天下制覇

  

Par for the course.

Impressions:

That was about as asinine as expected, but my favorite moment of godawful writing from a series that clearly thinks so highly of its writing came at the very end when Adlet declared “I wasn’t behind this plot to kill you, therefore that definitively proves my innocence in literally everything and I’m the only one who can be trusted.” It was almost as bad as “It can’t possibly be that quiet guy who has been totally vestigial to the entire story, he’s too devoted.” You have to love just how nonsensical Animal Girl #1’s plan was and that the entire thing would’ve been straight up scuttled if Animal Girl #2 hadn’t showed up late. And her elaborate scheme of “save this guy from death in order to manipulate some people into killing him somewhere else” fell apart because she didn’t think she had to hide the instruction manual very well.

But at least they only spent a very slight amount of time on flashbacks and recapping compared to any of the past 10 or so episodes. All the more time to explain that her nonsensical master plan for world peace through mass murder. And by explain, I mean that she said nothing but “I want peace through mass murder” and everyone looked shocked. Couldn’t even come up with an actual motive, guys? She might merely be a bad recurring villain/antihero in a show that didn’t have its head quite so far up its own ass, and certainly doesn’t rise to the level of major boss with her grand menacing factor of immediately running away while everyone comments on how totally badass the way she ran away was. And yes, I do love how the grand plan here was “lie to everyone so that they’d kill Adlet.” Gee. Can’t remember that coming up any time before.

By the time the actual ending rolled around, the only thing that could’ve improved anything was a Muppets-esque trombone stinger while someone went “Here we go again!” going into the Bennie Hill theme.

Final Thoughts:

Way back when I wrote the season preview, one of the first things I noted upon my typical 5 minutes of research into shows was how it did the “who’s the fake!” gimmick, and then upon resolving that in the first arc, immediately turned around and did it again. Little did I know that I would be spoiling the ending to the series a week before it even began airing. The only time this show ever came alive at all was when characters were actually fighting, and they often did a decent job of that, but that was paid for with the rest of the show being cheap as hell and ludicrous recycled footage for recapping. If you cut out just the flashbacks and recaps, the show would probably have been about 2-3 episodes shorter.

There’s so much that they could’ve been doing to actually make the mystery work too, or even just not worried about the mystery side at all and simply had them all fight in constant paranoia, but it had its singular little idea, that Adlet was the only suspect, and it was determined to cling to that come hell or high water, no matter how many times they needed to recap and reiterate over the non-mystery… which was all it’s magic to begin with. That should’ve been what put things into motion for the characters to bounce off of and interact with each other. Instead, a third of the cast just got put on timeout for close to two months, while the rest sat around repeating themselves and occasionally doing things that either made no sense, or were suspicious as hell yet passed without comment from anybody.

This was about three or maybe four episodes worth of content painfully stretched out to 12 and predictably suffered for it and didn’t even come to a satisfying climax. The writing was incredibly satisfied with itself yet extraordinarily weak