Kiddy Grade-Vol. 5
(MVM Region 2 PAL DVD)
review by Blackgloves

Two reincarnated youngsters -- sixteen year-old Éclair and ten year-old Lumiere -- work for an intergalactic police squad called the ES Force which enforces the rulings of the trading body: The Galactic Organisation of Trade and Tariffs (GOTT for short). In the previous Volume, dormant memories were awakened in Eclair's subconscious which caused her to doubt her work and the political role of GOTT. After she and Lumiere switched sides in a workers' uprising they had originally been sent to quell, GOTT Chief Supervisor Eclipse sacked them both and ordered their immediate elimination! After narrowly escaping one assassination attempt thanks to the secret intervention of their auditor Armblast, the two are now on the run while their former friends and ES colleagues are dedicated to their destruction!

In the first of the three episodes on this disc: the duo's former friends Un-oh and A-ou quickly track down Éclair and Luimiere, and during a heavy space battle Luimiere is badly injured. With the ship's medical facilities disabled in the attack, Luimiere has only a few hours left to live, and to make things worse, Un-oh and A-ou are still on the girls' trail! Éclair remembers back to a time, decades earlier, when the two befriended a doctor on a space colony where their previous incarnations had fought against an insurgency. Éclair gambles on the colony's advanced underground medical facilities still being operational despite the fact that the place is now uninhabited. Unfortunately, Un-oh and A-ou, who also fought in the battle on the side of the insurgents, have also figured out that this is where Éclair will head, and are hot on her trail...

In the second episode Éclair and Luimiere's intelligent space craft and battle robot are reprogrammed by former ES colleagues Tweedledum and Tweedledee! Now, not only are all their former friends trying to kill them but even their own spacecraft is determined to destroy them or be destroyed in the process! Finally, with everything against them, Éclair and Luimiere launch an attack on GOTT headquarters! After this day, nothing will ever be the same again!

With this instalment, "Kiddy Grade" continues in its development of a much darker tone than was evident in the first few volumes -- although the tendency to shoot everything from an angle that best reveals Éclair's underwear still seems to be very much intact! The cutesy humour is almost absent by now though -- and by the last episode on this disc, it appears that the series is about to reinvent itself as a dark futuristic thriller. It will be interesting to see where things go from here!

The disc contains exactly the same extras and audio options as all previous volumes of the series. Fans of the series should be pleased with the way the series continues to develop with each episode.