Welcome back to another week of Eighty Six! I was pretty critical last week as many of you noticed. Whether you agreed or disagreed though I think we can all agree that this week was better. If only for the clever directing. So without further ado, lets jump into it!
So, what do I mean by better? Basically that this week encapsulated all that is good, and bad, about Eighty Six. Take the Lena’s multiple conversations with the 86ers for example. This dialogue was tight and conveyed a lot of information about both sides. On the 86ers side we saw a lot of disagreement. Arguments about how to treat Lena, about whether or not they should bother talking to her, and a lot of underlying tension in their relationship with her. Some characters were accepting of her, others dismissive, others still indifferent to the whole thing. And we got to see it all play out through dialogue and character interaction rather than having it outright explained to us. Most of the time at least. What really makes this scene work though is how Eighty Six juxtaposes it with Lena’s side of the very same conversation.
Where the 86ers conversation was lively and full of movement, a packed and warm environment, Lena’s was anything but. She was alone with all the space and wealth of the world. Listening to a one-sided conversation where she couldn’t even see any of the other conversationalists. I think the way Eighty Six played with the chronology here was weird certainly. The way we see one half of the conversation, jump back in time to Lena and then continue the same conversation from her side but… later was definitely weird. But I found the way it portrayed Lena’s loneliness, her isolation and how she fit in better with the 86ers than her own people, well. If you’re going to make your lead a Liberal Arts degree Starbucks barista style white girl you may as well commit to how her society would react to that. And Eighty Six did a decent job.
This is further compounded by how this relationship with the 86ers blows up in the second half. The way they call her on her hypocrisy, not even asking their names and just treating them like pen-pals, was great. It how I hoped Eighty Six’s world would treat her with how out of place she is. Add on to this how Eighty Six handled Kirschblute’s death, just a single disappearing blip from Lena’s perspective rather than a glorious action scene, and you have exactly what I wanted. Is it enough to make up for last weeks screwups? Not really, especially not when this week has some screwups of it’s own. But it is a step in the right direction and it does rekindle some hope in my heart that Eighty Six can take its YA dystopia and maybe do something worth watching with it.
Speaking of this weeks screwups I did mention that this is both the best, and worst, of Eighty Six. I am of course talking about the entire opening lake/beach scene. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand what Eighty Six was trying to do here. It wanted to use SoL fluffy moments to try and get us to empathize and connect with the 86ers before it murdered one of them over comms. But this lake scene is not how you do that it. Compared to the conversations with Lena it was downright pedestrian. As if there are two different people writing this series. One who knows how to write dialogue and character interactions and one who just knows what the anime tropes are!
I just don’t get why we needed this lakeside scene. It’s not like it was fanservice, the girls were all completely clothed and just splashing around. In which case it makes even less sense that they would have the reactions they did to the boys arriving, but I digress. Was the point to introduce us to the love triangle between Undertaker, Lena and the one 86er girl? If so the scene drove that home with all the subtly of an iron hammer. Repeating it over and over and over again. It just feels like Eighty Six wasted our time here. There are better scenes that do exactly what this scene wanted, except this one is “light hearted fluff” in a show about… dystopian war and racial divides? Its out of place and I think there are much better ways to get the result Eighty Six wanted from this scene.
All in all though when I ask how this episode was as a whole, lake and all, how was it? And I can only really say it was an improvement. Unlike the last episode I never felt preached at. Lena is still wildly out of place but the characters are starting to call her out on her “I have a liberal arts degree” bullshit. Meanwhile the actual 86ers are starting to grow on me as a group. All of the credit for that goes to the 2nd half of the episode by the way. Its as if Eighty Six has started to do the bare minimum I would expect from it. It’s still a watered down Iron Blooded Orphans but the fact that I’m making that comparison at all maybe speaks well of it. Only time will tell I suppose. Hopefully it doesn’t regress in the weeks to come.
