As you may remember, last episode was quite the action-packed lil' thing.  We met the Japanese Police Force's fifth-best sniper, for example.  We saw four teenage delinquents act all delinquently, and get water-cannoned into the river for their troubles, and good riddance to 'em, too.  I know I was never a jerk such as them back when I was a teenager, some 25 years ago.  Now, I was a well-behaved lad, raised right and all that sort of thing, but c'mon... teenagers arguing with police in armored vans armed with high-pressure water cannon deserves to be taught a lesson by Chuck D.  As opposed to Chuck D... that'd be an entirely different type of lesson.  Though, if you think about it, it'd be exactly the same.  Anyway, Shido-sensei formed his little cult of personality, the larger portion of the Fellowship of the Ring Our Heroes bailed out of the bus, but not before Hirano went all Rambo on Shido... is there a word for last-letter-of-a-word-alliteration?  After they left the bus, the smaller group of Our Heroes appeared out of nowhere just in time to clean up a zombie horde... and the Fellowship was rejoined.  They then decamped to an apartment nearby, apparently owned by Boing-chan's friend, the fifth-best sniper in the Japanese Police force.    Which is where we pick up the action, more or less.

Well, actually, we pick up the action on a nearby bridge which looks very much like the Dan Ryan "Expressway" (aka I-90/94) around 5pm on a Friday afternoon... and how a 14-lane highway can have traffic problems is entirely beyond me.  It may have something to do with the dismounted police officers blocking gaps between cars to form a defensive barrier against encroaching Packers fans zombies.  I mean, in the show.  On the Dan Ryan, the cops wouldn't last a minute.  Getting back to the show, while I applaud the efforts of the shield-wielding police, shouldn't they have adopted a better defensive position, tactically?  Using the cars is clever, but please note that the four-man groups are unable to support each other easily.  The cars are in the way!  If the zombies come en masse, the police are screwed.  And I've just dissected a defensive position to determine its effectiveness against zombie attack.  Thank heavens for the internet.

Oh, but they've got a dog with them, never mind.  Lil' Yappy up there is promptly eaten by a zombie.  No, no, sorry, no, Yappy goes running away.  The undead don't seem to care... or do they?  Hmmm... could that have been foreshadowing?  Bwah-hah-ha-hahahahahahahahahaahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Meanwhile, at the safehouseapartment, the girls prepare to take a bath.  Wait, what?

Cue the sirens and put on your civil defense helmets, HSotD has gone to Fanservice Condition Red!  I say again, Fanservice Condition Red!  Oh god help us, it's a bathtub scene.  This business will get out of control... it will get out of control, and we will be lucky to live through it.

It should go without saying that everything beyond this point should be considered Not Safe For Work.


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Posted by: Wonderduck at 07:59 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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So, last episode we saw Takashi and Rei get their photo taken by a recon plane, rob two policemen and a gas station, and leave a survivor for the undead.  Oh, and about a third of the episode was taken up by a recap.  Which would be like this paragraph turning out to be seven hundred words long... don't worry, I'm not gonna even try to do that to you.  You want a recap of last episode, or of the show so far?  Read the episode posts!  Advantage: The Pond!  So, High School of the Dead, what wonders bring you me with Episode 05?

"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking.  The crew has finished its inspection of everybody on board, and apart from Mrs Snodgrass in First Class, nobody has shown any sign of being either infected or already dead.  So as to not disturb the patrons in First Class, she has been moved to Coach.  We will be experiencing a short delay as the runway seems to have been infested with the undead... or as we up here in the cockpit call them, passengers.  Ha ha, just our little joke, we're kidding of course.  We know you have your choice of airlines, so on behalf of all of us, we thank you for flying with Oceanic Airlines today."

Sucking a destroyed zombie into an engine would be only mildly better than sucking a "live" one into an engine, but you can push dead ones off the runway.  Turning living undead into dead undead is her job, and she's quite good at it.

Her name is Rika, she lives on the second floor.  She's the fifth-best sniper in the Japanese Police Special Assault Team, which seems rather a specific ranking.  Me, I'm the third-best duck-based anime blogger whose name beings with a 'W'.  I move up to second if you only count those of us who are currently blogging HSotD.  Rika and her partner were scrambled to this unnamed "floating airport" which is pretty obviously Kansai International to help with a "terrorism" problem.  Terrorism, undead, eh, whatever.  They've got plenty of ammo, but sooner or later, they're gonna run out.  What then?  Well, she's got a friend in the city that she'll have to go find... a nurse at one of the high schools.

Well, isn't that convenient?  Subtlety, thy abbreviation is HSotD.

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:48 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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If my memory is correct, last episode Our Heroes escaped from Zombie High in a mini-bus.  Along the way, they picked up Mr Shiro (a devious teacher) and what survivors from his class that remained (lickspittle whining toadies).  At the end, Rei and Takashi leave the mini-bus, then are separated from the rest of the cast by an exploding busload of flaming zombies.  They go on to find a motorcycle and head for the city.  Then they find a F-4 Phantom II and take to the skies!

...or the JASDF has made an appearance, one of the two.  Interestingly enough, a small amount of research indicates that the plane, probably a RF-4EJ, didn't take off in Japan proper.  Instead, it almost certainly flew from Okinawa, home of the Southwestern Composite Air Division, which is the only unit of the JASDF to fly the recon variant of the standard F-4.  So one could posit that, while the rest of the world is being affected, there are still some places that aren't.  Okinawa, for example.  The Falklands, certainly.  One could continue to speculate, but that's not the point here.  The point is, the authorities are trying to figure out what's going on

The picture isn't good, at least in this city.  I don't know that I would have expected fires to have broken out like this so quickly, but maybe it's the result of all those incendiary undead from last episode.  Are there armor-piercing zombies, too?  However, all hope is not lost.

For where there is life, there is hope.  Even if said life is a pair of teenage kids riding a motorcycle without helmets or even a license between them.  While I commend the pilot for his exciting flying, does the show really expect us to believe that the Japanese don't make a camera that's got a halfway decent zoom lens on it for their recon aircraft?  I mean, really?  Do the names "Nikon", "Minolta," "Konika", "Pentax" or "Canon" ring any bells?

Whatever they've got, it's got one heckuva fast shutter speed to be able to take blurless photos with the combination of the aircraft's velocity and the distance to the aiming point being so ridiculous.  At least the backseater's got decent taste in where he's got the camera focused.

But then again, this IS High School Of The Dead... what else would we expect?

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:49 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Yes, really.  If I can, I want to get a few more episodic recaps done before the next F1 race, too. 

As you may remember from just a couple of days ago, the three pairs of survivors had made contact with each other and were making plans to rescue their family members when Rei turned on the TV...

...just in time to see a remote news team turned into hors d'oeuvres by a wave of reanimated corpses.  The reaction of the television channel to the death of their newswoman and cameraman... on camera, no less... is just about what you'd expect from the world of TV.

Is there nothing that can't be fixed by a brightly colored scene, hand-drawn by kids?  End of the world?  Zombie apocalypse?  Eh, just get more crayons!  Saeko, apparently repulsed by the color magenta, changes the channel, perhaps looking for Ninja Warrior but instead stumbling across...

...uh... CMN?  Whatever.  The Cable Mews Network anchor reports that things are going zombietime all across the planet.  Beijing is in flames.  Contact has been lost with Moscow.  London has managed to maintain control, undoubtedly because they've had experience lately, what with 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead and all.  There's looting in Paris and Rome, which means it's basically just like every other day in Paris and Rome.  Here in the US, the President is allegedly being evacuated to an aircraft carrier-based command post.  Meanwhile, A-10 Warthogs are bombing the streets of New York City.

I'm okay with this.  Really.  Do we need to have a reason to do that?  Aim for the New York Times building while you're at it... the place is full of mindless undead.  Oooh, snap! from the apolitical anime blogger!  While I'm feeling all sorts of triumphant for sticking it to Da MAN, the Pink Haired Harpy Saya is harshing everybody's groove by pointing out that they've got a pandemic on their hands... one that seems to be following a similar pattern to the 1918 Spanish Flu... or the Black Death in the 1300s.  Y'know, two pandemics that ended only because they killed people too quick for them to pass the disease on?  Except with this one, the vectors are human-sized and they walk...

With that thought ringing in your ears, sleep well tonight!

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:08 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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