The first volume of Space Pirate Captain Herlock started off a little slowly, introducing characters and getting the plot rolling.  But it did pique my interest.  I was intrigued by that DVD, having never viewed a Herlock series before, and was anxiously awaiting the second volume.   The three shows on this volume continue the story, but the pace is still a little slow, and the characters aren't being developed like I hoped they would.

The Noo are a race of incredibly ancient super beings.  They ruled the cosmos eons ago, inflicting terror and fear on all they encountered.  Eventually they were locked away, and banished.  That is until a scientific expedition accidentally broke one of the seals imprisoning them.  Now four of the Noo are out in our universe trying to destroy the rest of the seals so that their race may rule with terror again.

The first thing they did to achieve their goal was to make the Earth vanish.  They fired a weapon at it, and it simply disappeared.  Chaos ensued in the solar system magnified by the Noo who used their power to start wars and make people turn against their friends and family.  From their base on Pluto, the Noo watched as the solar system burned.

The interstellar military fleet was able to track down the Noo, and they send an armada to Pluto to destroy the invaders.  They launch a devastating attack, destroying the base and part of Pluto's moon at the same time, but it has little effect on the aliens.  The Noo use their powers on the space fleet, and soon ships were firing against each other.

The Arcadia arrives soon after the fighting has stopped, and is immediately attacked by the survivors of the fleet.  Herlock isn't worried about them though; he realizes that the true enemy isn't going to fire on them with mere guns.  And he's right.  The Noo assail the crew of the Arcadia, and try to instill fear in them too.  But they find out that Herlock and his pirates will be a much tougher nut to crack than they expected.

The three episodes on this disc finish out the first half of the series, and I found the pacing to be a little slow.  There was a good amount of action and interesting scenes, but the main plot didn't advance very much from show to show.  Over the course of these three episodes, there were some strides made towards advancing the story, but not very many.  Still, what was shown was fun to watch, I just hope they pick up the pace a bit from here on out.

This set of shows focused more in Herlock, a little bit too much focus for my tastes.  Herlock is a quiet, inscrutable commander who always manages to pull victory out from the jaws of defeat.  While that is interesting to watch, it doesn't leave much room for character development.  He barely talks, and when he does, it doesn't reveal anything about himself, or what he's thinking.  In this volume Herlock knows just where to go and what to do at every step.  He and his entire crew resist the Noo's mind attacks, something that no one else in the solar system was able to do.  When things like that happen over and over again, it makes it a little hard to suspend my disbelief.

Tadashi, had a smaller role in this volume than in the last, which was disappointing because he was the character that I was most interested in.  His journey into manhood while trying to avenge his father's death took a back seat for most of this set but seemed to get back on track near the end.

Overall, this triad of shows had more of a space-opera feel to it than I was expecting after watching the first volume.  While this set is just as good as the first, I was hoping for some more depth to the characters.  As it is, many of them are very two-dimensional, almost to the point of being stereotypes.  This isn't a bad thing, as I enjoy a lot of space opera type shows.  It just wasn't what I was expecting after the initial set of shows.

The audio tracks for both the original Japanese and the English dub were in DD 5.1.  There were optional subtitles for the dialog or just for the signs if you were listening to the dub.

I viewed this DVD with both the Japanese and English soundtracks.  There was good use made of the soundstage, with a lot of effects and dialog coming from on speaker.  Unfortunately this was not always appropriate, and sometimes is didn't work well at all.  In one scene, for example, the screen is taken up with large talking heads of various people, and their comments are sent to the rear speakers.  It was odd seeing someone in front of you and hearing them speaking from behind.

As with the first volume, the Japanese language track had the rear channels too loud.  There were several instances of music being only heard in the rear speakers, which would have worked well, but the levels were so high that the music tended to drown the voices from the front.  The front and rear channels did not mesh well for this reason.  The English language track did not have this problem, and was better for it.

The English dub was very good, with very good acting from the talent.  There were not any phony accents (a pet peeve of mine) and the dialog matched the mouth movement.  Because of the problem with the rear levels, I found myself enjoying the English dub much more than I usually do.

Video:

Unfortunately, the picture quality of this disc is about on par with the first volume.  I was very surprised at the low quality of this transfer.  The picture was not very good, especially for a recent show as this one was.  There were a large number of digital artifacts, especially aliasing.  Aliasing (when diagonal lines have a stair-step effect instead of being smooth) plagues a lot of animation, but this was much worse than usual.  There were few scenes where this defect was not present.  There was also the problem of smaller objects shimmering when the camera was moving over them.  This is a result of poor encoding, and it was very prevalent.  These errors became distracting.

If that wasn't bad enough, the full frame picture was very soft, almost making it look like it was out of focus (though not quite that bad.)  The lines were blurred and not sharp and clear like they should be.

The picture was also dark.  While not as dark as the first volume, it was still hard to see what was going on in some scenes.  Details were lost in the shadows, and in dark rooms.  This show would have looked much better had it been just a little brighter.  This show deserved better.

The Extras:

A textless opening and three trailers (Heat Guy J, Last Exile, and Gad Guard) were the only extras.

Final Thoughts:

This show has a bit of a space opera feel to it, with grand space battles and two-dimensional characters.  That's not a bad thing necessarily; it just means that there won't be a lot of character development.  Though the pacing was not as fast as I was hoping for, I still enjoyed the show.  Recommended. 

Read the review to volume one here.