Letter Bee – 18

What kind of an episode was this? Seriously, this was by far the WORST installment of this series so far. It was ridiculously stupid, poorly produced, incredibly rushed and generally an entire waste of time. It makes no sense. It was horrible to watch. Who were the idiots responsible for this mess?

So get this: in this episode we meet a bunch of people who don’t agree with the policy of the Letter Bees, and are of the opinion that their fees are way too high for the poor people who’d like to send mail to their loved ones as well. Fair enough, competition is always good. So what do they do? THEY CHALLENGE A BUNCH OF KIDS TO A RACE. On a horsed cart. To test who is the best at delivering letters. It only gets worse from there on.

Connor for example halts his cart in front of a few roadblocks. We never actually see anything going on at that road. They could have just passed it, there was no reason to block it whatsoever. Connor stands still because he believes it to be the shortest road and his gut feeling (read: stomach) says that it’ll be removed in no time.

Along the way the bad guys decide to cheat for no possible reason whatsoever, since later in the episode it’s more than clear that they’re good guys. They end up crashing because a wheel on their cart was loose. What the heck? Later, as the finish is near they run into a bunch of Gaichuu (since this was a race to a nearly abandoned town and back, why they didn’t run into these Gaichu on the way to this town is beyond me), and the cart of the “Letter Pidgeons” is destroyed. When the Gaichu are taken care of by the Letter Bees, Lag abandons his cart in turn and just starts running as well. The entire cart just disappears during the entire rest of the episode, even though it would have been way faster.

The endless stupidity in this episode was just unbelievable, but the Letter Pidgeons themselves are just plain badly characterized. They’re just a bunch of paper bags and the dude who could only utter 3-word sentences was especially bad. The animation was cheap and the characters looked even worse and more like cardboard cut-outs with just one emotion.

But what pisses me off the most about this episode was how it completely ignored and side-stepped important themes for the setting, and at some point even contradicted the SERIES ITSELF. It’s like the writers of this episode knew absolutely nothing about the story, and just looked at the first OP for inspiration. Connor just continuously whined about food, even though it had already been established that while he likes to eat, he isn’t completely obsessed over it. Zazie is an experienced Letter Bee. While he can be cold, it’s nothing like him to just curse in front of small children (seriously; wtf!?) and yell at them to hand over the letters they want to deliver.

Also, it completely ignores one very important issue, and that’s what upset me the most about this episode. Lag is someone who we already know is obsessed over justice. This episode addressed how Letter Bees basically discriminate and don’t give poor people a chance. And Lag doesn’t even give this a second chance. He does lecture the Letter Pidgeons on how it’s important for a Letter Bee to deliver the heart of their clients. However, it makes no sense in the context: none of the mistakes that the Letter Pidgeons made would amount to such a lecture: these people simply did not know about how dangerous Gaichuu can be. Lag then completely avoids answering why he’s basically ignoring poor people. This would have been a great chance for the creators to clear up this little plothole of how the Bees make money, but the creators just continuously avoid it in order to go for cheap adventures.

I know I sound angry and I’m very much ranting here, but I really hate to see this show’s potential wasted like this. It really was going into the right direction before this thing came.
Rating: —- (Abysmal)