At last! After moaning and complaining my way through the last few episodes of Real Drive due to them constituting nothing more than filler, we finally have something to get our teeth into with episode nine of the series.Although this show really does seem to enjoy talking unintelligible jargon with the best of them at times, the crux of the episode was an upgrade to The Metal which went horribly wrong for reasons unknown. Thanks to some quick-thinking by Souta's father, who happens to be in charge of such upgrades and work on the software that powers The Metal, a complete system failure is prevented, but even the brief outage caused by his actions brings chaos to all and sundry, and causes those at the top to ask for him to be used as a fall guy.On a technical level, this episode finally poses some of the interesting kinds of questions that I've been hoping for from this series since the very start. For starters, there's the concept of a future world so totally reliant on the Internet (or a variant of it), that even a brief outage would cause billions in lost income and throw the entire world into complete and utter chaos for its duration. It's an important lesson that so often gets forgotten, that an over-reliance on technology (no matter how supposedly fail-safe) can be a dangerous thing. Also mentioned briefly is the question of what should come first in such a connected world - The safety of the populace, or the ethos and principles of that network. It's the kind of question that gets brought up frequently even know with talk of filtering or censoring the Internet, so again it's a very intriguing point to consider.Away from that, the introduction of Souta and Minamo's father brings all of their family life into sharp relief - Little is really explained about anything, but the tension between Souta and his father and particular is palpable, adding another more personal dimension to this episode at least, and I'm sure it won't simply be left at that.While this may not have been a hugely exciting episode for most, I was personally thrilled at the thought-provoking nature of it, with the episode managing to bring forth these interesting points for consideration without ever ramming a particular opinion down your throat or becoming preachy - The concepts are simply floated out there to be thought about or discarded as you wish. The animation for this particular episode was also breath-takingly detailed, which again added a great deal to the realisation of this future world. In short, episodes like this make me glad I perservered with Real Drive - Give me more of the same please!
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