And with this, we’ve pretty much abandoned the episodic nature of this series and are heading off to the finale where everything will come together, even though we’ve still got to wait for the preview movie to explain everyone’s backgrounds.
There is some serious potential for the ending of this series. At this point we already know that the writers of this show are just terrific: in terms of storytelling. Along with Hyouge Mono and Penguin Drum, we’ve got three upcoming endings who really have the potential to become amazing. There is a very big but here though.
Simply: Bettenou will either make or break this finale. I say this because she has some really good points, but also some bad points. The good points turn her into one of the most interesting villains around: the mystery around her. it’s a very neat idea to have the main villain of a show be a master of illusions, who can even bend those illusions into reality. Because of this, there was no way of knowing what was real. This was a very paranoid episode, because how much of it really happened? When this was revealed, it made all the more impact.
At the same time though, all we got to see of her was a bunch of random images. Heck, did she even speak yet? At the moment she’s only being fleshed out through her illusions, and the people’s reactions around her. This worked really well for Kaishou in this episode: as a side-villain he rocked. Again you don’t know exactly what his motives are, but there are a ton of possibilities with this guy. This show may not spend time fleshing out its characters, but it found some very interesting alternatives to still have a memorable cast by forcing us to read between the lines about them. As for Bettenou though, will that work as well? We’ve seen so little about her. Hiding a villain until the end is very tricky to pull off right. Blood-C pulled it off, but there the main villain’s air was all over the series. Un-Go is different and Beauteou is only one of all the different villains who all have hardly anything to do with each other.
It’s going to be important to bring everything together, and show the power of a conclusion of a semi-episodic series. Bring both the setting and characters to a new level, while retaining the same sense of storytelling that made the previous episodes so good.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
I like this show, but I do have a bit of trouble changing my expectations from what I expected it to be, to what it actually turned out to be. I expected this series to be a set of mind games with a ton of mystery and suspense. Instead, it doesn’t focus on building up mystery at all, instead of suspenseful it’s more over the top, and the mind games aspect of the show is rather held back by Yukiteru being a gullible idiot.
But ah well, I guess that that was the intent of this show: it needed someone who can both walk into just about every trap laid in front of him, be wimpy enough to be dragged around so that Yuno can shine, and still at the times where it matters find his balls and act like a skilled action hero. It’s forced, but it does carry the rest of this series, and I do have to say that the new villains here are pretty interesting, with a possibility to be the most interesting villains so far. Yuno in particular was great here.
Though was the underwear scene really necessary? I mean, this is no fanservice show. It’s almost if it’s a prerequisite for a guy to bump into a girl and expose her panties like that. And at the very least: if you’re going to do fanservice: make it creative. Pulling a scene like that only shows that you’re not really putting much thought into this.
Rating: * (Good)]]> 
Yeah, this was the “calm before the storm”-episode of Mawaru Penguin-Drum. After this there are only four episodes left, resulting in God knows what kind of ending. This episode meanwhile was very different from the others: it was slow-paced, actually linear, and it was meant to flesh out the existing plot, rather than advance it.
Thankfully though, this avoided the common pitfalls of the usual calm before the storm episodes. Most of the times, these episodes are boring because they are just trying to delay the inevitable. This episode took its time to explain what happened between Shouma and Himari, it revealed why Shouma and Kanba’s parents did the things they did (that child broiler!), and this episode did actually have a solid build-up and a climax. The aftermath of this climax in its turn, built up this very effective atmosphere for the final four episodes.
Now, the big question will arise again: will this show have a great ending? It’s Kunihiko Ikura, so he’s bound to have something planned. In general, I don’t really care if the creators don’t answer every single question they ask explicitly. Not answering any question is of course also bad, but I disagree with people who dislike series, simply because they “don’t explain everything”. There are plenty of things in this series that can be better left off to the imagination.
Instead, what I want to see from this series is it using all of the build-up that the previous 20 episodes put into it. Take the current series, and push its story and characters to new levels. Pulling enough interesting twists without overdoing it and rushing through the final four episodes. This is a delicate balance that many shows fail to hit, but let’s wait and see whether this series knows what it’s doing.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]> 
Holy crap! This show just continues to get better and better. With this episode, it once again surpassed itself. This really was everything that an episodic series should be. And heck, this is why I’m a fan of the genre: because they’re able to put in episodes like this. What a trip.
To be fair though, the reason I’m a fan of this genre mostly stems from quite a few years ago. During the past few years the genre has dulled in a bit because it lost sight of what made it really special: the way in which it allows a much more diverse outlook on its story and setting compared to if it was just a continuous storyline. I’m not sure what caused the decline, but overall a big difference of episodic series of the last years is that nearly always, the episodic stories are kept similar to each other, with little chances to branch out, like what this episode of Un-Go did.
I’m not sure exactly why this happened. Heck, back in 2003 you’d even have series that were collections of short stories that are completely unrelated to each other (Human Crossing, Sentimental Journey, Rumic Theater). That’s something that’s completely unthinkable nowadays. Probably a factor was that around 5 years ago, fillers got really notorious. With the arrival of the internet, and how the number of anime each season exploded, audiences got less patient and random episodes that were meant to just fill time pretty much died out apart from kids’ series and popular shounen series. This lead to a huge decrease in filler episodes, but also episodes that want to try a different story for a change.
The suspense in this episode was really great. It was a very interesting idea to just stuff the male lead into this position where nothing makes sense, and it’s up to him to figure out not just what’s going on (this probably is an illusion), but also why everything is happening. It was delightfully paranoid, and the pacing of this episode was completely different from the rest of the series. I also liked how the actresses were used in this episode: on one hand their characterization was very good as they tried to relate to the plot in their own ways, but on the other hands this was about a movie that has girls running around in their underwear as some sort of criticism of modern entertainment. Un-Go may technically not be episodic because of how some of its episodes flow into each other, but it has the same air, in which it tries to flesh its setting and themes out through vastly different cases, and individual episodes that could very well be all perfectly fine standalone stories.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]> 
Yeah, this indeed was a bit of a weird episode in which the creators use a 5-year-old kid to try and outsmart the two lead characters. At first I thought that they’d have some very suspenseful build-up or something, but instead this entire episode turned into a really weird game from the kid to try and kill them.
The big problem was that it relied very much on plot convenience. The plan of the kid relied that he would be able to get away from Yukiteru’s mother long enough to send away a package, that Yuno just wouldn’t tie him up. The final ploy with the poison gas would also have been completely useless if Yuno remembered to just open some doors and window and wait a bunch of minutes.
So yeah, this episode was full of plotholes, but plotholes aren’t everything. Sure, they don’t exactly help in retaining the viewer’s suspense of disbelief, but there shouldn’t be a problem if it makes up for them as long as the story is interesting. Still, the lack of aforementioned suspense didn’t make this the most interesting episode. This is something that I’ve been noticing throughout most of the latest episode. I don’t know exactly what it is, but this series seems to be missing something in terms of delivery.
I also wonder: could another reason why Deus ex Machina picked the twelve owners of the diary be a lack of interest in becoming a god? I mean, so far I have seen nobody who really was burnt on the end goal of this series. Yuno just wants to be with Yukiteru, that twelfth guy just wanted to extract his justice, fourth just wants help with his investigations, Yukiteru just wants to live. And this episode suddenly had ninth helping out Yukiteru and Yuno, who could have been her biggest roadblocks. I wonder for what reason that turned out to be…
Rating: (Enjoyable)]]> 
@#$*!@#&!@!^&!!! I should have known! I should have bloody known! I’m not going to say why I should have known, but this episode just delivered a truckload of major plot twists.
The first big one was revealed, right at the start of the episode: Kanba has been in contact with his parents all along. They’re the ones who gave him the money to cure Himari’s illness. I also love the way this was revealed, taking a place in the episode where you really wouldn’t expect it, with\out any obvious build-up whatsoever.
The second big plot twist: they’re not real siblings. Holy crap. I mean, this is a twist that has been pulled many times before, but this show just got it right by not making this as shallow as the others, which nearly always boil down to “we’re doing this for the incest”. Save for perhaps the first episode, the three siblings in Penguin Drum really felt like siblings, who were especially close to each other due to what happened with their parents.
And just when I thought that this would turn into this strange love triangle around Kanba… it is revealed that the one who originally introduced Himari to the family was Shouma.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]> 
This show is clever. Every single episode contains a single story, but the first episodes of all the multi-episode arcs all contain these slight hints that things aren’t over with. This episode was the same: it already was a great standalone story, and yet there still are a few things that don’t add up.
Of course there was the obvious end of the episode, in which what feels like the main antagonist made his formal introduction, but also: why was the critic of this episode in jail? Why did Kaishou not reveal that he had this guy’s children taken away from their mother? Why did this guy refuse to ask Kaishou about what was up with the books? There is still a whole storyline here that has yet been explored, even though the end of this episode made it seem like the end of the story was reached.
In any case, this episode once again was just wonderfully written. Once again, this show just comes with twist after twist after twist, and things that seem completely random at first make complete sense once everything is revealed. Beyond that, in order to make up for the way in which this series doesn’t have time to carefully flesh out its characters, it does make the cast fun. This episode inserted these small jokes at the points where they didn’t get in the way of the real storytelling, and especially the android has helped here. This leads to quite an interesting chemistry between the characters.
Heck, I’ll be surprised if this show doesn’t end up as the best Bones show of the year.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]>