Death Parade #01 — Friday Night Fever, Baby!

January 9th, 2015

  

That was… quite the OP to recalibrate the ol’ expectations.

I’ll get to Garo a little later. I need a break. I glanced at the episode already. It’s 20 minutes of Leon getting picked up by a family of famers and farming, so the only surprise is that they’re spending an entire episode on that before they’re inevitably attacked by a grue and he’s forced to pick up the sword again.

Impressions:

The rest of the episode dialed expectations right back to where they originally were. I think it did get too caught up in its “What a twist!”s, although I’m not sure what annoyed me more, the double double twist that it was her having an affair after all and she made all that up on the spot, all the random ‘accidental’ throwing that hit the boards, or the tagline at the end that ‘good’ prevailed. It really didn’t need the director popping out of the bushes to yell “Gotcha!” three or four times in sequence like that, and I think somewhere along the way he forgot that she would have sacrificed herself if not for him jerking her hand back to the bullseye… unless that was part of her master plan that is. Quintuple twist! It would have greatly benefitted from just a single deeper twist. I found the way they didn’t use his name (that I can remember, I may have been dozing though) suspicious, so I was expecting some big love speech about how much she loved X and wanted X’s baby, with one of his plot convenient amnesia holes being that he’s not X. Alas.

Still, being the first new show so far this season that makes me actually want to say something about the content instead of how absolutely nothing happened is a very significant accomplishment, even if this season hasn’t been full of dreadfulness. They’ve got budget and solid direction, although more than once they did certainly throw around dynamic transforming bar, or dynamic CGI dart throw for reasons I can only imagine were “The animators are getting too loud with their whores again and need something to keep them busy.”

What mostly concerns me is that I don’t really see how they can make this a week in week out affair without running the premise and twists into the ground. That’s absolutely the opposite of a reason to stop watching after one episode though, so we’re already sitting on top of the heap for the season. The ugly, stinky heap.

Apparently Funi’s version had a preview for next week. The actual broadcast seems to have an ad for the DVD instead. Oh well.

Posted in Death Parade | 4 Comments »

4 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • PP says:
    January 9, 2015 at 4:19 pm

    Literally saved anime.

  • ZakuAbumi says:
    January 9, 2015 at 4:21 pm

    I’d say this was pretty decent although your criticsm nailed the weak points easily:
    >the overacting towards the end
    >the flashbacks

    Goodness gracious, the flashbacks. In a show where you’re supposed to morally judge the characters based on how they interact in a vacuum and interpret things with a status quo kind of state, chunks of reveals about their past relations are totally counterproductive. Death Billiards did that better.

    One thing I’d like to point out though is that these flashbacks might be injected through a third party at the right time. With the premise being “People are being judged based on how they behave”, only those could drive things forward and get them to reveal who they really are (I sound like a wanker here, I do realize that). Either that or lazy writing but the sudden shot of the corpses the guy had when they refused to play the game properly was obviously interspersed.

    On another note, this is probably the safest guess in regards to the end: http://i.imgur.com/eEYXWod.png

    • Reincarnation is hell kinda says:
      January 15, 2015 at 11:19 pm

      Is the void really hell?

      Given my understanding of Buddhism and Shinto beliefs, the void is where one achieves eternal peace and reincarnation forces you back into the cycle of continued struggle. The goal of meditation and obtaining good karma is to reach a final understanding of all and relieve yourself from the cycle of reincarnation, and reach “nirvana.”

      The masks from what I read don’t necessarily denote Heaven or Hell as both of them culturally have negative connotations.

      The bartender never designates whether the void is Heaven or Hell.

      Wonder how they’ll develop this in the next episodes………

  • Dave Baranyi says:
    January 9, 2015 at 5:52 pm

    This show is channeling the old black & white Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV shows from the late 50s. Good old fashioned morality melodramas…

    It’s too bad that they didn’t instead make the anime about the opening – a bunch of misfits running a tiki bar with live entertainment… I’d watch that!