Sailor Moon Mondays: Sailor Moon Stars: Episode 169:
Finally, at long last, the lost season, at least it first episode, of the fabled final season has reached official North American shores. Well, provided you live in the USA as Canada still has no streaming Sailor Moon and they are very bitter about this and will let you know about it vehemently on Twitter. Right, so the episode itself is a very interesting development because, well, the adaptational mistakes made by TOEI at the end of Sailor Moon S really came to bite them on the ass here. So to recap, in the anime Pharaoh 90 is defeated, Hotaru is rendered an infant and Tomoe survives to raise her right. Yea, all that happened in the manga save for the fact that Tomoe was killed and it was left to the Outers to raise Hotaru. Also, Sailor Pluto wasn't dead here having already done the reverse revival thing in Sailor Moon S and joined the others in departing so that Hotaru could be raised and eventually they became a family unit which was the high point of Dreams. Indeed The Outers would rejoin The Inners to fight Dead Moon and by the time of Sailor Moon Stars full integration between the two factions had happened. Indeed, one of the only scenes that is actually from this arc in the manga this episode is the crew talking about high school and finally entering high school The Outers are right alongside them. So this episode is mainly establishing that family unit in The Outers only TOEI hopes you don't look too close to see all of the seams showing as they basically bring back Setsuna with no explanation and she just grabs Hotaru for no real reason. Yea, it is really clumsy but they had to make the stars realign somehow since The Outers are a faction that exists once again. Still, the most curious thing about this episode and this arc is they actually took what was basically a loose end in the manga and sought to give it proper resolution I guess. In the manga when Queen Nehelenia gets resealed she just kind of vanishes and the whole deal moves onto other things. In the anime series she is freed and manipulated into becoming the agent of a new power for ill defined reasons. Unfinsihed business indeed but Helios is already forgotten about and thank god for that.