Tylor, The Irresponsible Captain #4 (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

This is it, the final DVD in the "Irresponsible Captain Tylor" TV series. It contains six episodes, "Paco-Paco Junior", "Force of One", "The Longest Day in Space", "Snap! Snap! Crackle! Snap!", "My Way is the Hard Way", and "For His Was a Genius No Rule Could Contain". You may think that that final episode title gives away the series, but not so fast.

In so many ways, this DVD hit all of the notes it needed to. Tylor resolves the dilemma of what to do with Azalyn, the UPSF and Raalgon Empire have their war, and so on. Tylor´s crew proves its commitment to both Tylor and the military. There are some twists and turns along the way, such as when Tylor is sentenced to death, or Azalyn claimed to be pregnant with Tylor´s child.

However, there were several areas where the ending left me a little flat. The primary one is that, despite what was claimed on Commander Star´s bio on a previous disk, that she would be the one to discover Tylor´s secret, that didn´t happen, unless you count her learning that Tylor believes in doing what makes you happy. I want to believe that isn´t Tylor´s big secret. I mean, that would be such a non-event. It´s been pretty obvious since the beginning of the series that Tylor does as he sees fit.

Another loose end is the relationship between Admiral Hanner and Tylor. It hasn´t been clear to me since the beginning why Tylor seems so fond of the old man. Considering how powerfully Hanner´s fate affects Tylor, it would have been nice if there was some kind of justification offered.

That´s not to say that I was unhappy with this disc, or thought that the series ended poorly. I just thought that, with all of the buildup, it could have been slightly better. Although the final episode didn´t tie up all of the loose ends, the closing moments are fairly touching, and give the show a sense of closure. Not to spoil it, but I was reminded of one the pleasanter endings of one of my favorite movie series, the classic "Star Trek" movies.

Video:
The video aspect ratio is 1.33:1 (full-screen on 4:3 monitors). The quality came out well on the disc, and I had nothing to complain about in terms of color or animation quality. There is some minor artifacting, though only in some scenes.

Audio:
You can watch the show with either Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Japanese or DD 2.0 stereo English. There is an option for English subtitles. I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. I didn´t think much of the background music when I saw the first DVD, but it´s growing on me. The voice acting and sound effects are good. While there isn´t much use of channel separation, this is a TV show that´s about a decade old, so you can´t expect everything. I didn´t notice any problems with the audio quality.