Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water - Episodes 29 to 32

Okay, so get this: Hanson and Sanson get into a fight, which they try to settle by racing robot Kings. Then Jean jumps into the ocean to save the batteries that he had installed in these robots, and everyone thinks he's dead. Realising that their foolish quarrels led to Jean's death, they apologise to each other. Then Jean reappears and everyone expresses their happiness at his continued existence.
Yeah; that's what Nadia's all about nowadays. Bring back the sea, damnit!
These episodes would be better if they hadn't brought back Ayerton. His time in episode three was just fine - in fact, he was a bright patch in the dull orientation period. His appearance in the teen episodes was also welcome for a spot of irony and the suggestion that he did care. Now he's just a blowhard and has disrupted the harmony of the six member and one lion alliance.
Thankfully, however, the writers did away with the "this island has weak gravity and you can run really fast and it has a desert as well as a snow area!" idea, treating the island forever after as just a tropical island. That makes it marginally more pallatable. The fact that Sanson has made a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner - technological appliances he couldn't have hoped to have created on the Nautilus - really grates.

Then Nadia finds a secret cave and history is revealed - important history that is interesting to one and all and has something to do with the overbearing plot! It's odd that it took them four months to find these things. But hey, at least they did.
Then they land in Africa and are treated to a feast by an African tribe. Then a poacher steals King so that he may lay claim to the tribe's beloved treasure of a tin of food (!).
It's really depressing that Nadia became such a series of stops and starts. It's not that it's no good at all any more; it's that the story has fallen asleep. For the very short time that it pokes its head in, though, it's interesting. At the start of one of the episodes, the narrator (now played by Inoue Kikuko, the first narrator having disappeared [possibly because he saw the island coming]) asks "oh, and what is the secret of Nadia's Blue Water?" as if conceding that the preceding episodes have been largely irrelevant.

But there are only seven episodes left! Bring on the inevitable resurrections! Bring on the worthwhile! The island episodes (both islands) would have been okay, but stretching them to what amounts to more than a quarter of the series is definitely just that - pushing it. With the Nautilus, you knew where you stood. The battles were infrequent, but it just seemed that much more real.
One should just be glad that the concluding episodes are within reach ... these past two lots would have been a very sour note to have had to have waited on - this is anime which has a brief detour over broken glass in its journey.