Ah, amnesia, one of my least favourite plot devices.
After having a row with Ataru, Lum decides to sleep in her UFO. Unwisely she puts off dealing with a warning light until the morning, and while she’s in her sleeping chamber, her UFO crashes into the grounds of the Mendou Estate.
Emerging from her sleep without her memories, Mendou deviously decides to keep her on his estate away from Ataru, so that she’ll never recover and fall in love with him.
When Ataru and the Stormtroopers learn of this, Megane wants to storm the estate to rescue Lum. However Ataru is of the mind that she’ll come back to him, like she always does. And the remaining Stormtroopers appear lack the passion Megane has. So their bespectacled leader, dons his battle armour once more and heads for the estate (after writing his will of course).
On the way there the other Stormtroopers join him, not wanting to see their leader go to his death alone. And as they discuss their plan at the gates to the estate, they are joined by Ataru, who has finally realised that this time he’ll actually have to fight for Lum…
With the focus firmly on Ataru and Megane, the amnesia plot did not bother too much. The aim here was to amp up the melodrama and the stakes for the following episode and it did that well, and not at the expense of laughs. Animation-wise, not that great, but it does have a few visually interesting scenes, with yet another fight between Ten and Ataru being the most inventive (Takafumi Hayashi animating there??).
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Screenplay: Kazunori Ito
Storyboard: Takashi Anno
Director: Takashi Anno
Animation Director: Noboru Furuse