天下制覇

Oh no! Drunk-Mom, Gun-Haver, and Stick-Wielder!

Impressions:

Man, I don’t even know what was going on in this episode either. Certainly much better than the last one, but still flailing in strange ways and pretty obviously cramming in a Touma speech just to make it feel like an ending. Either one of Accelerator’s fight with Lurch or the bizarre attack against Mikoto’s mom could have been stretched out to be their own episodes (say, in place of one of the many useless episodes that came before), and yet they still had time to dick around on the phone for five straight minutes and make jokes about Mikoto’s mom drunkenly molesting people in the streets. That should tell you how well paced the rest of it was. I’m all for decent action, and it was nice to see some from this show in its eleventh hour, but this was just vapid flailing. Hell, Touma argued morality with Stick-Wielder for easily a good three or four minutes. That guy only had about 45 seconds of screen time prior to getting talked at. Literally about 80% of his screen time was Touma telling him to be a better person. I don’t even think he had a name. Then Touma started glowing and punched him. God, I wish I was kidding.

Accel and Awaki’s fight against Lurch was pretty well done though. Accel remains ever the moron with his powers and continues to use the strategy of "if I can get close enough, I can slap him and wound his pride" approach, but at least he went for the gun when that didn’t work out as planned. Of course, he then rushed in and slapped Lurch once he had the advantage again. That whole segment does beg the question as to why any part of the previous arc couldn’t have been that well animated. Here we have some random antagonist that we’ve known for three minutes putting up a far better and more interesting fight than villains that were strung along for literally a month before collapsing of magical plot devices.

So, yeah. It wasn’t really much of an ending. They finished off Lurch by about the sixth minute, then introduced and finished up the epic saga of Mikoto’s mom in approximately 9 minutes, 7 of which were spent on the phone or telling some random guy with a telescoping baton to stop being so darn evil. I wouldn’t call it limping to the finish line, but I think it may have soiled itself somewhere along the way.

FYI, in case you forgot. No Freezing tonight. It’s final episode is now scheduled to be first broadcast on ATX next Thursday night (US time). Fun!

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

While I do think that the first season of Index was overly maligned for being excessively talking, it was an otherwise solid action show. Unfortunately, I really can’t say the same for this season. It was characterized by extremely poor pacing and very weak arcs where the two most major ones of the season that covered over half the show completely fizzled at the end of both. There was a pretty severe drop in the animation quality this season as well. While Touma was never good for much beyond hitting things, his opponents had creative and interesting ways to slap him around. This season though, Oriana was about the only one who managed to do something other than throw slow moving objects/energy balls or use invisible punches.

It was still okay, with enough watchable episodes to not really annoy me overly much, but this season was little more than that. If you weren’t a fan of the first season, there’s little reason to watch this one. I’m not sure I can think of anything that this season did better than the first. The villains are weaker, the arcs are much less interesting and more comically supervillain, there are few (if any) interesting new characters brought out with no real development for existing ones, and the production took a bit of a hit. It’s okay if you’re already a fan, but this season feels like it accomplished little more than keeping the franchise alive.

And yet I’ll still take a dozen more exactly like this over any more Railgun.