It always makes life interesting when an anime series exceeds or otherwise confounds my expectations, but what the Hell was this?! An episode of Real Drive where the client is a dog, only he's not a dog but a human in a dog's body, and there are lots of dogs and they have cyberbrains and they all connect to a special dog Metal with some kind of dog paradise and the guy wants to merge his conscience with a dog because he likes them?! I'm sorry, I think I need to go and lay down in a darkened room for a bit....Okay, that's better. Yes, episode seven of Real Drive lets us in on the shocking news that in this series world there is an Internet for dogs. Yes, dogs. Said dogs also have some kind of nano machine-controlled cyberbrain which gives them basic language skills, but apparently this isn't enough for some dog owners, who feel that the whole master/servant relationship between human and dog is all wrong, and that the only way to correct this imbalance is for the owner to merge with his dog inside the Metal to become one.Leaving aside the rather ridiculous premise of this episode, the thought of humans merging minds with their pets and the way it was described by the focus of this episode just plain creeped me out. I mean, I love animals as much as the next person, but going to that kind of extreme seems a little... wrong.After an intriguing first few episodes, I have to confess - I'm disappointed by these last few episodes of Real Drive. Filler or not, there are myriad fascinating topics that could be discussed and brought to life by the world depicted in this series, so why is it limiting itself to overly sentimental episodes about book reports and cutesy (yet still played with a poker face by the script writers) stories about a dog Metal? Perhaps I've simply been expecting too much from the series, but for something created by Masamune Shirow the recent choices of subject matter have seemed rather flippant and a far cry from the kind of deep subjects we've seen from Ghost in the Shell and Ghost Hound. So, come on guys, enough of the nonsense, let's get back to some semblance of a real and eventful storyline.
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