天下制覇

"By the way, we have a machine that permentnly links to your brain, kills you, and separates your soul from your body."

Hooray for Boston’s airport’s wireless. It’s also possible that I’ve scarred these four Indian children that have been running laps around my seat for life by exposing them to this show out of the corner of their eyes. At least, I hope so.

Impressions:

I think the true Anime no Chikara tradition is doing a couple things right, and then eschewing it entirely, sacrificing its writers to the Great Volcano God Mahlua Tahoca, and then driving the show off a cliff. This needs focus  to its strengths. Those are A.) The supernatural, B.) Maya, and C.) The atmospheric/environmental thriller scenes. There’s even a case to be made that Fat Goth Koyasu and his Boy Wonder deserve more screentime so that they’re less of an obvious plot device to appear out of nowhere when a situation needs to be resolved. An episode about Maya’s imbecile friend and her search for the supernatural falls into none of those categories.

The writing took a turn from just bad to remarkably stupid in the second half though. First there was Uchida’s stellar phone call of SUDDENLY EXPOSITION. Because that’s my idea of engaging. Watching someone on the phone. Deus ex machina also seems too light a term for them literally pulling some otherworld machine out of their collective asses to dump the stupidest girl in the school into at the drop of a hat. "Hey kids, who wants to volunteer for a device that technically kills you?" "Ooh! Ooh! Me!" I’m cool with future technology being otherworldly, but give me a bloody break here. If they had just left it as Kozue’s personal experience, fine, I’d make jokes about her tripping balls, but apparently 1999 has machines with A/V linkage into people’s brains and are cool using random students to experiment with. My suspension of disbelief is taking a huge hit here. I hope that Mr. Smith remains out of the Matrix and in Kozue’s body just so she rots wherever the hell she is.

Preview:

Chie? Is that you?