Welcome everyone, to the grand finale of Michiko & Hatchin! It’s been 11 weeks and we have finally come to the end of this season of Throwback Thursday. Was it good in the end? Or did it fall apart right at the finish line? Lets jump in and find out!
Right off the bat, my overall impressions of this finale is… disappointment. The main thrust of the series was clearly that of found family, with the quest of finding Hiroshi a sort of Red Herring on that road. That your family isn’t necessarily blood nor who you grew up with, but who was there for you and who cared for you now. But the presentation of Michiko & Hatchin ends up detracting from that. The timeskip, Hiroshi’s final actions, the whole thing with Hatchin and her son. It felt like there was a good ending here that simply didn’t get the support it needed to properly shine. Like the series leading up to this point let it down That isn’t to say there aren’t good portions to this ending, there are. But by and large I was left feeling disappointed and hollow.
Getting into details, first up the penultimate episode, “Last Waltz Blooming Out of Season”. This was without a doubt the stronger half of the finale. The back and forth as Satoshi hunts for Hiroshi, Michiko for Hatchin, Hatchin choosing between Hiroshi and Michiko. Satoshi’s habit of violence and threats backfiring on him for an ignoble end, corrupt cops framing and chasing Michiko, Hatchin seeing her father but forsaking him for her true family. There was a lot of good stuff in here and it was generally well put together. It only really suffers from the same thing the rest of the series suffers: Not enough content/exploration. Spending half the show just messing around in the countryside without any real familial progress or character growth is fine and dandy until your finale is left with a number of plot points that simply don’t go anywhere.
Take for instance the cops! Mihciko & Hatchin has long shown us that the cops are corrupt in this country. Even the just ones, like Atsuko and Richardo, are clearly corrupt. They just happen to be corrupt in a way that helps our leads most of the time. This episode shows us another set who are actively trying to cover up a murder and blame it on Michiko so that they can get away scott free. Even trying to get her to prompt a fire fight so they have an excuse to kill her rather then take her alive. This is, at its core, good stuff! I liked the cop side-story! My issue is that it didn’t really go anywhere. The corrupt cop didn’t get in trouble, it didn’t fly back in his face nor did it end up helping Michiko. It just…. disappeared when it was no longer needed.
Satoshi’s end feels much the same way to me! We’ve watched Satoshi carve his way through the entire country looking for Hiroshi. He was betrayed, lost his organization, had to kill his best friend, and was generally brought to his lowest point. All of that with finding and speaking to Hiroshi for the first time in years as his goal. And yet… they never meet. Satoshi never gets to speak a single word with him, their relationship is never properly closed like it was with Shinsuke. You could maybe say that him taking the bullet for Hatchin acted as the metaphorical end, showing us that he still cares in some way. But for me it’s just not enough. Instead he gets shot up, rather brutally to though I found that quite fitting, in an alleyway by some no-name local thugs. It was a very soft, ignoble end for his character.
Aside from that though, aside from these missed opportunities, it wasn’t a bad episode. Satoshi having this showdown with Michiko in the street, trying to shoot her while she basically completely ignores him to get Hatchin thus moving on from her past into the future, was really nice. And the animation behind a number of the chase sequences was great to. It’s not like Michiko & Hatchin can’t do good stuff or that there isn’t a good idea here. It just failed to realize, in my eyes, what the most important parts of the story were. That or it failed to properly portray what it thought they were. Either way, brace yourself. Because you have to remember: That was the better of the two episodes this week.
This brings me to the grand finale, “Run as You Are”. And in case it wasn’t obvious by now, I felt this ending was… lacking. Oh the first half was fine. Michiko & Hatchin spends it finishing up the police chase, meeting Hiroshi, and attempting to tie up a lot of loose ends. I say “attempting” because I believe it fails. Rather it’s the second half that I felt really let me down. To put it in a word, it felt… empty. I didn’t feel anything during it. The timeskip didn’t really fit well into the rest of the episode, Hatchin somehow became a mother making it even harder to figure out how much time has passed, she apparently got into and out of relationship super fast and is living all on her own. Sure she appears to be a better parent then Hiroshi, but that’s a tremendously low bar.
In fact upon his mention, I think my problem with this ending can be summed up entirely via Hiroshi. This character that has been built up since episode 1. He was Hatchin’s father, Michiko’s lover, Satoshi’s childhood friend. He was integral to the plot from the very beginning. And what does he do when he shows up? Immediately disappears again, abandoning Hatchin without any reason whatsoever. I understand that’s supposed to be his character, that he lets people down. But this clashes tremendously with everyone else’s interpretation of who he is, most importantly Michiko and Satoshi’s. I would have liked… something, anything from him. Maybe a small moment about being afraid of commitment, some scene to humanize him and make him more than this walking season long disappointment of a character. Because of that, because he fails to contribute meaningfully to the found family narrative, it just falls flat.
Beyond that there are also a number of smaller, more nitpicky issues. Stuff like how Atsuko got Richardo and the cops to let Michiko go, or how she convinced Michiko to come back at all. They didn’t send anyone to follower her to the airstrip, she could have easily left. And what about Atsuko herself? This lady ran from her post, she was part of a train derailment and let Michiko go again. How is she still on the force? How is she not in jail herself. It’s stuff like this that makes me think the ending was an afterthought. Like they had this idea for a series, this great idea with a runaway father, but had no plans for how to actually end it. And so like a pile of dominoes, it all came tumbling down.
So yeah, all in all I was disappointed. Michiko & Hatchin started well, and then it even recovered a bit near the end. But its complete lack of planning and messy narrative was never able to fully right itself, and we can see that in the finale. Did I enjoy the show? Yeah, a bit. I don’t regret watching it. But it certainly isn’t the strongest series I’ve seen for this segment. Still, that’s another season of Throwback Thursday down. And for those of you that have been here a while, you know what that means: Voting time. Here is a poll, I want all of you to go ahead and vote on what the next Throwback series should be. If one you want covered isn’t on the list leave a comment below and I’ll add it next time. I’ll announce the results when the final review goes up.
See you then, and thanks for reading!
