天下制覇

 

And here I thought you had forgotten completely.

Nothing of any note (two bad children’s collectable things) airs between now and Thursday. I’ll figure out… something to fill the time, but hopefully there’ll be an early broadcast or two. Next weekend has a brain meltingly enormous number of premieres. Oh, and there was technically a Love Live pre-air special today. I flipped through and besides just recap, it contained a long advertisement for the Love Live cellphone rhythm game. So… yeah.

Impressions:

I think they were really badly trying to work the initial premise back into this episode after completely ignoring it for the last month. Since the climax had passed, the villain already defeated, under arrest, and in chains with a mountain of corpses and Satanic paraphrenia back at his pad, it all felt silly. Granted, law in this world has yet to make much sense, but that plus kidnapping plus the brawl through the city seems like it would make the whole trial thing just a tad bit unnecessary. Hell, the surprise witness was the guy that was ‘murdered’ a few episodes before. Because he was wearing a bullet proof vest and apparently nobody thought it odd that he didn’t bleed after getting shot.

Which meant that the first half was a lot of trying to unring the bell leading up to the big dramatic moment (at least going by the violins) being the antagonist going “Nuh uh. She did it,” and because they’re all terrible at their jobs, they just stammered and threw tantrums. And then she accidentally whipped the key magical book out of her ass. So yeah, it should have probably just ended last week. At least he broke free and went on one last murder spree, although technically, I think the good guys killed that one guy with a redirected pillar. Go team.

 

Final Thoughts:

Probably should have just kept on trucking with the regular cases. Once it threw away its entire premise to become just a completely regular action show, everything ironically ground to a near halt, only lurching forward through vague motivations of there’s a mystery and bad guys want power because power.encapsulated character episodes to subtly set up plot elements to be used for the big one, but this (like most) was content to lazily exposit and forget all that existed, leaving them feeling quite token, especially since many of the characters that had entire episodes dedicated to them disappeared immediately after and whatever lessons or friendships were learned were then forgotten.

It didn’t help that Ceci herself veered toward obnoxious either. As nice as it is to have a bunch of characters with super powers who don’t bitch about it all the time and are ready and willing to use them, that’s undermined when your protagonist looks and acts like a tween who just came from a Wiggles concert. And never fails to throw a tantrum about how everyone treats her like the little kid she, again, looks and acts like. 

Which isn’t to say that it’s without merits. It was certainly the most animated and had the best directed/choreographed action of the season (penultimate episode’s production hiccup notwithstanding), and the magic itself was thankfully just tossed out there without any unneeded explanations about the central conceit. The action generally moved along quickly and naturally, and nobody gave any speeches during them about how their power or friendship level was ultimate. The robo-fights were… not great for a number of reasons, but mainly because every other random thug seemed able to create one and they were pretty out of place in wizard world.

It wasn’t great, but it was one of the better shows of the season until it stumbled over its own plot in the last third or so. The writing (and in one case, the budget) let it down immensely in the end and instead of things coming together, it just petered out. Not a bad show if you just want to see some magic and robots punching each other, but don’t expect much more than that.