天下制覇

Oh boy! A plucky little photographer!

Season Premier Disclaimer:

I like to check almost every new show out. The value of a show is in its execution, not its premise. That said, my tastes are mine and mine alone. Some things bother me, some things don’t. I will attempt to be as cogent as possible as to my complaints or compliments for each show, but be aware that my views skew heavily towards the center. Nothing is perfect, nothing is irredeemable. That said, my tastes and my opinions are mine and mine alone and should not be construed as fact or, god help us, some kind of erudite critical analysis of the entire series based on the show’s first 20 minutes. Feel free to leave your own thoughts on the show if you’d like, but invective and similar will be mocked or deleted depending on which amuses me more at the time.

Impressions:

Ugh. I was inclined to skip this based on the rabid coverage elsewhere, but this episode didn’t have to make the decision as easy as it was. If not for the blasting techno and the title card, most of the first half of this episode was indistinguishable from –insert whatever romantic drama annoys you here–. Five minutes of a random confession scene, montage, and girly gossiping about it was a tad much, plus another chunk of family drama punctuated by dropping a pet squirrel in the bath afterwards didn’t help much either. Of all the things that I think the first series did well, the dramatic going-ons of a 15 year old girl was not one of them. Thankfully, it did pick up a little bit around the 14 minute mark, but even that was just a swarm of CG BEES locusts before our plucky little 15 year old photographer turned into a superspy and was more or less able to freely wander around a secure complex in the middle of it being attacked. Unfortunately, that meant that there was really next to no entertaining action until the last couple minutes, and April was the only one that was on screen for more than about 10 seconds.

Animation is up to Bones’ normal high quality, and since it’s a theme of the season, I’ll go ahead and note that their CG vehiles are only marginally abhorrent. However, for an action series, it was pretty underwhelming. Maybe if they hadn’t chewed up so much time with stupid Suou, they could have made April vs Flash a little bit longer or more interesting. One would hope that they’ll improve on that in the future, but who knows. I’m a bit worried about how much of the focus was on a seemingly powerless and rather uninteresting character too.

Anyway, this does provide a bit of a refresher to the world, so you won’t be absolutely lost if you skipped the first series, but at the same time, I wouldn’t recommend jumping right in either. I’m honestly not terribly thrilled or overly impressed with this episode though, so take that as you will. I’m sure this will be covered to death anyway.

Preview:

Oh, here’s the real cast.