What the F was all that? It's an ending, I guess, but for me the series ended at episode 12 of season 1. This whole second season felt like a completely different show. The animation quality was noticeably worse, the ecchi was greatly reduced, and the tone was absolutely all over the place with the first 9 episodes being just goofy comedic nonsense only to do a complete 180 the last few episodes to turn into some serious drama. You go from people whacking each other with foam weapons to knock a flower off their head to presidential assassinations and people lying in pools of their own blood. Pick one direction and go with it. Outside of the kiss on the beach there really was no tender moments unlike season one where even the ghost episode was really heartwarming but also sort of sad.
The end of episode 13 with the beach battle felt like a rehash of Mahoro and Ryuga's climactic fight in season one. I felt like her fight with Ryuga made sense as he was part of Mahoro's past that came back to haunt her and she had to put it to rest, but this guy she fought, this Feldrans, she had no connection with. We didn't need an Illuminati-like villain for the season. Mahoro conquered her war torn past at the end of season 1, can't this poor girl just live out her last few days in peace? I went into this season expecting just a cute slice of life show as she does daily things and makes more friends and got anything but that. The whole countdown that permeated the series suddenly goes from half a year to zero and then she just up and suicides anyway, only to poof back into existence 20 years later around Jupiter? I can't even believe I just typed that sentence. I was looking forward the whole time since s1e1 to see how Mahoro would die, or if she would be saved, and this is certainly not what I was expecting. Her blowing up to take out a minor piss ant like Feldrans is pretty lame. He was not "final boss" material. The image of phantom Mahoro hugging the Earth was pretty touching, but was it too much to ask to just let her live her last few months in peace and pass quietly with friends? We could've still had that same nice final image. I don't know why they felt the need to make everything so bombastic with government conspiracies and shootouts as the finale. It felt very End of Evangelion-y, in more ways than one. If anything, making her come back as a copy, or clone, or whatever it was just cheapens her sacrifice on the beach. I liked what someone above said, that it was Suguru's delusion as he was wounded and presumably dying. Overall between her suicide and re-appearance, the concepts aren't necessarily bad but I just didn't like the execution. Both felt pretty underwhelming. In fact a lot of what pertained to Mahoro this season did, like her revealing to Suguru what she did to his father. That should've been a whole episode after so much build up but they handwaved it in a brief 15 second scene. It felt rushed despite having 14 episodes to work with.
And speaking of, Minawa was a complete dead end that didn't add anything to the story. The theme of an android girl "finding her heart" could have just been accomplished via Mahoro expanding her relationship with Suguru. Instead, most of the season focused on Minawa and Mahoro got sidelined in her own show. Not to mention the last two episodes Minawa just disappeared entirely like even the writers didn't know what else to do with her. Multiple episodes were building up to her and that classmate having a relationship and it just ends with no resolution.
As for this episode, I thought the saddest part was seeing what became of Suguru, how he was cursing Mahoro, saying she only made his life miserable and betrayed him. It sort of hurt to see her regarded in this way after all they had been through. In a way he'd almost have been better off dying on that beach so he wouldn't have had to endure 20 years of suffering and turning into the bitter person he became and having to live such a rough life, including becoming part cyborg himself. It's hard to reconcile that image of him with the kid with all the friends who were celebrating Christmas together just a few episodes earlier. But I guess that's why it hits home more, because you can see people like that in real life, homeless people who I'm sure many of which had good childhoods but ended up in bad times, and people who never emotionally recovered from a trauma. This part was quite sad to see, even more so than Mahoro's death, so it was well done even if the episode was very bizarre. I didn't like this season as a whole, but I will give them credit for having the balls to try something this experimental and different. Was Mahoro the right anime to do that for? Not in my opinion but it's 20 years too late to change that so whatever. At least I still have season 1 to enjoy. Though I do wish they had put the same level of care into season 2, fixed the abrupt tonal shifts, adjusted the pacing, given more time to important scenes and less to the irrelevant wacky ones. I don't know how closely this followed the manga so maybe their hands were tied in where the story needed to go, but it could've got there a little smoother imo. |