天下制覇

Okay, can we please stop playing the OP now?

Impressions:

A not all that surprising ending, although I'm a little amazed that they spent over half the episode on the goddamned Spartacus crap. What was the plan here exactly? To badly dress up like her and then stand around and die? If so, it went off perfectly. And it only took ten goddamned minutes for Honey to go Super Sayajin, allowing her to give everybody magic powers by visiting God or something. I'm not clear on what happened there. Had this been a show driven episode to episode by individual characters, maybe they could've gotten at least some drama pulls out of that, but alas, they had to bring someone back from the dead just to reach five, and that's by using the omnipresent obnoxious crapbaskets as two of them. And in the end, all they did was fight one midboss. Hell, they totally cut over the evil Tarantula getting killed.

It's not until 15 minutes in when we get to the final battle against Jill. Honey effortlessly slashes her thanks to the spirit energy from the peanut gallery, Jill keeps regenerating until she doesn't. Well, at least that spared us any kind of long epilogue. She just merrily trots off back to school. Sure. Okay. Can't say that's any worse than anything else that happened in this episode or any others in this iteration. but at least there was a dance sequence to the OP. Hip hip huzzah for that.

Final Thoughts:

You could've certainly made a solid show with the story blueprints here. Not a particularly inspired superhero show, but you theoretically have the pieces for your standard season of Arrow or Flash here, from mentor betrayal to killing of various (supposedly) important characters to sappy corny power of friendship ending. At least, if not for all the major issues in execution. Probably the most painful was how poor the action was. Animation was weak, the speedline dimension was idiotic, and the fights one-sided. The second bugbear clinging to its neck was its need to inject schtick into goddamned everything. Carpet bombing a school and killing hundreds, let's make that goofy and silly! Except then it tried to go back and repaint the gags as horrific scenes of brutality… and then got distracted from that to make groping jokes. It wasn't taking anything seriously enough for any of the drama to have any weight, made worse by nine out of ten jokes being "Check it out! I'm groping her!"

And then there's the characters. Nobody ever develops in any way. From start to finish, all Honey does is declare that Jill will pay for what she's done. The Genet thing required everybody to be painfully idiotic, and they were more than happy to do so. It didn't even lead to any big betrayal or payoff in the end. Jill just came out and say it, so Honey declared that Jill would pay for what she's done. Honey needed to actually lose her crap at some point, or at the very least, there needed to be a genuine betrayal somewhere. Jill-as-Genet did little more than hang around and make puppy dog eyes, same as damn near everyone else. The whole deal was supposed to be driving Honey to the brink of despair, yet there was about as much despairing in episode 1 as there was in any other episode. It was a show in abject fear of change, which is especially ironic for something revived from the long dead to introduce a new audience to an old franchise.