EPISODE 6: Lost July

    Oh. My. God. If the episodes get much cooler than this one and twelve, I'm gonna snap o_O; This episode was just too good for words. But I must try, for the good of the page, to summarize and analyze it. Lemme just say that Rem is now my second favorite person in the series, and Knives the third :p On with the summary!
    We're introduced to a ship that has people on board celebrating about finding a planet that could possibly be hospitable, and Rem debating over the existence of flowers on its surface. It flips to two little blonde kids with long hair and party hats, one wearing glasses with a moustache and eyebrows glued on, that seem to be rather apathetic about the conversation. Later, it shows the darker blonde boy (whom we all know is Vash :p) looking out into the area where people were closed in pods. Rem approaches him, and he asks why the ship was so lonely and why all those people are sleeping. Rem answers with the name of the mission and its purpose: Project Seeds was for taking a slice of humanity off the ruined Earth and moving it elsewhere. Rem says that God must be laughing at humanity's feeble attempts at survival ^_^ Knives interrupts them and they go eat in the Rec room... I think is what it's called. In any case, it's a room that looks like a random green field on the Earth. Rem, Vash, Knives, and Mary all eat lunch together and discuss the meaning of life. Knives makes the observation that the rec room always seems different even though nothing's ever changed, and Rem explains to him that it's alive. It switches to the mission briefing room where Joey, Rem, Vash, and Knives talk about how humans destroyed their old world and how they're attempting to start over again (it goes a little more indepth than when they were in the pod room). It then goes to a scene where Knives stumbles on Vash beat up and crying in a vacant passageway, and Vash tells him that Steve found him and beat him up because he wasn't human. Knives told him that they just need time to let the people understand them, and then there's a flashback to two little embryo-looking babies that Rem protects from the laser rifles. Then we get a long, nifty little scene where Rem is cutting Vash's hair while Knives waits his turn. Vash has his hair cut to about chin length, and Rem tells him that she never noticed how handsome he was before. She gets an idea, and suddenly we see Vash's reflection in the mirror with his trademark "needle noggin" haircut. Rem says it reminds her of the one she loved back on Earth, and she explains how he gave her the strenth to live her life, and when he died, it made her very sad. She joined the crew because that's what he would've wanted. Vash then declares his love for her and says that as long as he's around she'd never be lonely again. 'Tis a very cute scene ^_^ She turns to do Knives' hair, but Knives has run off to a dark room and has cut his own hair. He stares into a display of butterflies and yells something about it being all wrong. Vash comes in and seems startled by Knives' actions. Knives explains he'd just had a change of heart and it would be boring if they both stayed the same. It switches to dinnertime with all the crew save for Steve sitting around a table laughing and talking animately. Steve gets up and makes a drunken fool of himself, to which Knives comments that it's no way to act in front of innocent children. Then we get the butterfly scene. Knives kills the spider and gets his ass kicked by Vash because Vash wanted to save both the spider and the butterfly trapped in its net. Knives leaves the rec room, and then there's a couple clips of him walking into Mary and Rowan's rooms. It then goes to a scene that shows Steve in a pod with a straight jacket on, being condemned by the laws of the SEEDS ship, but he's denying it. Rem begs the others to hear his side, but Mary insists she was raped and Steve is frozen. Rowan and Mary have a private talk in which Rowan proposes, then when Mary asks if he's serious, he reveals that he's set Steve's pod so that he'd never wake up. Mary gets mad, claiming she didn't want to kill him, and he says she's an accomplice. As Rem, Vash, and Knives walk down the hallway, gunshots are heard, and Rem calls out to help to Joey, but the monitors go offline and Joey can't see anything. Rem and co. enter the room just after Rowan finishes off Mary. He aims at Knives, but Rem jumps in front of him and tries to talk him out of firing. Just as he's about to either fire or yield his gun, Joey opens the airlock behind Rowan, sucking Mary and he out of the ship. Rem cries because noone has the right to take the life of another, no matter what. Vash stays with her while Knives goes and consoles Joey, claiming he made the right decision, but then claims that he's human and prone to mistakes, unlike himself. He then kills Joey and sets the ships to crash into the planet when he goes back to Rem and Vash, blaming it on Rowan. They run to an escape pod, but at the last second, Rem leaves Vash and Knives in the pod while she herself goes to save all the colonists. Vash cries for her, and watches through his window as the ship she's on explodes. Knives starts talking about how stupid she was, and how he orchastrated the crashing of the ships so that humans didn't spread across the universe. Vash tries to beat him up for badmouthing and killing Rem, but then it's found that Rem corrected the orbits of the SEED ships, so that all landed on the planet safely. Knives was not happy, and neither was Vash without Rem. It switches to a montage of Rem and Vash with her humming sound life in the background, and then we hear her say "Vash, take care of Knives." We see present-day Vash, 107 years after the landing of the ships, brandishing two guns and saying he WILL take care of him.
    Oh God yes... I cannot tell you how LONG I've waited for this episode! I'm just gonna discuss each point individually and at random since there's just too much stuff in this episode to keep it all in order. First off, since I just got done writing the lenghthy synopsis, I'll start with the ending scene. There's an overall eerie effect when we see chibi Vash crying for Rem, then hear her voice along with several of Vash's memories, then seeing Vash take a morbid, anti-Rem twist on her last words while brandishing guns. It makes you think about how much he loves Rem... we see again and again how he will defend Rem's philosophies again and again no matter what, and that he'd be willing to take a life, the life of his BROTHER because of her death. The thing with her slow humming of Sound Life made me cry... she was a good person, and she's DEAD. The entire ending of the episode just blew me away. Next, we have the whole "One must kill the spider in order to kill the butterfly trapped in its web" scene. This is a monumental point not only in Vash's life, but for the whole series. This is where Vash and Knives' opinions differ so greatly for the first time. Probably one of the first violent acts Vash ever performed as well, beating up Knives because he killed the spider. Rem is 100% behind Vash, and tries to tell Knives he's wrong, but Knives is sure he's right, saying that wanting to save both the spider and the butterfly is a naieve contradiction. He seems oblivious to the fact that he royally pissed off his brother when he kills the spider, too. Neither understands how the other can think any differently than their frame of mind. The theme of killing the spider to save the butterfly is one that appears in many forms throughout the show too, once you think of it. The scene replays when Rowan kills Mary and wants to save Rem, also in episodes 7 and 8 when the easy way to save all the people would've been to just kill BDN, and also in episode 5 when the Nebraska family could've been taken out to save the town from destruction... we can see this philosophy is truly part of Vash's life. The scene just illustrates it on a simpler scale. Let's see... what else is cool... Oh yes, that scene with Rem cutting Vash's hair. Vash confesses his love for Rem, and promises that as long as he lived she would never be lonely; he would always protect her. This scene also provides the explanation of his haircut. As it's something Rem gave him, I can see why he kept it all these years. He's like a new-age Alex, or Rem, as you prefer. Alex taught Rem all his philosophies and how to live, but he died. Rem taught Vash all her philosophies and how to live, but she died. So there's a long line of extreme pacifism rooted there. Just so you know, this scene also provided the most information about Alex, direct from the mouth of Rem. We also have the scene with Knives asking if he'll be eaten like the fruit of the tree someday. Ok, that has no bearing on anything whatsoever, but since the majority of Vash's sentences start with "Rem says...", it's good at showing how much she meant to him. Let's see, what else... After the SEEDS ship explodes, Vash is watching out the window, and the reality of the explosion is confirmed when his ship is rocked by the shockwaves. He then starts screaming Rem's name, and when Knives unveils his plot to destroy humanity and let the three of them live together on the planet alone if it weren't for Rem's foolishness, Vash has another violent outbreak and tries to beat him up again, not out of anger for destroying the human race, but because he wants him to bring Rem back. Knives beats him easily this time though, since his swings are driven by pure emotion and aren't really organized or anything. I just felt so bad for him... it really tugs at one's heartstrings when we hear "Bring her back! Bring Rem back, you bastard!" yelled by our favorite blonde bishounen. Another thing where you can tell Vash from Knives right away is the first shot in the episode. You just KNOW Vash is the one with the goofy glasses on. It pinpoints his character perfectly. Knives is giving him a "I don't know you, freak" look, and it makes it even cuter. Plus he's a little kid, which makes it cuter still. ^_^; Forgive me, that really had nothing to do with anything. The last thing I'll bring up is the scene where Knives stumbles across Vash after he's recieved a beating from Steve. We see scenes of first Vash, then Knives being abused because of what they are, but Knives takes it a little more personally when it happens to him. Vash is terribly offended when he's called inhuman, and doesn't know what to think of people. Knives is very tender and consoles him, telling Vash that people just need to get used to the idea of them being around, and they'd be generally accepted. Of course, when Knives is beaten, his ways of thinking change and he looses faith in the human race, gets a new outlook on life entirely, and tries to exterminate all the human life. Vash just cries. Even there we can see Vash seems to be pushed around more easily than his brother and doesn't take action against acts committed against him. This may be because of Rem's teachings, but it could also be attributed to the fact that he was too young to do anything about it.

Yes, this episode is indeed tied with Diablo as my favorite episode of the whole series. And it does highlight Rem, who is my second favorite character of the show next to Vash. It shows the origins of Vash's thought processes, shows the early relationship with his brother, and shows that the planet they live on is not Earth, and how the humans came to live on this faraway, isolated place. All things considered, Rem Saverem is a great person for making Vash what he is today. 'Nuff said.