Meiji Gekken: 1874 Episode 6 Discussion

I'm confused...

Don't get me wrong, this is not the best show of the season, not by a long shot, but it was fine for what it was trying to achieve, and I even enjoyed it at times!
This episode though felt sloppy and rushed.
The end of the last one was already a bad omen, but this one tried to do a little too much, and thus failed at most of them.
Usually, episodes have an A plot, around which the story revolves. Adding a B plot can work if done well and some anime (like Kaguya-sama) even have a C plot.
In contrast, this one had:

• A plot: Yakuza Civil War
  
• B plot: Officer Murder Investigation
  
• C plot: "Spy Girl" (Kurogi, Senri) Temple Exploration
  
• D plot: Ōkubo Economic Troubles
  
• E plot: "Love Triangle" between the Main Character, "Samurai Girl" (Nakazawa, Koto) and his fiancé (Kanomata, Sumie)
  

I know now that the D and E plots are not as important as the other ones, but it's hard to tell in the moment. (C plot should probably be included too)
And certainly the presentation order and quick change of focus doesn't help. To prove my point, this is the order and time the plots are focused on:

Sums:

• A: 10:45
  
• B: 5:10
  
• C: 3:40
  
• D: 0:40
  
• E: 2:50
  

There are 13 recorded focus shifts, with about 9 of them being abrupt scene changes to a completely different plot.
Also, assuming that Kyōshirō is the main focus of the episode (plots A & B), the accually important content takes up 15:55.
This means that 7:10 are "filler" (around 31% or almost a third of the episode!), about 5 minutes of which are in the first half of the episode.
I know that C, D and E plots will probably be addressed later, but my point is that they create an unnecessary buffer between the main focus of the episode, which forces the viewer to switch their attention to a different subject in a matter of seconds (ecpecially when there is an abrupt scene change) before doing it again not even 2 minutes later.
And it doesn't help that these plot points will reappear in the future (or so it seems), because that makes them not actual filler that can be safely skipped.

Even if the goal was to have 4-5 plots develop at the same time, a disadvantage of this approach is that all of them feel incomplete and faster than they accually are.
Combined with the fact that their developments where pretty rapid to begin with (I won't go into detail about that, this post is long already), it makes for a rushed feeling episode.

I think a better way to handle what we saw would have been to double the length of plot A by dedicating a whole episode to it and another to everything else or even sprinkling them in other episodes. This part of plot C especially, could have been better suited as a flashback shown before the rest of the plot, maybe with a small teaser in this episode at the end of the scene that we see at around 6:40.

TL;DR
In my opinion, this episode was mishandled. The content is not bad, but the presentation leaves a lot to be desired. They focus on too many things at once and the pacing suffers for it.

P.S. Nitpick: "Harry Potter glasses guy" (Fujita, Gorou) is involved with everything, which makes him seemingly teleport all over the place (the events probably do not happen in a short time so he has time to travel, but it still looks off)

@gorkthe134th Wow that's an insanely detailed analysis.

I think it's not just this episode. Every episode had around 5 different things going on, and when the show decided to focus on one, it went through like 15 plot developments. If I looked away for 5 seconds I would've missed some relevant detail.

I like the fact that the show is trying to handle so many parallel storylines happening at the same time, so I think punting C/D/E plots to a different episode would make the anime less enjoyable. This could also further complicate the storytelling, trying to explain which part of which storyline happened at what point in time, in relation to other storylines and episodes; for one, they'd have to add more flashbacks, as you said.

I would prefer the show to still follow all the storylines in parallel like this, but slow everything down, so that "time passes more slowly" and each storyline has more time to breathe. It might feel like the plot drags a little, but I think it's better than people getting confused and losing interest.

Alternatively, they could have taken drastic action by outright cutting out characters and storylines. But that could have made the story less interesting.

It sure must be tough spinning so many plates... But I think they're mostly taking the right approach, they just need to slow down a bit.

@perseii tbh I was not in the best of headspaces when I wrote this, so some aspects are a bit overexaggerated.

In general I prefer more focused episodes, but it's true that this anime has handled it well before.

In particular, in episode 4, a lot of characters are focused on, which on the surface seems to be the same thing episode 6 does, but in reality they all contribute to either setting up the tournament or the opium transactions and eventual yakuza conflict we see in this one.

In contrast, in episode 6, all mentioned plots are (currently) unrelated to each other, with very few scenes to transition between them, which is the reason the pacing feels slow. (I also was a bit salty that they spent almost 3 minutes on plot E lol)

In conclusion, I saw the decline of the pacing and the animation and thought it was time to rant about it for a bit.
(btw I wanted to talk about the animation too, after I was done with the pacing comments, but I had forgotten it by the end)

@gorkthe134th Just to be clear, I mostly agree with your criticisms, about how it felt disjointed and rushed. I just had a different idea on how they could fix the problem, but I do recognize that it'd be really tough, and every approach has its pros and cons.

Speaking of pacing and scene transitions, I now realize that the episodes feel like they're just covering as much story as possible before simply "stopping". It's as if they made a 5 hour long movie and just cut them up in 25-minute chunks. There isn't much sense of closure or even a cliffhanger.

The previous episode ended with Osanai getting killed in what feels like an afterthought. And this episode began with the tail end of the sword tournament and ended with Shizuma running, after the big battle at the yakuza parley.

Maybe if it was a 5-hour long movie it would've worked better? It's definitely strange and a little disappointing.