With that said, though, I think Ao certainly hoped all along at some level that Elena and Fleur would come after him. This is a pretty universal dilemma – an orphan boy feeling as if he has no place in the world, and that he carries misfortune with him wherever he goes. Better to be a burden to people he doesn’t care about than people he does. Ao may have “defected” to the allied forces, but it’s not as though he did it because he has any special trust or affection for them – he did it because the people he cares most about are Pied Piper, and he figured that since he was committed to using the quartz gun for what he sees as selfish reasons, he’d be more of a burden to them than anything. That leaves us returning back to the generational divide, a commonality with the original E7. I think it’s probably fair to say that Ao has pretty much ruled adults out as trustworthy options, with the exception of his Mom and possibly Ivica. Since in many ways this show has been from the beginning largely about Ao trying to find someone to trust, it probably is fitting that this was a major theme of the episode.
Still, after the grand scope of the last five or six eps it was interesting to see the narrative focus almost entirely on the three Pied Piper Pilots, with a solid side of Gazelle and global politics – no Secrets or Scub, or Truth – really, a return to much earlier in the series in many ways. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, given that those were the signals the series was sending with episode 17 – that the big questions had been laid out, and the pieces were being moved into place for the final push. It was an interesting call for Astral Ocean to go with a character-driven episode with a very narrow focus this close to the end. That’s all of Team Goldilocks present and accounted for, then.