Hello and welcome, Ultraman Connection readers! This week, we’re taking another short break with a “Special” recap episode. Like the previous one, it summarizes the show so far, and focuses on the many Kaiju and alien opponents Blazar has faced over the past 16 episodes. The last “Special” episode also introduced a new group of characters to the audience. Watching behind-the-scenes conversations between members of a TV production crew made for a fun new perspective on familiar happenings. We had already followed the elite team of SKaRD every week, in the heat of these titanic battles, so the first “Special” recap took those events and let us see how ordinary civilians reacted to them instead.
This episode also provides a new perspective… but from an entirely unexpected point of view, one completely removed from the world of Ultraman Blazar!
Say hello to the “Perfect Analyze Gadget”, or “PAG”. This cute little cybernetic character is a brand-new face to the show. (But perhaps not to longtime Ultraman fans, more on that in a second…) He inhabits the Computer World– ahem, I meant to say, the “Cybernetic” world, which is described as a “two-dimensional world where information flies about everywhere.” And he’s here to tell us all about Blazar, as well as the Kaiju who have appeared in the show fighting against him!
Why? Well, PAG tells us that his job is to collect data about Kaiju and Ultra heroes, and he’s very excited about it. I won’t repeat his analysis here, and I have no clue why he exists for this purpose as a walking Wiki database, but I can talk about another one of his functions – serving as a fun call-back to Ultraman Gaia.
Gamu Takayama, who fights as Ultraman Gaia, tried his best to keep his identity secret from the rest of the defense organization XIG during the events of that series. However, that’s really hard to do when you’re working as a scientific researcher and advisor for the defense team, and not as one of the fighter pilots in an attack squad. Unlike many other Ultraman protagonists, he can’t just cover up transforming into Ultraman by crash-landing his jet in every episode!
So Gamu invented an AI autopilot system, dubbed “PAL” to help cover for him while he would be away, punching out the Monster of The Week as Ultraman. Fittingly for its name, PAL almost becomes a character of its own as the show goes on. It even gets to save the day in a number of episodes as Gamu’s friendly sidekick!
We don’t know how PAG was created, or by whom, but its enthusiasm for discussing the Kaiju from Blazar (and Blazar himself) is downright infectious! Its enthusiasm is so infectious, in fact, that it conjures two other adorable chibi-styled characters to share its knowledge with!
The back-and-forth banter between PAG, Gedos and Mogusion was fun to listen in on. I also loved the cute designs for the Kaiju, resembling Sanrio characters more than gigantic, destructive monsters. Despite their cute appearances, however, both of them still seemed to share PAG’s enthusiasm for their own natural habits… such as eating people.
Just like the last “Special” episode, this week’s recap provided a fun, original set of characters and a premise that I hope we can return to in the future. I would absolutely tune in to watch a series of animated shorts with PAG meeting new Kaiju buddies in this “Cybernetic” world. Who knows, maybe it’ll wind up being our next “Chronicle” series? Regardless, we’ll be back to the action in Ultraman Blazar next week, with episode 17, “The Wandering Zangill”! Until then, stay tuned to Ultraman Connection for all your Ultraman news and more!
