Angelic Layer Episode 24! I’ve already watched this series plenty of times, so there will be no surprises for me, but this will be my first time reviewing the whole series episode by episode. And I’m sure there will be some fine details that I’ve forgotten or never noticed in the first place. It has been a few years since I’ve seen this anime, so maybe it will be a little different from what I remember. A quick run down of the series. This is a slightly futuristic anime by Clamp, the creators of Card Captor Sakura, XXXHolic, and Magic Knight Ray Earth. The story begins with a country bumpkin moving to the big city to go to middle school. The main character sees a robot fight on TV and immediately becomes a fan and buys her own robot to join the battle competitions too. So, this is a fighting robot anime like Metabots or Gundam Build Fighters, only with a Clamp flare. Last Time on Angelic Layer!This episode is all about Shuko and Sai’s match. Sai declares that she’s going to win this match in memory of her dead little sister. The terrain for this match is particularly cool, it’s Ankor Wat. As Athena and Shirahime trade blows, Shuko pulls out all the stops to win, but Sai isn’t going to be easy to beat. Sai tried her best, but in the end Shuko wins the match. After she’s declared the winner, Shuko makes an announcement, she calls to Misaki revealing that she’s Misaki’s mom! Episode 24!This episode was filled to the brim with much awaited drama. At last the mother daughter reunion we’ve been waiting the whole series for! Misaki gets the surprise of a lifetime when her the champion of the competition, Shu, wins her match then makes a startling announcement. She is Misaki’s long lost mom. Needless to say Misaki is really shocked and confused by this turn of events. She’s still in the tournament audience, when Ojiro shows up at her seats, tells her friends to stay put, and pulls Misaki away. While he’s hurrying along, Ojiro admits that he’s known about Misaki’s mom for a while, and he’s sorry he couldn’t tell her. Then he leads her into the staff only area of the stadium, right to her mom’s private room. Ojiro tells Misaki to wait there, and he’s going to go fetch her mom so they can have a proper reunion. Misaki is left alone with her thoughts, and they aren’t good. She starts to wonder why her mom never tried to contact her before? Why did she leave and never come back? Had she done something wrong, so her mom was avoiding her? When Ojiro and Shuko return to Shuko’s room, Misaki is gone. Misaki is just a middle schooler, and this is a lot of emotional baggage to dump on one young girl. Poor Misaki is lost in self doubt and confusion as she wanders the streets of Tokyo. It starts to rain, and Misaki wanders on. By now everyone knows that Misaki is missing and start looking for her. Shuko has the right idea that Misaki may have left the whole stadium and leaves the competition area too, looking for her daughter. But Tokyo is a big city and Misaki is just one little girl. Ichon has a video of Athena shown on the big screen across the street from Tokyo train station. The same station that Misaki saw when she first came to Tokyo and first learned about Angelic Layer. Just as Ichon predicted, Misaki in her daze had made her way to the same train station and was captivated by the same video that she had seen months before. And that’s just where Shuko finds her. The mother, daughter reunion gets off to a rough start. When Shuko finds Misaki, there’s no running into each other’s arms, there’s no warm embrace. Instead, the two family members burst into tears from all the emotional hurt and worry. They retreat to a cafe, to get out of the rain, but they can’t seem to think of anything to say to each other. There’s too many questions, too much distance between them. Misaki, being an ever kind person, tries her best. She starts talking about the one thing she knows they have in common. Angelic Layer. And just like that, a connection is made. It isn’t a strong connection, it’s fragile and very timid, but they do start talking. After a while they realized that there are a lot of people that are probably wondering what happened to them. When they return to the stadium, they find that the entire tournament has been patiently waiting for their return and the match is still on! And so the episode ends with them taking their places, and getting ready for their match. I think this is a really heartwarming episode, but it is kind of hard to miss that it’s Misaki that seems to be doing most of the emotional heavy lifting. She’s the one that tried to make the shared connection, not her mom. She’s also the one that forgave her mom almost instantly once her mom explained she hadn’t done anything wrong and apologized to Misaki. But when it came to trying to repair the relationship, it was mostly just Misaki doing the work. Shuko mostly was just apologetic and feeling sorry for herself.