Review

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Wise Man's Grandchild - Episode 5 [Review]

I admit that my stomach dropped when the preview image for this week's episode on Funimation was Sizilien. I find her vastly annoying, but more than that, her storyline at this point doesn't seem to be filling any real need in the series overall except the desire to have a romance included. While I'm all for romance, this show doesn't really need it, and the fact that neither she nor Shin have to work for it instead relying on the insta-love trope, just makes it feel like a distraction to the more interesting plot and characters.

On that same note, did we really need to open with a scene of Maria blissfully enjoying a bidet in Shin's house? Again, it seems to serve no purpose other than to shoehorn in some barely-there fanservice (rather like the girls' school uniform tops or Shin opening a gate and ending up facing his classmate's boobs) and just feels like a cheap way to fill a few seconds or a shameless bid to entice viewers to keep watching. If the rest of the show is done well enough, it wouldn't need to bolster itself with things like this, or if the fanservice was given a more devoted effort, it would feel less intrusive and more like a part of the series as a whole. But this half-assing it just feels like an irritating disruption.

Much more interesting, albeit truncated because this show is trying to do so much, is the fact that Shin is trying to teach his school friends his style of magic as a means of combating Schrom and the demonoids. Shin doesn't believe for a minute that they've seen the last of the villainous fiend, and even though he doesn't find out until the end of the episode that the kingdom's enemy, the Blusfia Empire, is mobilizing troops for war, it isn't hard to guess that he suspects it. Shin may be good, but he also doesn't have the sort of ego that makes him think that he can handle all problems entirely on his own, so he's willing to take advantage of the study group he was basically roped into forming.

It isn't hard to think that this may have been Aug's plan all along, either – despite being all buddy-buddy with Shin, he and his dad are still clearly gearing up to use him in more subtle ways. This is perhaps best seen when Shin goes to the palace to get his medal for defeating the demonoid and Schrom – the king makes a big announcement to the assembled people that Shin is Merlin's grandson. He follows this up with his promise not to exploit Shin for political gains (and Merlin's threat to leave the country if he does so), but the whole thing feels disingenuous. By first announcing who Shin is, he's calling attention to the boy as a potential savior, especially since the nobility can be reasonably expected to have at least heard rumors about Blusfia's war preparations. He's also explicitly stating that he, the king, has made this promise – but not that he's spoken for anyone else on the matter. Basically we can see him as calling open season on Shin, something borne out by the fact that Shin can't get out of his house or school for the crowds trying to get a look at him. It's also notable that Aug has made no such promise, and with every mention of the danger the kingdom and its citizens are in, he can be seen as quietly manipulating Shin's sense of justice and his fondness for his friends into doing precisely what Aug, and his father, want him to do.

With all of this, it's nice to see that Merlin is truly looking out for his adopted grandson. When Shin announces his plans to teach his friends to use his kind of magic, Merlin whips out a gate spell to show that anyone can learn how to do it. Later we find out that he had to really work at it, but he did because he wanted Shin to feel like less of a freak with his friends and to be able to live as normal a life as possible. That's some good parenting and the first true sign of someone looking out for Shin as a person that we've seen since he's hit teenhood, and it's a nice counterbalance to the scheming behind the scenes. If the series can focus more on things like this and trust that its plot is enough to carry the rest, we'll be a lot better off.

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Isekai Quartet - Episode 5 [Review]

Episode 5 finally delivers the talent show that has been built up for the last couple of episodes. While it's not as riotously entertaining as I'd hoped, it still gets in plenty of decent jokes, including a couple that only viewers who are extremely familiar with one series or another are likely to get.

The most unexpected twist is that teachers aren't exempt from the random selection of participants, resulting in Rerugen getting caught off-guard by being selected first. He's a dutiful guy, so he's not going to shirk from this duty even while dying of embarrassment on the inside, which is not lost on the students; the funniest part isn't even that he's bad at singing his national anthem or that various characters take heart that they can't do anything worse, but that Darkness gets dreamy over experiencing that kind of embarrassment herself. Her own performance, where she virtually begs one of Tanya's upstanding underlings to literally whip her silly, spins the conversation off into condemnation for the underling because she implies that he always does this. It's a wonderfully ludicrous crossover between unexpected characters. I'm honestly not sure what Weiss' deal is though, as I don't remember anything from his series that could be connected to his "talent" or why Tanya would be flummoxed enough to cut him off.

Amongst other foolishness, the star scene is Megumin using her Explosion spell. Unsurprisingly, Ains is keenly interested, even though the target is a bronze statue of Pandora's Actor, a minion of the Great Tomb of Nazarick that he personally created. Ains wanting to follow that up with a display of his own wasn't surprising, but I was surprised that he used some kind of weather manipulation to create a snowfall. That was actually a neat touch, and the episode didn't waste the satisfaction of the moment by lacking in jokes, such as Megumin being helpless in the snow.(1) The other gag that requires deeper knowledge to get is Grantz's reaction to the snow(2), which was definitely worth a chuckle.

That may be the strongest aspect of this series: it doesn't miss any opportunities. The musical selection while it snowed and Ains' reasons for choosing snow were neat touches as well, especially since Overlord has never delved much into the background of Ains' player. This ending does leave the series without any clear direction forward, but I still look forward to seeing what it comes up with next.

1) Megumin depletes all her magical and physical energy after using Explosion, so she's completely helpless.

2) Tanya ran the recruits for her battalion through a winter hell in an effort to get them to drop out (so she could delay going back to war), but to her consternation, all of them bore through it and qualified. Ironically, it's one of the main reasons why her unit is so effective.

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One Punch Man Season 2 - Episode 5 [Review]

I'm very amenable to the concept of what's often uncharitably called “filler” material. There's this idea that everything in a story needs to serve a unilateral purpose in regards to moving a narrative forward, but I think that's a narrow-minded way to approach storytelling. People and their relationships are messy and complex, so it's only natural that this be expressed in the way that we tell stories to each other. “Filler” gives creators freedom to explore narrative and thematic avenues they might not be able to touch on otherwise. It can grant depth to side characters or grant additional flavor to an imaginary world. It can provide a grim story with some levity or add weight to a normally farcical one. I always want to see storytellers experiment, and sometimes a narrative detour is the best way to accomplish that.

All that said, this current arc of One Punch Man sure is some frustratingly unfocused filler.

At a distance, it seems like there should be a lot going on. Saitama is checking out a martial arts tournament. Garou is patrolling the city for heroes to hunt. Silverfang is on a mission to reel in his rogue student before he becomes another monster. Powerful monsters are executing a coordinated attack in order to completely overwhelm the Hero Association. And yet it feels like nothing of consequence happens in this episode. With all of these plotlines happening simultaneously, the result is a jumbled mess hopping from scene to scene without letting any of them gain enough momentum to do something meaningful.

Garou continues the fight he started with Metal Bat last week, and like the rest of the fights this season, there's not much to comment on. The gimmick this time is that Metal Bat paradoxically gets stronger the more he gets beaten up, but with no resources to communicate that visually, One Punch Man falls back on merely telling us what's happening, which is neither elegant nor particularly exciting. I do find it cute that the fight ends because Metal Bat's angry little sister shows up and tells them to stop. Again, it highlights that Garou is still a decent guy deep-down, who wouldn't stoop so low as to harm a precocious little girl, and he even defends her from the scheming of two nearby monsters. This is interesting, because as much as Garou aligns himself with the plight of monsters, the monsters themselves have zero allegiance to him. These guys just want to use him to further their own agenda, even trying to lure him in with a phony “Monster Association.” Fortunately for Garou, he's all about that lone wolf lifestyle right now. Since he's currently the most interesting part of the show, I want to see how his own twisted sense of heroic idealism rubs up against the reality of a monstrous situation.

Meanwhile, monsters everywhere are creating more chaos than the heroes can keep up with, but the supposed urgency of the situation is lost when the show keeps jumping back to a martial arts tournament going on without a hitch. It's also difficult to understand what exactly the monsters are trying to do. They make a point of showing that they have more than enough strength to do whatever they want, but then some of them decide to retreat for unspecified reasons. It honestly feels like the show is stalling for time by dangling some mysterious master plan in front of the audience. I have to commend One Punch Man's attempt to pander to me by throwing in another dominatrix villain, but halfway through the season is unfortunately too little too late. I can't even get too excited about a matchup between her and Blizzard because the show isn't able to make its fight scenes very intelligible.

At least the martial arts tournament has finally started! The emcee quickly introduces all of the competitors, and we're treated to some flavor about ongoing grudges and backstories, but it looks like most of this stuff won't pay off for a while. It also looks doubtful that we'll actually get to see any of these fights, but that might be for the best. I did get a modicum of amusement from Zakkos' complete whiff against Saitama, compounded by the spectacular failure of his ambition to propose to his girlfriend. The way Saitama and the audience mercilessly flog his arrogance tickled my schadenfreude just enough in the episode's final moments.

Much like a city-sized centipede burrowing its way underground, One Punch Man currently seems content to stick its head in the dirt and flail around instead of moving forward with any one of its subplots. With almost no narrative hook, mediocre production values, and largely stagnant characters, there's not much punch to be found in this man at the moment.

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