天下制覇

  

That is some champion level half-assed backpedaling.

Impressions:

This was a rollercoaster ride. It started out horrifyingly awful with a minute and a half recap, at which point I said “Oh hell no,” and flipped through to see if the rest of the episode held anything that looked even of slight interest. I stumbled upon some dismemberment, and shrugged, thinking that’d be good enough and lamenting standards for this season, so back to the start I went… whereupon the OP played, full of men caressing each other and staring longingly into each other’s eyes. It followed that up with jumping forward to being bored in high school, followed immediately by a flashback explaining that everything they established in the first episode was actually just a lie, and the truth is that there are just monsters roaming around. Oh, okay. So you just wanted to make a generic highschool fighting thing with ruins in the background, and spending an entire episode lying about your premise is the only way you could think to do it. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then there was bullying, more angsty flashbacks, and faffing about. Yet, I think my favorite godawful moment was probably the explosion because everything just went to hell. The loudspeaker started dispensing emergency exposition about how vampires power up, they tossed in weird ‘comic relief,’ and a mob of CGI people began roaming the streets. Was the fight worth it then? Not really, especially not the ridiculous scene where he held her back instead of just killing her to make space to talk about the power of friendship. While it certainly put Friday’s show’s to shame and then some, that’s not a high bar to clear, and it spent the rest of its time attempting to undo everything it did last week, aside from having teenage boys blather about their feelings and engage in some really uncomfortable sexual tension/dry humping. Not that the first episode was good, mind you, but rewriting your entire premise with a flippant handwave to go right to the most generic thing possible, with added friendship, is not a promising move either.

Next Episode:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.