天下制覇

And how about some truly out of place jazz to go with that SHOCK and exposition?

Sinbad's broadcast was canceled today (at least 2/3, but I assume the third too) due to the second earthquake, same as the shows yesterday. I may just end up skipping it, being a spinoff to a long running pseudo-Jump show that I bowed out of some 60 or so episodes ago, but we'll see how I feel if/when it pops up.

Impressions:

Lipservice is the perfect way to describe this episode. The world's been destroyed! But everyone's still going to school, hospitals are functioning, society is moving right along. But it's totally destroyed because there's some wreckage, uh, over there. So there's about five minutes of obnoxious exposition we could have cut out, and the narrative as a whole would have gone basically unchanged. And here's some total action! …Happening just off screen while everyone instead looks shocked before we pull back the camera to reveal what it was. Over and over and over again because that's so much easier on the budget and means we can just keep using the source for our storyboards so we can all kick off early to the pub. It certainly can be an effective way to shock or surprise, but like flashbacks, when you're using it as your day to day hammer and nail for putting a story together, something has gone wrong from the very start.

Not helping was the holy hell glacial pace of events, and especially not the protagonist whose personality is somehow less enthralling than a lecture on the whiteness of bread. He snivels and he shuffles around, but secretly has the dark power of darkness and is willing to use it when it counts! That doesn't work for me. He spends the entire episode being paralyzed in terror by everything; other people, the world, himself, etc, and then, in the critical moment, he's horrified again, but after that, he decides, eh, what the hell, might as well use my power. Mostly offscreen. So you don't even have the heat of the moment excuse. And then he didn't really even do anything even at the end. He just unleashed a torrent of exposition explaining what his power was and how it allowed him to stand there and explain things over a ridiculously out of place insert song.

But at least there's quite a bit of bloom. That makes things ephemeral or whatever. Bloom. And all the neon color filters. But mostly the bloom.