Occult Academy #02 — Come With Me If You Want To Live

July 12th, 2010

 

Uchida would definitely be more entertaining as a T-800. 

Impressions:

A decent episode, but definitely not as good as the first episode. A lot of Maya’s energy and the excitement was gone to make way for exposition, exposition, and exposition. The first two thirds of the show simply dragged to all hell. The gameshow bit didn’t work for Vampire Bund either, and even just a minute of it here was too much. I seriously cannot believe that they stretched out the Terminator/Time Cop/Insert Time Travel Movie Reference Here joke for four and a half minutes. A quarter of the bloody episode on something that we already knew to be patently false. It was horrifying to watch. I expected Maya to hit him about 15 seconds in, but it… it just kept going. The poltergeist of the week was also presented very well visually and atmospherically (and I don’t care if that’s not a word), but then they fabricated secret passages out of nowhere and it immediately died to blatant abuse of deus ex mechanica librorum, so I was laughing more at how poorly that was all stitched together at the end of the scene instead of impressed by any part of it. It should have also been set up at least a little bit instead of just popping up to attack Maya out of literally nowhere.

Unsurprisingly for A-1’s Anime no Chikara, The writing in general was just not very tight this week. Maya and Uchida teleport from the roof of an enormous school to the middle of a forest, somehow foregoing all intervening space. I’m okay with the idea of the phone that takes pictures of the future, ripped off from any number of things as it may be, but I really wish they had left that up in the air a bit more. When Maya used it to take a picture of herself and it showed her dessicated skull, good. That’s great. It’s creepy and while the leap to "future phone from the future" isn’t hard to make, the uncertainty is what makes a thriller thrill. However, they decided to beat it into our heads about three minutes later that that is indeed what the phone does. I say it a lot, but a light touch is a virtue. Don’t explicitly state something unless you absolutely need to. Show the audience, don’t tell them.

All that and I still haven’t said word one about Uchida. He seems… okay I guess. He was extremely generic this episode outside of his nearly 5 minute yarn about being a super agent and I feel like Maya being both his boss and student is just cheap gimmick abuse, but we’ll see.

Preview:

Yes, A-1, it’s funny because she has ‘kaze’ in her name and you made a reference to wind. Hilarious.

Posted in Occult Academy | 10 Comments »

10 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Chen says:

    The four and a half minutes, if a bit embellished, weren’t all lies, was it?

    • Aroduc says:

      There was absolutely no sign of anything of the sort in the future bit in the first episode, just a generic supernatural monster and the key thing. I guess I’d be open to that part just being poorly presented with absolutely no signs of the supposed decimation of Earth and now they’re retconning, but given that the flashforward started out with clear nonsense, I’m not inclined to swallow any of the rest either.

      • Chen says:

        I thought the opening segment of the previous episode tried to show one of the clones failing to stop the prophecies of Nostradamus in the same time period. That’s why number six was called for the mission. The rest of them died trying.

  • Anonymous says:

    im still wondering… ok, aliens rule the world and all… then lets pan over to uchida smoking a cigar and relaxing on the beach?

    i guess i can stand a joke (if thats all its supposed to be), but that one was way out of context.

    maybe i didnt follow the story correctly… or it was all just a bunch of crap with a few segments being true?

    • Aroduc says:

      I took it as 99% BS, if not more. I’m open to the option that it’s just a poorly written mix of humor and then really overblown seriousness though. Like I’ve said, Anime no Chikara’s writing is not exactly stellar.

  • Aex says:

    So… why didn’t Maya just snatch the phone and take a picture of esper-boy to make sure he really wasn’t the key? Would’ve been my first thought.

    Maya really carries this show, she’s friggen hilarious. I’m also willing to bet money that #6 is the absolute worst of the group instead of the awesome agent he portrayed himself as. The only thing that’s probably true about his story is his mission. He definitely wasn’t smoking a cigar on a beach when he got the call.

  • Anonymous says:

    As long as I’ve been following your blog I don’t think I’ve ever seen you say that the second episode was as good or better than the first episode of any series you’ve watched.

    Not that I’m too surprised, since most shows try to hook people in with flashy first episodes, but it just seems a bit redundant seeing it in every blog entry you post!

  • amyable says:

    If the number of comments generated by these posts is any indication, this series is one of the least popular of the season and Ookami-san is probably the most popular.

    All of which makes baby Jesus cry.

  • rincewind says:

    Finished watching this episode… yeah, late, but well…
    … anyways, really fun, Maya´s faces are awesome.