Babylon Episode 12 Discussion

Sorta long ramble here, cause I can’t keep the bottle cap on anymore.

That was perhaps one of the worst fucking conclusions to a mystery / psychological series that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

What was accomplished? Nothing. What was taught here? Nothing. What was the ultimate point of all that meandering? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Magase’s Quirk....I mean, Esper ability.....I mean, Gifted abil—.....ahhh fuck it, i dunno what to describe. That shit never had any sort of set-in-stone explanation. She’s perhaps one of the worst excuses of a villain I’ve ever witnessed. Whatever bit of backstory tossed in for her is silly and bareboned. She’s not sophisticated, she acts so, but there’s no true deeper intent, just a redundant af ideal about what’s good and evil. She wins in the end and is now probably gonna prey on the mc’s son now, but what was the point? It was so anticlimactic and inconclusive, considering how the series kinda lost its spirit by episode 7. Any visual cues this show are mostly too hollow without much foundation to really have much deeper theme, context, or meaning. Tbh, episode 3 was the point where I should’ve noticed the red flag, due to how the course of the story suddenly changes to chasing some crazy bitch with supernatural psychic powers to “talk” people into suicide. Zen himself was as underwhelming as everyone else in the cast. One can argue about fitting oneself into the characters’ shoes and parallelism or realism, but seriously.......does realism alone always constitute good storywriting? No, ofc not. The one good thing I can take away from the show: the soundtracks, cause they help with adding to the tension (or at least attempts at tension).

If this was how the original source material went, this series was already full of problems to begin with, regardless of bad pacing or not (only 3 LN vol, 2 manga vol).

And people compare this to Psycho Pass s1 or even say it’s better than latter...I can’t really comprehend that, tbh, cause Psycho Pass had a sci-fi dystopia setting whereas Babylon does not unless one wants to consider Magase’s “Quirk”. Magase as a character would’ve been more befitting in a more supernatural setting.

I don’t even want to talk in detail about the redundancy about the numerous discussions about this “good Vs evil” subject. The conversation went from thought-provoking to childish real quick. Was this just more of a leeway for Magase to have her way that easily because a bunch of god damn politicians can’t come to a straightforward and obvious conclusion that was right there in front of them the whole time? I guess so.

With all that being said, the foundations for this show were too weak to begin with. It’s like trying to drive a big luxury cruiser without any propellers or engine. It felt like a show where the brainstorming just stopped halfway.