天下制覇

   

Such feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings.

Impressions:

How appropriate that the response to all the stuff going on in the background is a great big collective shrug from everybody involved before the status quo continues right on quoing with nary so much as a ripple in absolutely anything. One wonders why they spent any time on it at all, or why it even existed in the first place. Hell, I still have no idea what their definition of ‘human emotion’ is. Probably crying, but the ability to conjure violins for background music on command would also fit perfectly.

Speaking of which! Their attempt to yank on the heart strings through Whose-Her-Face realizing that her suicide was short sighted and selfish by playing make believe with how sad pretend-family was and the life she gave up was also blithely transparent and I’m not in the mood to have any of that crap. It grated on me the same way as when he gave that one woman who spent two decades abusing, neglecting, and exploiting her children and was killed because she beat her assistant a hug and told her that she really did try her best, only this time, the hug lasted about ten times as long with forty times the sad violins. As a character, all Skatey did the entire time was mope about and occasionally yell some vacuous banality about people being complicated. This is not a character I feel any attachment to. This is hardly a character period. What made her any more special or different than that other guy who also committed suicide? Screentime? Violins? Oh right, the sudden attack of the feelings from a our golemesque main character when she proved her worth or whatever. It must have been emotional then. Otherwise, why else would Mr. Roboto cry?

Final Thoughts:

It started out fairly strongly, if a bit with its own head up its ass and jammed even further in the second episode. A few of the episodes were interesting, if a bit too TWISTY and pleased with its own cleverness, along with oddly presenting both murder and suicide as if they were earth shattering things which gave even immortal demigods pause, but the more it tried to call attention to the meaning, process, and mystery of Whose-Her-Face, the more things fell apart, just to give a collective shrug about it all at the end for some weak saccharine attempts to tug at the heart strings over characters whose ‘growth’ has been nothing more than standing around mawkishly. All it managed was the hollow platitudes of “people are complicated” and “suicide sucks,” which aren’t nearly as mindblowing as the show seems to think, and doesn’t present anything beyond that. The first part in particular strikes me as petulant more than anything else, particularly since that seems to be the sum and total of the statement they’re willing to make. It probably would have helped if they didn’t turn ‘judging’ into overt psychological torture partway through, where the loser is whoever turns into a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath. You’re really selling that “guess they’re not so complicated” part after all, just in the entirely opposite way.

Muddying that further was the really bizarre and almost tangential aside about having human emotions, but since the representative of emotions that they use is an impassive robot and the representative of lack-of-emotions is a hot headed firebrand who constantly lashes out in frustration, spite, anger, arrogance, and takes sadistic glee in tormenting people, I really couldn’t tell you what their definition of emotion is. Unfortunately, as the show went on, the ‘lore’ episodes took over and everything ‘important’ in them was simply spat out at the screen in fits of exposition. When it wasn’t that, it was transparent attempts to make the audience feel sorry for a character whose entire arc was just remembering that she killed herself and now regrets it.

Instead of trying to clumsily mash at the heart strings with a golem and ritalined-up cocktail waitress while simultaneously tossing out hackneyed philosophical truisms, it would have been much better served to simply stick to a more superficial procedural case of the week format from start to finish, with maybe a particularly involved, tricky one spread out over a couple episodes to wrap things up with a satisfying conclusion instead of blaring from Gabriel’s horn that suicide is sad.