Black Clover

Episode 16

A Shonen Jump action show just isn't complete until every character gets some degree of tragic backstory. This time around, that character is Luck, and I speculated last week that maybe he smiles all the time as a way of hiding his true feelings. That doesn't seem to be the case, since it turns out his expression (or lack thereof) ties directly into why he had it rough to begin with. He was born unable to express anger or sadness, so his mother would hit him out of frustration, up until he started coming home with combat victories under his belt. There's some trouble in trying to untangle the goals of this flashback, as the part that informs Luck's adulthood most is that his mom died and left him alone, not really the physical abuse. He was born that way, got abused for it, finally won his mother's affection, and then she died and left him with an unattended knot of conflicted emotions.

The fact that we were about to delve into Luck's backstory at all was a surprise last week, since we were just getting to know the guy. It worked since we were seeing his opponent push him into unexpected territory, and it forced us to evaluate his source of determination, but it arrives this week as one of the cheesiest "power of friendship" stories that I've seen in a long while. On its own, Luck's story is potentially interesting, but the resolution is spectacularly embarrassing. Asta jumps in to give his shonen hero speech, and then Luck realizes he wasn't really alone this whole time! He has friends! It's such a head-scratching moment, and the idea that this is supposed to tie everything together with a little bow is baffling to me. I have no idea what the emotional journey is supposed to be here. Is he supposed to learn to rely on others instead of doing things on his own, One Piece-style? There isn't really a moment where he refuses help before Asta barges in and gives him the pep talk. The way that the events of the plot and the character arc bounce off each other is extremely inorganic, and cross-referencing with the manga reveals how much of the scene's energy got lost in adaptation. This is the sloppiest that Black Clover's story has been up until this point.

Continuing from last week, this episode does benefit by keeping the story busier than usual. We've got two villains to face off with in this dungeon between Lotus and his partner, but we also manage to get through the whole process of seeing Luck's backstory, seeing Asta and Noelle come to his aide, and then watching them all come together to win the fight. We're plowing through the source material much faster now, so I'm grateful for that, though the B-plot where Yuno and the Golden Dawns fight the other Diamond Kingdom guy is pretty substance-lite up until the cliffhanger. The resolution to the Lotus fight is also a mixed bag, as the Black Bulls' constant strategy of just comically throwing Asta and his anti-magic at all their problems is very unsatisfying.

This is the kind of episode where I like it less the more I sit on it. We had just gotten into the swing of things with the Dungeon Exploration arc, where all the expected ways that an early shonen series could keep the story moving were finally being entertained, but asking for the pace to pick up has turned out to be a wish on a monkey's paw. The action isn't engaging, the solutions aren't interesting, and even the tragic flashback amounts to a wet fart. I really liked the juxtaposition between Lotus and our heroes, where he seemed to respect the idea of friendship and teamwork by virtue of his own partner elsewhere in the dungeon, really hammering that home as a theme of the arc, but the second he's beaten and out of the picture, he proves to be pretty underwhelming.

This episode is a combination of many little issues, but the biggest one is that it fumbles just as I was starting to get into it. Some of it is limp adaptation (even covering two and a half chapters this time didn't bring the spark), but I worry we're going to keep running into a much deeper problem where everything stops dead in its tracks every time it's Asta's job to save the day. Asta inspires Luck into his character development, which is perfectly normal for a shonen series, but Asta continues to be so uncharismatic that the moment doesn't feel earned, and the really uncool way that the Black Bulls team up to take down Lotus isn't much better. There are instances with this series where I think "This is it. This is what I want out of my shonen," but then it just kind of faceplants instead.

Rating: C

Black Clover is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw