Predictions and Observations:
Mother Knows Best

Episode originally made available online circa November 29, 2010
This Post Posted: December 23, 2010

Couldn't Yusei and Bruno take a stab at fixing Zora's clock? Guess their thing is runners, not clocks, but they *are* engineers. Conversely, I wonder if Linden's clock knowhow can come in handy with the new engine designing? He does seem to know a thing or two about spinning gears.

Aww, it's a Zora episode! That's so sweet! Finally we get some background on Zora as a character, and we get to meet Reginald-- I'm guessing, though actually the name of Linden's dad is never stated out loud in the episode. One of my first questions: Zora says that Linden is her youngest son; meaning he might have an older brother or two? My second question: that *is* Reginald, right? For sure?

Linden says, "You're even cooler than I thought you'd be" -- does that mean Zora's been in touch with him and written to him chatting about her boarders? Or just to let him know, when he came to stay, he'd be sharing his room?

Seeing this, we can understand a lot more why Zora treats Yusei preferentially and gets easily aggravated with Jack and Crow. Even though Yusei is definitely a hardcore duelist, he takes his engineering just as seriously because he loves that, too, which is a balance she could wish for Linden understanding. And Jack and Crow's other interests are a bit harder for Zora to see or appreciate, so to her it probably looks as though they *have* taken that road to be career duelists.

Martha also had some disparaging words about dueling: "I hope at least you won your little game... which is why it breaks my heart to see you back here dueling..." (ep#36) What is it about Zora and Martha's generation? They seem to both have a fairly negative opinion about dueling as means to a future.

No one's ever *just a duelist*. Pro duelists come in all types, with all different cards, and those cards represent to us their hopes and dreams, their other passions and hobbies, where they come from and what's important to them. For instance, Yusei's cards reflect his Satellite heritage and his love of engineering. Linden's cards scream that he loves to work on clocks. My point is that no one is *just a duelist*; if dueling itself were the only thing one's life was about, then there would be no cards that represent that person, because one's cards are a reflection of who they are. It would be like putting a mirror up to a mirror; it's not going to reflect anything meaningful.

I notice that Akiza really relates to Linden; she takes an interest in reuniting someone who's estranged from a parent. She's been there.

Why does Crow take even more of an interest, though? Actually, both of Crow's duels this season have been all about families, parents and kids, which is something that's fairly strange to him; as far as we know, Crow never knew what it was like to be part of a family with parents. And he found other families to grow up in; his friends, and we know he caused Martha some headaches when he was nestling-aged (ep#68). He extends a similar invitation to Bashford-- a family of friends-- and he takes a stand to keep Linden from throwing away the family that he has, even though he knows what it's like to be on Zora's bad side. I wonder... are we going to find out who Crow's parents were this season, or something wild and wacky like that? What are we building up to in Crow's very subtle plotline here?

The odds are three to one that the Clock Knights power up; only one outcome out of the four possible is unfavorable to Linden-- that of getting moon twice.

I think the concept of the Clock Knights is based on conversion to 24-hour clock time -- three o'clock AM is three hundred hours, but three o'clock PM is fifteen hundred hours; therefore 300 or 1500 attack points. That is kind of cool, I have to say. Any random set of facts you'd care to learn, there's a set of cards for it... I've learned so much cool stuff doing research for this post over the years...

Ghibli is another name for Sirocco. "Ghibli" is used in North Africa, particularly Libya, and the word "Sirocco" is typically Italian. The Spanish and French also have their own names for this wind, which blows out of the Sahara and onto the southern coasts of Europe. And it *is* searing, or so I read. (Wikipedia, "Sirocco")

So we get reintroduced to Time Wizard! The good ol' "master of the past and the future"! (Think that's quoted from "Keith's Machinations II", but I'd need to look it up and I don't have the time right now) And its non-Duelist-Kingdom rules. Woot. And Mirror Force in the same duel, which I guess highlights Crow's acting as a mentor to Linden. Also, Linden starts out with the sure wins in the chance games, but Time Wizard's a more daring longshot.

So if this is the town clock, and a council decision is tearing it down, that means this is a smaller, independent town, a suburb, of New Domino itself and this is its clock. Otherwise, it'd fall under the jurisdiction of the City, right? The office of the Director-General? Or the Senate?

So Crow peeked at Linden's deck. Is that really *fair*? I guess, since it came up in the flashback, "I *have* seen your duel deck!! And I *do* understand, I have since you were a boy!" Crow knew that, to see both sides of the situation, to figure out if he could see what Zora had in Linden's deck, that Linden himself hadn't seen, it was worth it to him to bend the rules a bit for a good cause. When did Crow get a *chance* to glance at Linden's deck, though? Maybe when he was changing into the suit?

The last time we ran episodes out of order, it was due to violent psychic defenestration from the top of a skyscraper that would soon be burned to the ground after losing a fight with a giant radioactive hummingbird. I think it was the defenestration and probably also Sayer's falling right through the center of the building like that that got those episodes quietly skipped over, though Yusei vs. Akiza was pretty violent, too, and seeing Yusei that afraid to duel can be pretty scary and depressing. So, with that in mind as my precedent, the big question on my mind was, why on *Earth* did we skip *this* one? Considering what comes after it that we *did* air, I thought episode 85 must be extremely, catastrophically, ruinously dark and scary. Turns out, or so I hear, that why they actually skipped over this episode is because they don't want to finish the Crashtown arc on Christmas Day, since we've got the 25th on a Saturday this year. This probably means it's a) very scary, and they'd get in trouble for showing something so dreadful on such a holiday, or b) very important, and they know that nobody will be watching on Christmas morning and they don't want to give the whole audience that big a continuity gap.

Jack's the one who notices that Crow planned to lose. He seems to be pretty perceptive in stuff like that, in gauging people's motives for dueling.

This episode also begins a theme of seeking forgiveness, of figuring out what to do when you've messed up and it seems like there's no way to fix it, which the Crashtown arc continues in spades. That also goes for the theme of seeing only the negative in a situation. This episode also ends with a *happy ending* at sunset. And I'm really marveling right now that 5D's went from this shallow to that deep in the space of a few episodes. Really surreal to be working on this episode at the same time we're in the thick of Crashtown, really...

Okay, I'm finally calling this done, I guess. I don't like having a post open this long, and I've been sort of working on this alongside everything else. Hope you enjoyed it! - Clio

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