark-powered Endymion and failing. In the end, she stabs him, and then turns the sword on herself, noting that this was always their destiny. Cue the credits.
This episode, like the last one, drags. Every battle scene is narrated by long conversations about how impossible something is, or what needs to be done, while the enemies just stand around and not kill the Sailor Scouts. As a child, I didn’t care, and I loved it. As an adult, I really wonder why my beloved Sailor Scouts haven’t died yet?
Yet, while it drags in the battle scenes, it flits from fight to fight so quickly that it’s hard to get a full grasp of the emotional aftermath. In short, the pacing is off.
I also do not understand why, as these episodes are key episodes in the arc of ‘Sailor Moon’, but the animation is particularly bad in this episode. From Sailor Moon’s ganglier-than usual body with a gimp leg, to Metalia’s hair-chokehold, there has just been scene after scene of cringe-worthy stills and animation:
It’s hard to understand why this is. Why remake a beloved series to be infinitely lower quality?
Because of a off-kilter pacing, and animation that bounced from low to high-quality, I give it a
