Should you watch this, Wiki this, or wait for the recap? Wiki this or wait for the recap.
The final battle between Sailor Moon and Queen Metalia begins, even as the other fallen Sailors lie around her! But Sailor Moon’s power alone might not be enough to stop Queen Metalia – so it’s up to Luna and Artemis on the Moon to help find a way to defeat Queen Metalia! The war isn’t over yet though – just as Usagi and the others think that the world is safe, a mysterious stranger literally drops in on Usagi and Mamoru – and she’s after the Silver Moon Crystal!
“Conclusion and Commencement –Petite Étrangère–” is the fourteenth episode of the first season of Sailor Moon Crystal. It’s Japanese anime and I watched it with English subtitles (I don’t speak Japanese, though I would like to at some point). This episode ends the first story arc and begins the second story arc, and is chock full of denouement and exposition.
I can’t quite say if it’s a good idea to put both the finale and the premiere of a “season,” so to speak, in the same episode. In the manga it works out fairly well because I recall there being more story involved and also it’s quite a big chapter. Yet here, it’s confined to the limits of 22 minutes and also the fact that you can’t really shoehorn in other elements to increase pacing without affecting the flow of a story as a whole. It also means that the Black Moon Family arc is shortened by one episode, when it involved alot more dramatic elements than the Dark Kingdom arc. Remember that we’ll be seeing the Black Lady at some point, and her corruption is a key element of the story!
Highlights
New transformation items and weapons for Sailor Moon
New toys for our heroines are always good. Notwithstanding the fact that Sailor Moon gets a costume update or new equipment every other episode (remember how she changed head gear pretty often at the beginning of the season), she gets a significant upgrade in the form of a new transformation compact. Being a dude, I don’t actually know what function the compact serves in real life or why a regular girl would wear such what looks like a really heavy accessory on her chest, but it does symbolise an increase in power for her. And what this implicitly means is that there will be other, more powerful, more threatening villains for her to fight.
Silver Millennium is restored
I think this aspect was always glossed over in the previous series – don’t they have a giant palace to retreat to when they need to regroup or something? How come they’re always meeting at someone’s house when they need to discuss really critical plans? But here, we explicitly see that their ruined kingdom is restored, Sailor Moon is legitimately a princess now that she has the Moon Castle, and the raison d’etre for them fighting (which was sort of revenge for the destruction of their previous lives, and the restoration of what they had lost) is finally answered. This gives closure to their original quest, tying up the first arc’s plot threads in a neat little bow.
Letdowns
Not enough action
Unfortunately, all of the action is spent within the first quarter of the episode, because the rest of it is devoted to the denouement of the Dark Kingdom arc and the exposition/set-up for the Black Moon Family arc. While this may be necessary, it also affects the pacing of the episode. There’s no real head or tail to this, it doesn’t follow the Three Act structure, and it results in a narrative that doesn’t fully satisfy.
Too much telling, not enough showing
There is all this talk about the normal lives of the Sailors, and how they just want to be ordinary girls and such. We never see this. Also, if you think about it, their lives before they became Sailors were pretty miserable. We always see how Usagi befriended them and brought colour to their lives. So to say they want to go back to their former lives is not entirely true – they want to go back to their Sailor lives, without the burden of fighting bad guys every Friday night. Such demanding girls!
No set-up for Chibiusa’s arrival
For all the set-ups and attention to detail that was gone into the first story arc, there was almost no foreshadowing of Chibusa’s arrival! Not even say, a scene of someone spying on them. They could have inserted some random lines about starting a family or how many kids they would have, or even thoughts on how the Silver Millennium would endure for another thousand years – all this would have helped Chibiusa’s introduction and made it more natural! Instead, it’s out of the blue, and vastly different in style than the rest of series’ approach to story.
“Conclusion and Commencement –Petite Étrangère–” is, sadly, an episode that you could pretty much Wiki and not miss much of. You know Queen Metalia will be defeated, and unless you’re living under a rock you’ll also know that Chibusa appears and who she is. The excitement comes in the storytelling, the journey, and it is this aspect that episode truly lacks.
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