天下制覇

This face is the last thing you see before your throat is torn out by the hive queen.

Impressions:

The entire first two minutes of this episode was a kid running through the streets until he arrived at a convenience store. The next thirty seconds were a girl stepping out and wordlessly handing him a soda. Well, wordlessly aside from both of their internal narration going on about how this was the start. At least the boy band pop intro it then launched into was kind of catchy. Of course, after it ended, we had the dawn dawning, an alarm clock ringing, teenagers stirring in bed, and after all that, if you hadn't figured things out yet, someone ran in and screamed "IT'S MORNING!" It's just like that old writing adage, show, don't tell then scream. I don't even know what that over-long intro was introducing really. That there's teenagers? And a convenience store that maybe three or four minutes of the show will take place nearby?

The rest of the episode would disappoint from there. At least the running was kind of atmospheric and I could enjoy the music without having to suffer through the scenery-chewing of blithering halfwits. It's one of those rare commonplace Japanese dramas that eschews things like structure and development to instead just toss a bunch of mealy mouthed dullards at the wall, each more inoffensive than the next. No start, no end, no plot, no development, nada. In theory, this means there'll be something for everyone, and nobody will be scared away, but it just creates completely forgettable sludge, indistinguishable from all the other sludge. Hell, it gets sidetracked with some random girl at the 14 minute mark who I'm not sure even appeared in the episode before then, and then partway through that, remembered that there are two other girls it needed to introduce, so blipped over to them just long enough for them to show up and smile, before back to Girl B. It's like storyboard ADHD, except also under a haze of opiods because everything passes in a numbing haze.

Next Episode:

…