Ultraman Teo 06

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Is Teo Too Soft for Its Own Good?

I’m slightly worried about Ultraman Teo.

I just finished Ultraman Teo 06, and it was perfectly entertaining and interesting. But six episodes in, I’m starting to wonder whether Teo is going to find the right audience or strike the right balance.

The show feels like it skews young. Pucchi is basically a Japanese Ferbus. Ibuki is a very simple, innocent, naive guy because he comes from another planet. The whole show is very soft, at least on the exterior.

There’s no conventional defense team. Kaiju are new to this world. There’s no central villain or central threat. Instead, we have this cute, friendly kaiju that the Astronomy Club is taking care of.

And yet, underneath all of that, Teo is doing something considerably more serious and serialized than its appearance suggests.

Ultraman Teo Is Surprisingly Serialized

One thing that continues to interest me is how much these episodes build upon one another.

Ultraman traditionally gives you plenty of room for one-off stories, but Teo keeps moving into sequel episodes and cliffhangers. At this point, it feels much more serialized. There really hasn’t been much of a mythology-of-the-week structure where everything resets after an episode.

I find that interesting and enjoyable.

It also contributes to the strange identity Teo is developing. The exterior tells me this should be a softer kids’ show, but the actual storytelling keeps asking me to follow ongoing relationships, mysteries and threats.

The biggest one right now is the UTTF potentially finding out about Pucchi.

We still don’t know exactly what that would mean. Emma has information about rumors surrounding the UTTF, including the possibility that they make people disappear or even erase people’s memories. I’m not ready to call Teo dark, but there are clearly more serious things happening underneath its lighthearted presentation.

Six Cats and a Story About Friendship

Ultraman Teo 06 is a perfect example of that tonal balance.

The episode revolves around Betchy taking care of six cats for a friend who is on vacation. That sounds incredibly slight, and the episode has plenty of fun with it.

Betchy is overwhelmed by all these cats and gets Ibuki to help him handle the burden. Ibuki misreads the situation, Betchy kind of lets him do that, and eventually we get the reveal that these aren’t actually Betchy’s cats. He’s just trying to help somebody else.

It’s funny and sweet.

But it doesn’t really feel like the episode is about six cats.

It becomes more about the Astronomy Club coming together to help take care of Betchy. He considers everybody in the Astronomy Club his friends, so when he has something he can’t handle by himself, Ibuki is there to help him.

It’s an extremely mundane story, but Teo approaches that mundane world in a way I find surprisingly real.

Then you have Kanna picking up this strange bird feather, the appearance of Vermilios, something interesting happening with Pucchi, and the UTTF continuing to close in on the Astronomy Club.

All of these things are happening in the same show as Betchy struggling to take care of six cats.

That contrast is becoming Teo’s identity.

A Very Curious Ultraman Series

That’s why I’m slightly worried about Teo while also thoroughly enjoying it.

Is it too kiddy for the audience that would appreciate the more serious serialized material? Is it too serialized or serious for the audience attracted by Pucchi and the softer presentation?

I don’t know.

But I think Teo is approaching its world in a very real way despite looking like it should be much sillier. There’s no defense team organizing everything. There’s no obvious villain driving the story. We’re following this little Astronomy Club, their alien friend, and the friendly kaiju they’re trying to protect while increasingly strange things happen around them.

And somehow, in Ultraman’s 60th year, I think that might be giving Teo a connection to the original Ultraman.

Not because it’s overtly trying to homage it.

In fact, Teo doesn’t have many obvious anniversary elements at all. It doesn’t even have a Science Patrol equivalent to immediately hark back to the original series.

Instead, there’s something about the way the Astronomy Club is working out, and the way having Pucchi with them and protecting him is working out, that feels spiritually like the original Ultraman to me.

It’s going back to something very basic that works: an alien comes to this world and fights kaiju.

Then it builds its own strange, soft, funny, increasingly serious world around that premise.

I’m not sure yet whether Ultraman Teo has found exactly the right balance. But six episodes in, I think it’s doing something interesting with Ultraman, and I’m enjoying it.

All Zeztz Analysis | All Omega Analysis

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Inspector’s Notes

Kanna Is Already Investigating the Kaiju Mystery

I like that Ultraman Teo has this simpler, kind of kiddy vibe, but we still have Kanna doing actual detective work here.

She notices this strange feather and immediately thinks it could be a clue. Is it related to this kaiju specifically, or is it pointing toward something else?

That little moment interests me because Teo seems so kid-friendly on the surface, but there’s also this deeper lore developing underneath it. The characters aren’t just waiting for the next kaiju to appear. They’re investigating and trying to figure out what’s actually going on.

Does that feel strange alongside everything else in the show, or does it fit perfectly? Or do you not even care if it fits because this is exactly the kind of thing Ultraman should be doing?

Why Is Shiga So Calm Around a Kaiju?

Shiga is so calm and cool here when there’s a kaiju right over there.

What has the UTTF seen and done? More specifically, what has this lady seen and done personally that a kaiju rampaging through this little town does not seem to bother her?

Is this a joke to you? There’s a kaiju here!

I found the moment a little funny and crazy. Then Professor Minobe comes over and starts talking to her very casually, which makes the whole thing even funnier.

I genuinely can’t tell how much of this is supposed to be funny. Is Shiga’s complete lack of concern telling us something about her and the UTTF, or is the strange casualness of the scene simply part of the joke?

Either way, it really stood out to me.

Teo’s Barrier Looks Pretty Freaking Cool

I’m pretty sure Ultraman Teo 06 is the first time we see his barrier in action, and it’s pretty freaking cool. I really like the way it looks.

I didn’t realize barriers were such a common thing for Ultras until relatively recently. I knew Ultraman Reboot had an actual device he could use as a shield, and Ultraman: Rising really made the idea stand out to me. I’ve also seen other Ultras use barriers, like Ultraman Z with Gamma Future, where it felt more like a special ability that particular form could use.

But apparently barriers are pretty common for Ultras, and they usually seem to look like rectangular screens.

That makes Teo’s stand out to me. It has this cool hexagonal pattern, and I really like the strange metallic look that comes over Teo before he deploys it. It gives a fairly standard Ultra ability a visual identity that feels specifically his.

Loose Threads

Ultraman Teo Is Doing Omega’s “Kaiju Are New” Premise Better

Ultraman Teo is doing something that Ultraman Omega did, and thinking about that made me realize there are actually two similarities between these shows.

The minor one is that neither Sorato nor Ibuki is a conventional human host. They’re both aliens living on Earth in human form and trying to integrate into the world. Sorato fell to Earth with amnesia, while Ibuki remembers who he is and the planet he lost.

That’s interesting, especially in two Ultraman shows airing directly after each other, but it’s not really the similarity I care about.

The bigger one is that kaiju are new to Earth in both shows.

That alone feels like an odd premise to repeat immediately. What makes it even stranger is that I think the much sillier Ultraman Teo is taking that premise more seriously than Ultraman Omega did.

Omega had this subdued, more realistic feeling to its setting and setup. That was part of what originally got me excited about it. Here was a world encountering kaiju for the first time, and I wanted to see what that world would actually do about it.

But I never felt like Omega followed through particularly well.

It took a really long time for the KSCT to become a thing and for Sorato and Kosei to get involved with it. Even when they did, the whole thing seemed kind of weird and slapped together to me, and not particularly professional.

Probably one of my favorite examples of the world actually adapting was taking a kaiju body part and repurposing it as the core of an anti-kaiju weapon. That’s a pretty cool idea. It makes sense.

And if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, see me in my office. We’ll have a chat.

But overall, I wanted much more of that from Omega. If kaiju have suddenly appeared in a world that has never dealt with them before, how does that world adapt?

That’s where Teo is surprising me.

Because on its face, Teo is a lot sillier.

We have the Astronomy Club. Ibuki is a sweet goofball who doesn’t understand Earth customs, which regularly gets played for comedy. We’ve got Pucchi, this goofy little friendly kaiju everybody is taking care of.

And somehow this is the show where I’m getting the more serious exploration of what a world that’s new to kaiju actually looks like.

The UTTF already exists and is investigating what’s happening. They took Pucchi’s pod. Shiga is monitoring the situation. We’re hearing rumors about what the UTTF might do to people. Professor Minobe is reasonably excited about kaiju appearing because he wants to investigate them as a biological phenomenon.

Ordinary people get alerts on their phones when kaiju appear and react almost like they would to a natural disaster. Meanwhile, the Astronomy Club is doing its own investigating and trying to understand what is happening around them.

All of that makes sense to me.

It feels like this world is adapting quickly and, more importantly, intelligently to the new reality that kaiju are now on Earth.

I also don’t anticipate that the Astronomy Club is eventually going to turn into a defense force or get roped into one. I think they’re going to deal with kaiju in their own way, and I actually like that. Teo doesn’t need to become a conventional defense-team show to convince me that its world is responding to what’s happening.

Something about the two-parters and serialized storytelling may be helping with that too. It feels like the show is taking its time to explore these things and letting them breathe instead of needing to resolve everything within a single episode.

Although I do like serialized storytelling, so it’s entirely possible that I’m just getting a lot of serial here and eating it up.

But I think there’s more to it than that.

Ironically, I think I’m getting a more serious take on “What does a world that’s new to kaiju look like?” from the sillier show.

And that’s a little frustrating.

I was really excited about that premise when Ultraman Omega was coming out. I didn’t follow nearly as much information about Teo before it premiered, so I wasn’t expecting it to revisit such a similar idea, much less become the show that handled that part of the premise better for me.

Six episodes in, it’s observable that the premises are similar.

And, so far, I think it’s also observable that Ultraman Teo is doing a much better job with this part of that premise.

I’m happy Teo is doing it better.

I just can’t help thinking about how Omega didn’t do it so great.

And that’s too bad.