I've been quite critical of the last couple of episodes of Real Drive, with the series drifting away from Haru's story and the intriguing possibilities of the show to instead deal with designer sunglasses and an Internet for dogs - Hardly the kind of high intellectual drama you'd expect from a Masamune Shirow affair.Unfortunately, episode eight doesn't really get us back to what I would consider the point of the series, although it does at least prove to be a little more entertaining, offering up a future vision of the ghost stories which are not far shy of an anime cliché of their own. Of course, the ghosts of Real Drive aren't in fact ghosts at all - In reality, they're little more than a temporary Internet file that hasn't been deleted. While I got a little kick out of this episode bringing the concept of distributed computing (a la SETI and Folding@Home) into the world of the Metal in a new and predictably capitalist way, that was only a very thin veneer over what was otherwise a slightly shallow episode - Entertaining enough, certainly, but once again a long way short of some of the standards set earlier in the series, leaving it once again to find the 'filler' stamp liberally applied to its proverbial forehead.If I may table a suggestion for a future episode of this series, I think it would be wise to see Haru diving into the mind of the script writers, to see if he can find where all the decent plots have gone. Sure, this modern ghost story gets marked up compared to episodes about sunglasses and dogs online, but that's hardly a resounding endorsement of a series that could (and should) offer so, so much more.
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