High Card

Episode 11

OK, so right off the bat I want to give High Card some credit because I wasn't expecting the show to tie in past events to Chris' motivation. The idea that Chris only recently thought of this idea once he started coming across the same exact cards his dad used to save him while working is actually pretty smart. Even the heist episode played a part in all of this because Chris prepared another fake so that he could walk away with the actual card if everything went according to plan. I do have to question how good that fake was and how he managed to get it made because if everything did go according to plan, then his employers would've gotten the fake and I'm pretty sure they would've been able to tell that it was fake. Maybe Chris would've blamed it on the weird Joe-looking guy, who…come to think of it we've never seen again, do we?

I even wanna go out on a limb and assume that Chris knows he's on his self-destructive path. He's going all in on this mentality that the only reason why he survived was to save his sister. He probably feels incredibly guilty that his survival meant the death of his father and he's about to lose the only other family he's ever known. I like how this ties into Finn's arc about understanding what family means. It's not exactly the same because we're talking about a situation where Chris is trying to be convinced to not sacrifice himself for a family member that is still alive for the sake of the family that he has at work. That's a little different compared to Finn's current situation where his family is dead and he's already seemed to come to terms with that. Speaking of, are we ever going to resolve that whole thing with the dark knights killing Finn's parents? Also, the hooded dude in the Klondike family is totally Finn's older brother, right?

If I seem a little bit rambling in this review compared to usual, there's a reason for that. Every time I start following the straight line that this episode lays out for me based on rather a nice foreshadowing and buildup, I'm left wondering about all the other loose ends that barely got that treatment. Was this always the way that the show was supposed to go? If so, then I feel like there were much better ways of utilizing the time that the show had. For example, this whole message of family might have hit harder if we actually got to see Chris spend more time with the other characters who are off doing something totally different while all of this is going on. If High Card doesn't get a second season to build upon all of those other loose threads, then I'm just sort of left wondering what I was supposed to care about this entire time while watching the show. I guess we just have to wait and see what happens during the actual climax of the season and what will be left over when the smoke clears.

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High Card is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.