Flashbacking Penguindrum #13 — Meanwhile… In the Past

October 6th, 2011

 

Oh boy! Another episode dominated by flashbacks and a character barely seen to date in the show!

Impressions:

This show gets a lot more interesting if you watch episodes backwards. In that case, once you ignore all the flashbacks.. which comprised a good 80% of this week… after revealing that he’s obsessed with his lover (whoever could it be!) as someone looking suspiciously like Momoka runs around his library and that he believes punishment shouldn’t be simple, Sanetoshi kills Himari and tells Kanba Kamba it’s all part of the greater strategy. That’s so much more fulfilling than having little Ms. Plot Device revived again from her magical illness like I expected, although I do have the sneaking suspicion that something almost identical to the above will be a cliffhanger in a week or two. I don’t even know why this show bothers with cliffhangers at this point. I think all the people who actually buy them have gasped themselves to death long ago, or forgotten how to breath entirely.

The pretentiousness this week was also particularly high when Pinky began directly telling the camera about how he was keeping all his plans and motivations a secret. You have been in one other episode and are nothing but a walking ball of deus ex machina and mostly rambling nonsense that you have not given me a single reason to care about. What cause do you have to be smug about anything? You should probably ease off all the overt plot devices if you really want to try to sell destiny as a central theme. It undermines that just a little when death is reduced to a repeated cheap ploy to string along the audience. Oh, but this time, her revival will have consequences. Gadzooks, Batman.

Ah yes, and Ringo decides to accept her destiny and throws herself under a bus. That last part may just be my fevered wishes to get her useless hide out of the show though.

Posted in Penguindrum | 4 Comments »

4 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Nan says:
    October 6, 2011 at 1:54 pm

    You would think that with the flashback obsession in anime someone would have gotten creative and made a time travel series based on screwing with that. The closest to doing a tt back and forth cause-effect juggle I can think of was psyren, and iirc that aspect was one of the more interesting parts of the series…

  • murazaki says:
    October 6, 2011 at 7:38 pm

    ^^ se ve buenisimo

  • Nightshadow2239 says:
    October 7, 2011 at 12:42 am

    I couldn’t help but notice, but you posted this under “Penguin Girl” rather than “PenguinDrum”. If this was intended, then my bad haha

  • Gary says:
    October 8, 2011 at 12:02 pm

    I guess different people like different kinds of fiction. Take e.g. David Lynch, not everyone’s gonna appreciate Mullholland Dr. where the 80% of the plot (it turns out) is the psychotic delusions of a lesbian woman who just offed the woman that snubbed her in a contract killing. Because nearly no one gets that that’s what the story’s about when they first watch it (if they havent been tipped off beforehand).

    So, going to see Mulholland Dr. is definitely a movie where you just have to suspend your disbelief, put your faith in the driver and enjoy the ride, knowing full well that you’re gonna get trolled and it’s all a riddle by a precocious sunovabitch that want you to work your ass off for the payoff.

    Some people (like me) like that stuff. Maybe they’re masochist.

    Then there are a lot of people where that just aint their thing. They want a classical narrative and not some convoluted riddle. Many would say then that, “My f-cking God, why did I sit through that, I didnt understand shit and I dont have a freaking clue if there was anything to understand or if that was just some random bullshit”. Those people are down to earth, chill folks.

    Then there’s the pretentious wankers. They’re not enjoying themselves and because it’s not for them, but they cant for their life admit that they cant say more about it than “this is not my thing, and I’m not gonna spend a working week on figuring out what this shit is all about, and whether it’s about anything”. That’s when a bloviator brings out meta bullshit about “plot devices” and “deus ex machina”. That’s all fine and dandy when one is talking about a straight narrative set in the material world and being about what events go down and what will happen to the characters and nothing else.

    But if you go to work on e.g. Mullholland Dr. with that toolbox you’re gonna be saying a lot of stupid ass shit. Fact is that in a mystery show (like Lost, Twin Peaks, Mullholland Dr., The Prisoner, Penguindrum etc) where a key feature of the genre is that what’s really going down is kept from us to a large extent, you aint gonna identify the McGuffins and the Deus ex Machina’s until the writers have shown their cards. And that hasnt happened yet in Penguindrum, so you just dont know. Patience, buddy.