A Certain Magical Index 3 #04 — Meanwhile, With the D Team

October 26th, 2018

 

Maybe this episode was a failed backdoor pilot.

This is a bit late because I got through about half of each of the three Friday shows I'm still considering covering this season, and said to myself "Ugh, I can't deal with this for an entire season" and tried to move on to the next. So much for that plan. I think I am prepared to punt on Juliet. Its episode was centered on that one hanger-on girl and leaving no doubt in anybody's mind that it was going to be harem as all hell. The big moment 'proving' our hero deserves his harem? Not being a 100% sociopath, thus proving her undying affection is deserved. Next time, throw her off a cliff yourself. Apparently that's the default for interpersonal relationships.

Semi-Impressions:

Not to spoil in the headline, but this episode was self-indulgent crap. An alphabet soup of names, groups, and gibberish thrown around, no doubt for the True Fans™ to be able to show off their encyclopedic knowledge or just point to an expansive wiki to figure everything out because lord knows this whole episode could've taken place in a damn sewer and no rewriting would be necessary. Remember how we had an entire episode reviewing every single secondary character in the damn franchise? Well, these aren't even them. These is the tier below that who showed up for maybe one arc, maybe in a spinoff, and now here they are, having a squabble over… some goddamned macguffin for some inexplicable political situation.

Note that the solution isn't a big infodump reintroduction to all these random ninnies. Plenty of shows can and have told stories based on an entirely new cast of characters separate from the main ones, or jumps into Exciting Things In Progress. This does neither of those things, although I highly suspect it thinks its doing the latter while teasing us for Accelerator, one of the more tiresome and boring of all the characters in the show, to actually do something. One briefing after another, all about conspiracies and widgets happening somewhere far offscreen. Stuff's finally about to go down… so we cut away to a distance shot and an explosion, then back to another briefing. The only action that happens this week that isn't cut-away-then-explode is a car spontaneously splitting in half, and a van getting rammed.

Next Episode:

Posted in Index | 2 Comments »

2 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Fluffums says:

    This is the part in the novels where the author decided he needs three main characters to tell the full story.

    With a harem of sorts for each.