天下制覇

The fervor the Japanese have for it is something I will never understand.

Just a little later than usual because I'm on vacation and slept in.

Impressions:

Coincidence is, within reason, a great way to introduce challenges for protagonists to overcome. Coincidence is almost invariably a goddamned terrible way to resolve them, and this last little bit was basically built around that. Evil Dog just happened to attack all the other zombies before going after Cat-head. The zombies just happened to all wander away en masse from the school thanks to a particularly insipid speech about how great school was for reasons I really can't understand at all. And, of course, the elephant in the room that's been around for a very long time, they just happened to have a cure sitting around in the very same place they've been the entire time. At least they had the balls to kill the dog… after bringing it back. Standards are so low.

Oh, and almost all of this was done by about six minutes into the episode, and the dog's funeral a little past the halfway point and most of the rest was spent blathering about how brave and great the dog was before some nonsense about 'graduating' and leaving their now zombie-free stronghold that can repel entire hordes with a single speech. Sure, it's safe enough to decorate and pack and hold a stupid little ceremony with nary a zombie in apparently a multi-block radius, and full of secret anti-zombie stuff, but we've graduated! Good. I'd hate for anything to make an iota of sense at any point in the eleventh hour.

Final Thoughts:

While it certainly goes above and beyond a lot of shows in the visual and audio direction at various points, the achilles heel here is the terrible writing, mostly the fact that it spends almost its entire run faffing about, and solutions to every temporary problem they have simply drop from the sky into their laps. Actually, solutions being paradropped from the sky would make more sense than how they simply tripped over them. It's hard to be compelling when you're spending a third of the time in flashbacks and most of the time in the present, there are no conflicts or challenges to overcome. Add to this that two characters were almost enirely superficial to everything. Both Brown Hair and Gray Hair may as well have not existed at all because they had no real impact or influence on the story.

With so many other shows this season so much more dedicated to repetition and padding than it was, it still could've been far worse, but only the first episode and maybe the last couple had any real meat to them outside the occasional well-directed moment, and those were often drowned out by flashbacks, maudlin speeches explaining how emotional something was, and random fashion/bikini montages. Hell, even the primary crisis was overcome thanks to the power of sentimentality. Zombie sentimentality. They never were able to get a good handle on how to do them through the entire thing, alternating between treating them as parking cones and horrifying shadows, but that just leaves a horrible taste in my mouth for the show to go out on.