Megaton Musashi #03 — Pratfall Assassin

October 18th, 2021

 

I'm very glad I'm not yet trying to remember any character names here.

Impressions:

This is such a weird show, and I'll admit I'm giving it a lot of leeway because of both the weak Friday to Monday section of this season as well as being one of the very rare non-simulcast shows, which just shows how much that has completely murdered the fansubbing scene. It's still not particularly good though. The director is definitely not on the same page as the writer. You've got psychic people going around murdering in the streets, but also they're very silly and slapstick. And then there's the commander girl who's mainlining some kind of bubbling purple drug, while the still-not-actually-introduced random afro kid is being bullied to a comically ridiculous degree. Still, that's just a random thing going on in the background of episodes.

But I can still easily enumerate what something like Evol, or even Granbelm did, that this is struggling with. Like them, it definitely wants to be a more ensemble show with a bunch of different characters all kind of doing their own thing, but it fails to ever tie things together or have a central story that progresses with them. Evol did so by introducing and developing new characters each week, all of them having a story that always came to a head with whatever the monster of the week was. It's a good formula. This is definitely less focused and more flailing. The mech stuff is just A Random Thing to Do, all but completely unrelated to the psychic mind-controlled assassins running around. Heck, this week's mecha bit seemed specifically for introducing the digimon AI thingy, a flouncy cloying idol AI, because that's what the show was clearly missing. 

I realize that I've written two paragraphs, and hardly talked about the episode itself, especially in a case where a summary is probably more helpful than usual, but honestly, I'm not even sure what there is to talk about. The psychic serial killer stuff seemed to be the main 'plot' thrust of the episode, but aside from it going on, which we already somewhat knew, that was just one of about four different undeveloped plot threads going on. It really needs to focus down on one or two characters at a time and tell a complete story before moving on to the next. Ensemble casts and stories are great, but you need to actually put together a cohesive story, not throw in a random scene about a dude loving a random cat because he's a major character and needs his contractually obligated 30 seconds of screentime.

Next Episode:

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