Space Ride of the Valkyries

Space Ride of the Valkyries

Manga Chapters 8-5 and 9-1

TV Episodes 44 and 45

Manga Chapter Summary:

A hat-wearing man plays his guitar and sings as the 999 approaches its next station. Tetsuro notices that there are dead trees all around. Maetel tells him that they only grow up halfway here and are full of holes. The Conductor announces that the next stop is Deadwood Mountain, where they will be stopped for 25 minutes. As they leave, Maetel says all they have time for is to eat. The hat-wearing man approaches them, playing his guitar and singing. After finishing his song, the man puts out his hand, causing Tetsuro to call him a beggar. This angers the man, who punches Tetsuro in the face and says he is paid by people for singing.

Maetel apologizes for Tetsuro’s comment and gives the man a gold coin. The man feels honored to be paid by a beautiful woman such as her, wearing such dirty clothes. He says his name is Prider and that the whole universe will remember his name someday. Tetsuro and Maetel head to a restaurant where Tetsuro doesn’t eat because his teeth hurt from the punch. Tetsuro notices more people with human bodies here than he’d expect. As they head back to the train, Tetsuro asks Maetel why she brought her trunk for such a short stop and she claims it’s because a lot of people get on and off here.

After the 999 takes off, the Conductor comes in, asking to look at a passenger’s pass. Tetsuro realizes that Prider has boarded the train and is sitting further down the train car. Tetsuro walks over to say hello to him and they apologize to each other for what happened earlier. Tetsuro tells Prider that he is on the train so he can obtain a mechanical body. The 999 speeds up. The Galaxy Railway Administration detects an abnormal object approaching the 999 and orders it to speed up to warp speed. The Conductor fears that it is the Valkyrie.

Three white crafts quickly approach the 999. The Conductor is scared, claiming no one caught by the Valkyrie got away and lived. The crafts get closer by and Tetsuro is able to see the pilot of one of them as it nears. The 999 is forced to stop and Tetsuro and the others hear the 3 Valkyrie “witches” walking down the adjacent train car towards them. This doesn’t faze Prider, who starts singing. The door opens and 3 women wearing helmets enter. They claim Prider is a good singer, but have no business with him.

Maetel tells Tetsuro these women are the three knights of the Valkyrie but not Valkyrie herself. The three of them walk up to Maetel and say she is coming with them. One of the knights notices Tetsuro’s Cosmo gun and he tells them how he received it from an old woman on Titan. They tell him to take good care of it and that only the top professionals can carry it. The knights tell the Conductor that they are taking the 999 to their mothership, despite his pleas that it is against regulation. As they exit the car they ask the passengers to stay quiet and still. Tetsuro is surprised at how unexpectedly polite they were, although the Conductor is still scared of them.

The three knights enter the engine room, demanding the 999 head on a new course. The 999’s engine relents to their demands and makes a U-turn. Maetel tells Tetsuro they are going to meet Valkyrie and to check his gun. The narrator explains how Valkyrie makes people frightened as much as Emeraldas does and that Tetsuro now recalls being told about her while in a hut in the snow. The 999 arrives at the brightly glowing Valkyrie mothership and stops, detecting a large amount of radiation.

 

Tetsuro and the others are ordered under threat of death to get off the 999 and head with the three Valkyrie knights. They are brought up an optical elevator and are presented before another woman, the Valkyrie, who demands they kneel before her. Maetel and the Valkyrie seem to recognize each other, and Maetel refuses to kneel. Tetsuro does as well claiming he hasn’t met her before and has no reason to respect her yet. The frightened Conductor urges Tetsuro to kneel. When Prider is asked he simply responds by singing.

Maetel doesn’t want to remain here, but Valkyrie shows them an image of the 999, heading back without them.  The mother ship starts moving, preparing to warp to someplace else at great speed. Valkyrie claims they are heading to the end of the universe and can never return. Tetsuro pulls out his gun but it is shot away. Valkyrie claims she wants to freeze the life of the universe. Meanwhile the Galaxy Railway Administration reconnects with the 999, and finds its passengers missing. The 999 replies that it was taken away by the Valkyrie and the mothership’s position is now unknown.

When asked if she is scared, Maetel says she’s scared of her future and can’t die for the time being. Once the mothership stops, Tetsuro is told to look outside and finds a number of skeletons outside the ship! Valkyrie claims space isn’t a vacuum here, it’s a dirty nebula filled with bacteria. In a year Tetsuro could become a skeleton like the rest of them. Valkyrie claims to be comfortable here, a place in space with tens of thousands of skeletons.

Tetsuro, Prider and Conductor are separated from Maetel and held elsewhere in the ship. They try to knock out the three Valkyrie knights guarding them only to be knocked back, realizing that they must be androids due to how tough they are. Maetel and Vakyrie arrive and Maetel uses an explosive to blow up all three of the Valkyrie knights. Valkyrie admits that all three of her real daughters had been killed and these were mechanical dolls made in the image of her children. She swore on the bodies of her children that all humans would be made into skeletonized stardust as a bouquet dedicated to her daughters. Everyone insists that they want to live, angering Valkyrie further as her daughters had the same desire.

Valkyrie pulls out a sword. Prider throws himself in front of Tetsuro and takes a fatal blow. Maetel says she will fight her. Seeing how they protected each other, the Valkyrie backs down and decides to return them to the original place where the 999 is at. She realizes that she is wrong and shouldn’t have taken other people’s future due to the death of her daughters. Back on the 999, Maetel says Valkyrie will wander through the skeleton-filled stars for the rest of her life while listening to the song played by Prider.

TV Episode Summary:

The TV adaption is spread across two episodes, with the first episode featuring a large amount of new content in it, as well as a new key character, Prider’s girlfriend, Alice. As Prider plays his guitar at the beginning of the episode, Alice approaches him, mentioning it is his birthday and that they should celebrate at her apartment. Prider reacts happily to the 999’s approach. Things then occur as they do in the manga at the beginning, with Prider being a little more apologetic after Maetel pays him for his song. The layover is 5 hours and 25 minutes rather than just 25 minutes as it is in the manga. As such, Tetsuro and Maetel have more time at the station before leaving.

Alice is the waitress at the restaurant Tetsuro and Maetel go to. After she spills water on Tetsuro, her manager fires her, but Tetsuro and Maetel talk him out of it. They talk to her outside and she reveals her identity to them and that it’s Prider’s brirthday. She invites them to her apartment that night. Tetsuro and Maetel return to the station where they see Prider trying to purchase a ticket via a loan and is told they accept only cash. He runs into Maetel and Tetsuro, who is surprised he is trying to board the 999, considering his girlfriend is trying to hold a party for him tonight. As they board, Tetsuro wants to go see Prider, despite Maetel’s warnings as the train will take off in under an hour.

At their home Prider blows out the candle on the cake Alice has made for him. He asks for her to lend him money whish she gives him. She doesn’t ask for the reason, saying she saved it up for him. Tetsuro bursts in, telling her not to give him the money as he’ll board the 999. Alice tells Prider to hurry and board the 999, holding Tetsuro back. Tetsuro is mad about Prider leaving without Alice, but she wants him to live his dream of leaving this poor planet. She tells Tetsuro she was an orphan and he was the first person to treat her like a human being. She hands Tetsuro a rose to give to Prider. Hearing the 999’s whistle, Tetsuro says goodbye and rushes back to the station. Tetsuro makes it to the station just as the 999 is taking off, only making it on by grabbing the Conductor’s hand. Tetsuro talks to Maetel about how sad it is to love someone. Once onboard the train, Tetsuro yells at Prider over the hard work Alice has done for him and that he left her behind. Tetsuro punches him and the two quickly get into a fight until Maetel holds Tetsuro back. Prider is mad since he is leaving a poor planet. When he asks Tetsuro why he boarded, Tetsuro remains silent about his quest for a mechanical body. He feels bad and gives Prider the rose which he puts on the top of his guitar.

From here, things proceed as they do in the manga with the three Valkyrie knights/daughters arriving. They are named in the show, Rosanne, Emilia and Carol. Tetsuro grabs for his gun as they approach and Maetel tells him to stop. The first episode ends just as the three of them enter the train car.

The second episode is a bit more faithful to the source material, but still has some adjustments to it. The three Valkyrie knights don’t recognize Maetel as they do in the manga. Only one of them heads to the engine, not all three. While on the way to the mothership Tetsuro goes to pee and thanks Prider for singing earlier, thinking it saved his life. When Tetsuro and the others first meet the Valkyrie, Prider doesn’t start singing to her as he does in the manga. Maetel doesn’t recognize the Valkyrie as she does in the manga and Valkyrie doesn’t reveal she knows who Maetel is until later in the conversation.

In the manga, Maetel remains with Valkyrie while the daughters bring the others away; in the episode Maetel is with them. In this scene Prider angrily slams his fists on the wall, mad that he may die in a place like this, and thinks he deserves it for deceiving Alice. Prider plays his song to help distract the three knights, although Tetsuro and the Conductor still fail in their attack on them.  Maetel uses a whip rather than an explosive to destroy the three of them. When the Valkyrie reveals that her original daughters were killed, we are provided a flashback of it, showing it to be mechanized humans who killed them. After Valkyrie stabs Prider, Maetel shoots away her sword rather than threatening to fight her. Prider’s death in the anime is more elongated, with him singing his song one more time before he dies. Valkyrie claims she will bury Prider.

TV Episode Cast:

Tetsuro Hoshino – Masako Nozawa

Maetel – Masako Ikeda

Conductor – Kaneta Kimotsuki

Prider – Akira Kamiya

Alice – Minori Matsushima

Manager – Banjou Ginga

Locomotive Voice – Keaton Yamada

Carol – Rihoko Yoshida

Emilia – Kazuko Yanaga

Rosanne – Satomi Majima

Valkyrie – Taeko Nakanishi

Narrator – Hitoshi Takagi

As a new feature to this section, I will be mentioning previous appearances the voice actors have made in the show. Minori Matsushima previously appeared as Laura in “Laura of the Dual Planets” (episode 14) as well as Miiru in “The Star Named Curiosity” (episode 68). Rihoko Yoshida appeared as Liza in “The Sakezan Continent” (episode 29). Satomi Majima appeared as a handmaiden in “The Planet of Dimensional Voyage” (episode 24). Taeko Nakanishi also appeared in that episode as Egoterina; she had also played Hanako’s Mother in “Trader’s Fork” (episode 10). Banjou Ginga and Keaton Yamada have played a variety of minor characters throughout the show, with Ginga also playing the mysterious voice that has sometimes spoken to Maetel.

Non-Spoiler Analysis:

This was a fairly enjoyable pair of chapters for me. Tetsuro and Maetel briefly arrive at Deadwood Station where they meet the singer Prider. Tetsuro has lived in a bit of luxury for a while now on the 999, but has a similar poor background to Prider and is rather foolhardy in calling him a beggar, something I’m sure Tetsuro wouldn’t have liked being called when he was back on Earth. Prider desires to leave his planet and become a well known singer, singing songs at several points throughout the chapter/episode. The TV episode expands things with Prider considerably. He has a girlfriend Alice and we see how he is able to purchase the ticket for the 999, through money she saved up for him. Tetsuro grows sympathetic to Alice immediately and is very upset at Prider leaving her to join the 999. As a little kid Tetsuro seems to have this idealistic notion that they should stay together. Alice loves Prider enough to save up the money so he can pursue his dreams. While it’s not the type of love Tetsuro is expecting, it is love nonetheless. Throughout the TV version we have more time for interaction between Tetsuro and Prider, causing it to fit a bit better than in the manga when towards the end Prider sacrifices himself, taking the mortal blow from Valkyrie that was meant for Tetsuro and dying. While Alice may never have seen Prider again anyway, it is quite depressing that he dies so quickly after he leaves and she will forever wonder what happened to him.

The Valkyries bring some fright back to the storyline, coming off as rather menacing characters, spoken in the same breath in the manga as Emeraldas (a line not included in the TV version). This is all the more effective for me in the manga chapter, where you can’t see the faces of any of the three of them behind their visors like you can in the episode. Likewise when we meet Valkyrie, in the manga the light emanating her is so bright that you can’t see details on her face (or even be sure that she is human). In the TV episode she looks a bit more like an ordinary middle aged woman so you lose some of the fright factor. This is helped a bit by the Valkyrie mothership heading to a space filled with skeletons, showing us numerous people slain by the Valkyrie. We soon realize that this is Valkyrie fighting back against humanity after her daughters were killed. While she was able to make android replacement daughters, they just weren’t the same, lacking any real compassion and care for others. As with several prior characters we’ve met, like Ryuzu or Horohoro, you do feel bad for Valkyrie to an extent, but we do have to remember she is a mass murderer who killed numerous innocent people that had nothing to do with her daughter’s deaths. It seems to be a running theme in the manga and the TV show that these villainous characters have depth and sorrow to them, and they do, but you don’t want to dismiss the bad things they’ve actually done.

Valkyrie is a reference to norse mythology. Valkyries were female figures who would choose those who die in battle and those who live. The Valkyrie take half of those slain to the afterlife, Valhalla, ruled over the god Odin. Valkyries could also appear as lovers of heroes and mortals and daughters of royalty.