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Fighbird Ep. 10: 50,000 Hostages!

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Summary

Katori and Haruka watch the boys play baseball. Kenta comes up to bat and nearly knocks the ball into Haruka if not for Katori quickly swatting it aside. Kenta suggests that Katori try playing and hands him the bat. Katori knocks the pitch high into the air and starts running. However, when the pitcher yells at his teammates to catch the ball Katori catches it instead and strikes out. He then tries to pitch but all his throws impact violently with the ground and walls. Back at the Amano Peace Labs, Hiroshi voices his approval at Katori trying baseball. Haruka tells Katori that he doesn’t need to listen to everything Kenta says but Katori says that he loves Kenta’s suggestions. Kenta tells Hiroshi that Katori can’t control his aim, and Hiroshi gets the idea to fit Katori with metal braces to help him train. Katori however perfects his pitch after one try. Kenta then decides to take Katori to watch a professional Baseball game. As they watch, Katori asks if the pitcher use the same kind of braces he did but Kenta replies that they actually practiced a lot to be this good. Satsuda arrives at a police meeting and is shown a video of Jango threatening to kill fifty thousand people by 8:30 tonight as revenge for the ridicule he suffered at the Nobel Prize awards. The police chief shows Satsuda a small ball-shaped bomb that was delivered with the video and says that it’s strong enough to take out anything within a kilometer radius. Satsuda and the other police inspectors are ordered to find the real bomb before the set time. Back at the game, a home run is hit out of the stadium and the umpire asks for a new ball. He’s given one delivered by Shura which is actually the bomb. Satsuda patrols the skies in a helicopter. The pilot says that they’ll be famous once they solve this case but Satsuda reminds him that they’re doing this to save lives. They wonder where they’d find a place with so much people just as Satsuda spots the baseball stadium. Satsuda heads to the stadium and tells the employee at the entrance that they need to evacuate everyone inside. However the employee tells him that this will cause a panic. Satsuda enters the stadium and spots Katori and the kids. He runs up to them and demands to know why they’re bombing the stadium much to the trio’s confusion. They use the distraction caused by a home run to run away from Satsuda. Kenta contacts Guard Star and informs him about the bomb, prompting the latter to mobilize the rest of the Guard Team.

The Guard team scans the perimeter in vain and deduces that the bomb must be inside the stadium. With fifteen minutes until the bomb goes off, Katori spots Shura on the stadium’s roof and runs after him. Katori demands to know where Shura hid the bomb, and the latter retorts that he’s too late to do anything before running away. Kenta and Haruka realize that the bomb must be in one of the baseballs while Katori chases Shura to a closed amusement park. The kids start searching the storage rooms for the bomb. Katori corners Shura in a house of mirrors and the two start fighting. After finding nothing in the storage room, the kids deduce that the bomb is being used in the game and inform Katori, who knocks Shura away and runs back to the stadium. As the pitcher prepares to throw the bomb ball, Satsuda orders the stadium operators to announce that the game is cancelled and call for an evacuation. When they refuse he shoves them aside to try to find the PA switch, but ends up pressing the button that starts closing up the stadium’s roof. Katori arrives too late to stop the batter from hitting the bomb ball, so jumps and grabs it in the air before throwing it out through the closing roof where it explodes harmlessly in the sky. Shura decides to finish the job by starting up a four-legged mechanical monster. Guard Star transforms to robot mode and starts firing on the monster, but gets knocked back by its powerful cannon. Shura aims the cannon at the stadium but Guard Fire knocks him back before he can fire. The shots hit the stadium roof and causes it to crumble. Guard Fire tries to contain the flames while Guard Star jumps inside the stadium and tells the panicked crowd to follow Satsuda’s evacuation instructions. Katori runs out of the stadium and combines into Fighbird. Fighbird shoots the monster with his Dyna Buster and blocks its shots with his Flame Sword. He then finishes the monster off amid the cheers of the crowd. The next day, Katori continues to practice his pitch with Kenta, who insists on turning him into a pro pitcher.

Commentary

The best Fighbird episodes are the ones with tense situations like this. Jango is again sidetracking Draias’ objective in favor of getting revenge for what happened in the last episode, but this time he’s back to his mass murdering ways. Though this begs the question of why he’s trying to get revenge on Japan for something that happened in Norway. One nitpick I have is that the episode spent a little too much time setting up the Chekhov’s gun of Katori learning how to aim his throws. Given that he’s an android, it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch for him to throw the bomb out of the stadium without training for it.

Overall Rating
4/5

Fighbird Info

Director:
Katsuyoshi Yatabe

Writer:
Yasushi Hirano

Mechanical Designer:
Kunio Okawara

Character Designer:
Hitoshi Ueda

Musical Composer:
Toshiyuki Watanabe

Format:
48 episodes

Airdates:
Japan 02.02.1991 – 02.01.1992

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