天下制覇

Could this episode have been any more rushed?

Honestly, I had completely forgotten this existed last night. I think my brain was trying to protect me.

Impressions:

This episode could have, and indeed probably should have been at least a three or four episode arc. Then again, since about half of it is wasted on shots of the two of them running around while music plays and Hugh conveniently doesn’t bleed to death nor do they even try to use any magic to save themselves, one can only imagine the horrors they’d produce if they gave this more episodes instead of actually properly developing things. So here we have zombies wandering around at the Professor and Rasiel’s bidding… which lasts about two minutes before they’re reduced but just sort of a generic chasing swarm while Hugh and Dalian go on a totally nonsensical metaphysical journey full of imagery that makes zero sense as Hugh’s gunshot wound seems to get better with time. Then it doesn’t even remember to do that and they just sort of stop once Hugh collapses to give him time to recover and read a book for them. After creating a giant puddle of blood all over the floor, one would think that sprinting from a ravenous swarm would be beyond him, but apparently not. 

Past that, the ‘story’ tossed in at the end could not have been any more heavy handed. I had enough of that nonsense from Penguindrum yesterday, thank you very much. It wasn’t meaningful when Hoshikaka did it either, while I’m distracted and ranting about shows randomly tossing in crap like this. Meanwhile, the useful protagonists are torching the place and actually taking care of business. Good work, useful protagonists whose names I can’t be bothered to remember. Way to show up in the last 4 minutes of the show and take care of this mess like an actual protagonist would while Hugh and Dalian are off on their magical, metaphysical journey of surviving a zombie horde by reading at them. Who are the protagonists here again?

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

The primary failing of this show that overrides all others is that it was formulaic as hell and the formula lacked any understanding of how an episodic show should work. It had next to no continuity whatsoever, or to be more specific, the main characters were completely extraneous to it. Episodic shows in particular need an anchor between episodes which is generally accomplished by having a more-or-less static cast interacting with different situations. Every single episode cannot be a bottle episode (why do I keep using that term lately?). Hugh and Dalian hardly had any presence at all here and even when they did, it was mostly just to whip out some exceptionally convenient deus ex machina that resolved everything immediately. The number of times they were tied up and had what was going on explained to them before the situation took care of itself was staggering. Plus it gave no reason to care about anything really. New characters were introduced each week and typically dead twenty minutes later after eating up half the episode’s screentime.

Beyond that, there’s also the relatively poor art and animation, the promises of some kind of greater plot about others like Dalian (or Dalian herself) that never manifested, and of course, the shoddiness of the writing in general. The continued overwhelming contrivance that solved almost every issue without th eneed for help certainly didn’t improve matters. Anyway, the short version is, this is how you do an episodic show very badly. It was a potentially interesting concept, and if Hugh had continued shooting things and fighting dragons like he did in the first episode, things would have been much improved, but I might as well be wishing for a unicorn-pegasus steed that defecates icecream cakes, because I’m not getting that either.