A Tale of Endless Summer

A Tale of Endless Summer

Manga Chapter 10-3

TV Episodes 54 - 55

Manga Chapter Summary:

The 999 approaches a green planet called the “Planet of Endless Summer” and Tetsuro is able to hear the voice of a cicada. Maetel claims the planet hasn’t ever not heard the voice of a cicada in all its history. The Conductor announces their layover time as 36 hours. Numerous cicidas roam the area as the 999 touches down. Tetsuro watches as a large swarm of them pass overhead, making a noise like it were a symphony. Tetsuro enjoys the warm field, claiming even Sakezan’s planet wasn’t this hot. Flowers fly by in the wind and Tetsuro tells Maetel that this may feel like heaven. Maetel brings up a point that causes Tetsuro to think about how people with mechanical bodies won’t go to heaven as they won’t die. Suddenly, Maetel is carried off by a giant wasp!

Tetsuro rushes back to the 999 to grab his gun and immediately heads out, despite the Conductor warning him. The Conductor throws him a compass device enabling him to tell directions. Tetsuro eventually finds Maetel’s hat in a field, and finds her coat as well, but it’s a trap and he falls into a chasm upon stepping near it. Tetsuro wakes up on a spider web in a large room, and finds Maetel laying down on a platform in front of him. There is also an insector there, a humanoid insect, who calls Tetsuro and Maetel food. Tetsuro is brought over a vat of boiling liquid; the insector says she needs to boil him and extract his oils, which are good for its joints. Tetsuro asks her if she is a machine and she says no, but machine bodies are imitations of their bodies.

Maetel wakes up just as Tetsuro is dropped into the vat. Tetsuro starts laughing, as the vat’s temperature isn’t any hotter than a warm bath! Maetel realizes that the boiling point on this planet differs from that of the Earth. The insector flees. Maetel puts her clothes back on and she and Tetsuro head back out to the fields. Tetsuro asks Maetel why humans don’t migrate to such a nice planet. He asks why insectors don’t travel to other planets and Maetel claims they may start doing that. Suddenly Tetsuro finds the Conductor, passed out in the field. Maetel is surprised he isn’t by the 999, and he says it wasn’t by choice. A giant cocoon encompasses where the station used to be. The Conductor claims the insectors arrived and put it here. He was able to make a hole in it and escape. He reached out to the Galaxy Express administrative offices but wonders if it was able to transmit through the cocoon.

The three of them head inside the cocoon and find the 999 encased in a web-like substance. As long as the 999 is stuck in here, the Conductor says they won’t be able to get back on the rails and into space. They see a number of eggs in the web-like substance and soon see the insector from before, who says her name is Bee Sharpslot. She claims she no longer wants to extract their oil, and that the eggs around here are her children. Her species are like a type of bee where the eggs are laid on the body of a living insect; when they hatch the larvae consumes the body of its host and grows up. Tetsuro wonders if they are the food. Bee says no; she knows they are not enough food for her children and shows some webs filled with food that she expects to go on the 999 with them. She flies off.

Tetsuro wonders how long they’ll have to wait here, but Maetel thinks time will go by in the cocoon quickly. The Conductor says they’ve already passed the scheduled departure time. He hopes the administrative office notices that. One of the eggs starts cracking. Tetsuro is about to shoot it, but upon seeing the baby insector inside, begging for its life, he can’t bring himself to do it. Maetel reminds Tetsuro of Antares’ advice to shoot first, ask questions later. Before they know it, a large number of the eggs have hatched and the baby insectors enter the 999. The babies start chewing up the seats of the 999, but the cocoon starts cracking and deteriorates, enabling the 999 to leave. The baby insectors continue to chomp away at parts of the train cars. Tetsuro and Maetel wonder why the babies haven’t tried to eat them. The babies say goodbye to Bee, who waves farewell as the 999 takes off.

As the 999 heads into space, the Conductor remains with Tetsuro and Maetel, fearing his room is getting eaten. Maetel says this is like a group vehicle for a school trip, something Tetsuro hasn’t experienced before. Soon the other train car becomes quiet. Tetsuro and the Conductor head in and are shocked to find the insector babies dead. Maetel says the insectors have delicate bodies, and were unable to survive the change of environment of the 999 heading out into space. The Conductor says this is why the insectors have historically remained on the Planet of Endless Summer.

We cut to later, Tetsuro and Maetel send out the bodies of the insector babies into space. Maetel compares it to a burial at sea. Suddenly the Conductor rushes over, saying he’s found one alive, in the mechanical car. The Conductor wants to bring it back to the Planet of Endless Summer, but the Locomotive refuses. The Conductor gets upset. He tells Tetsuro that the insector mother must have communicated with the babies, and told them not to eat them because Tetsuro refused to shoot them. Maetel says the insectors also understood the kindness of the human heart. Maetel says Tetsuro’s kind heart may be the strongest weapon they have, although someday it may cause a hard time for him.

TV Episode Summary:

The TV adaption retains the core plot elements, but as usual for a two parter adds some additional material to the storyline. As the episode starts, we find that the llayover time is reduced to a mere 7 hours. Maetel explaining to Tetsuro about how the insectors control the planet takes place before the insector grabs her rather than afterwards. Also the dialogue from Tetsuro about this being like heaven and machine people not experiencing heaven is cut. Maetel claims this planet is summer all year long, enabling the insectors to grow in number throughout the year. Tetsuro doesn’t seem concerned about their large number. The insector pulls Maetel away just afterwards.

The Conductor doesn’t toss Tetsuro a compass device like he does in the manga. When Tetsuro first encounters Bee, she claims she needs to extract oil for her babies to consume rather than using it for her joints. Tetsuro references a “Goemon Ishikawa” being boiled. Upon realizing she can’t boil them, Bee pulls out a gun, but Maetel shoots it out of her hands.  Maetel tells Tetsuro not to chase Bee; killing others to survive is part of the nature of insects and they don’t kill for no reason like humans do sometimes (causing Tetsuro to flash back to his mother’s death).

Later, we see a crowd of insectors living in a chamber underground. The isnectors claim they have not been able to find food. Bee says they will have to abort their unborn children as a result. Those in the crowd are willing to give up their lives to ensure the new generation lives however. We see a bunch of the insectors laying dead outside of the cocoon when Tetsuro and the others find it. Maetel thinks they worked themselves to death. Tetsuro and Maetel find the Conductor hiding up in a tree rather than being in the field. Once they head in the 999, the Conductor brings them to the Locomotive and he reaches out to the Administrative office, getting no signal due to the cocoon. The Conductor asks the Locomotive to try taking off at full power, but it doesn’t move. Tetsuro despairs upon realizing they are stuck here, although they see Bee fly by shortly afterwards. The first episode ends at this point.

As we start the second episode, Bee tells Tetsuro and Maetel that she will pass away soon and that all her subjects died in order for her children to live on. When Maetel mentions Antares, we have Tetsuro briefly flashing back to him. We see Bee die after waving goodbye to her babies. Once in space, Tetsuro is the one that figures out one of the babies is still alive instead of the Conductor as he hears its crying. The Conductor isn’t as insistent on wanting them to go back to the Planet of Endless Summer in the episode as in the manga chapter; Tetsuro has to do some convincing. When the Locomotive refuses to return, Maetel says they should use an escape capsule to send out the baby. After the capsule takes off, Tetsuro claims it looks like a cradle. We have a musical sequence with Tetsuro’s mother singing to Tetsuro when he was a baby. Later, the Conductor claims the capsule is on track to make its way back to the Planet of Endless Summer. The Conductor brings them back to the Locomotive where he explains the telepathy from Bee to her babies (although this doesn’t make as much sense in the TV episode as she died).

TV Episode Cast:

Tetsuro Hoshino – Masako Nozawa

Maetel – Masako Ikeda

Conductor – Kaneta Kimotsuki

Sharp Bee – Toshiko Fujita

Mechanical Car Voice – Kouji Totani

Insector – Toshiyuki Yamamoto (Episode 54 only)

Antares – Masao Imanishi (Episode 55 only)

Baby – Tomiko Suzuki (Episode 55 only)

Baby – Seiko Nakano (Episode 55 only)

Narrator – Hitoshi Takagi

Toshiyuki Yamamoto previously appearance as a Restaurant Manager in episode 48. Tomiko Suzuki just recently appeared in episode 51 as one of the baby lifeforms. Seiko Nakano appeared as a child in episode 6.

Non-Spoiler Analysis:

This storyline features the 999 coming across the Planet of Endless Summer. As often is the case, Matsumoto takes the opportunity to show us an alien world, this one being one where humans don’t exist and insects are the dominant species on the planet. Tetsuro and Maetel are initially caught by the insector queen named Bee, but we find out that due to the boiling temperature being so low on this planet, no harm comes to them. That was a rather funny scene, and a rare one in which Tetsuro is happy to take a bath! As we head to the latter part of the chapter we see Bee’s plan to send her babies out into space via the 999. This is made all the more important in the episode where we find out that food is in minimal supply on the planet, and the adult insectors end up all working themselves to death in order to help the baby’s passage.

Unfortunately, as often in the case in this manga/show, things are a bit melancholy as just about all of the baby insectors pass away due to the different environment they experience going into space via the 999. This is very similar to chapter 8-1, “Mists of the Fog Capital” where two passengers from that planet immediately died once the 999 headed to space. One baby is found left alive; in the manga chapter we don’t really get an explanation for it, but I assume it died since it doesn’t appear again and we see a bundle floating in space on the last page. In the episode the baby survives and is sent back to the Planet of Endless Summer. While the rest of its race has died out, hopefully upon its return to the planet there is some way it can keep its species going.

Overall this was a pretty fulfilling chapter/pair of episodes. I liked seeing Tetsuro enjoy himself so much on the planet at first. It really came off as a paradise at first; the type of planet that he could settle down on someday. The baby insectors are extremely adorable and it was funny to see them chomping away on the 999. I was very sad to see them die though! Ultimately Tetsuro’s kind heart is what saved them from being eaten themselves.

The episode includes a reference to Goemon Ishikawa, a Japanese outlaw who lived in the 1500s. Reading up on him, he seems a bit like a Japanese version of Robin Hood, someone who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Anime fans probably most know this name via Lupin the Third, as a character in that franchise is named Goemon Ishikawa XIII. For many years he was voiced by Makio Inoue, who famously portrayed Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock character.