Directed by Masaki Harada. Written by Keiichi Hasegawa. Airdate March 22, 1997.
Shinjoh is going on an important test flight, so Daigo is stuck taking Shinjoh’s sister Mayumi to see a show from current pop sensation, Maya Cruz. (It’s not a date, he insists, making sure Rena hears this.) Daigo admits that he doesn’t even know who this Maya Cruz is, which shocks Horii, a Cruz superfan. Of course Horii is a superfan of the big pop star of the moment. Horii’s basically twelve years old and we love him for that.
Okay, funny stuff over, let’s get back to Shinjoh, who’s doing Maxima Drive tests over Earth. An anomaly strikes his ship — accompanied by strange music — and Shinjoh crashes. When he awakens in the hospital, something isn’t right: he seems uncertain of his identity and the purpose of GUTS. He also becomes abruptly obsessed with Maya Cruz’s music and starts trying to contact her, claiming he’s her brother. Shinjoh then vanishes from the hospital. As the GUTS team tracks him down, they learn the truth about Maya Cruz’s actual identity and the story of a long-separated alien brother and sister.
There’s a potentially superb episode here. Using a hugely successful pop singer as the center of a story about the loneliness of an alien trapped on Earth is a fantastic starting point for a semi-tragic science-fiction tale. The contrast of Maya Cruz’s massive popular success with her sadness from 15 years of abandonment on a strange planet is the kind of character-based drama that Ultra shows have excelled at.
However, the execution of “Memory of Pale Night” falls short of the possibilities. The episode runs up against two major problems.
The first is that the required villain character/Ultra fight opponent, Alien Natarn, is crudely grafted onto the story of the alien siblings. A member of the race pops up for a brief confrontation with Daigo and the alien-controlled Shinjoh, which occurs only moments after Alien Natarn is mentioned for the first time. This leads straight into a short and underwhelming giant monster fight, one of the least interesting yet on the show. Even Tiga looks bored going through the motions fighting the giant form of Alien Natarn, which looks like an off-the-shelf design the art department had lying around.
I have no problem with occasionally keeping the Ultra fight short, or having the giant adversary be more of a fringe figure than the center of the story. (The last episode did something similar, and it worked great.) The way Alien Natarn is used here, however, is distractingly random and over before viewers can care much. It’s too blatantly squeezed in because the episode needed action.
The other problem is Maya Cruz herself. She’s simply not interesting enough to carry the emotional burden of the story. Actress Noriko Tanaka plays Maya with a flat affect, not even showing off much stage presence for the singer’s club performances that bookend the episode. Maya seems less lonely and adrift in her showbiz career and more uninterested or even disdainful of it — and of her fans, honestly. There’s no warmth coming from her except a tiny ember during a coda with Shinjoh, a moment with a nice twist to it.
I love the idea of an alien singer putting her loneliness into her music, using it as inspiration. But we only get a, well, pale shadow of that. Maya Cruz’s concluding song, the title of the episode, lacks passion, and the montage effect over it doesn’t improve it.
There are a few moments that convey the somber solitude that should suffuse the episode, and they’re all achieved through visuals, like Shinjoh gazing at the stars through his hospital window and Maya looking over a wintry cliffside. This is a noirish-looking episode with several striking shots that the script can’t live up to.
The strongest part comes right at the beginning: the fun banter among the GUTS crew about Maya Cruz and Daigo having no idea who she is. Finding out that Horii is a big fan (a “Cruzer”?) is something I wished factored into the story more than just this single mention. Don’t leave good Horii drama on the table!
Rating: Mediocre
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