Yurei Deco

Episode 11

I'll give this to “Fate Changes Twice": If you just look at it as a relatively action-packed adventure that is meant to get us to the proper climax of Yurei Deco, it works perfectly fine. Hack, Berry, and Finn finally make it to the moon/sky-base/server/thing that is “Mark Twain", which is a cool setting in and of itself, and there they tap into the Hyperverse to crack open Tom Sawyer Island's most secret of codes to solve the Phantom Zero mystery once and for all. It's solid stuff in that respect, and we even get a decently cool action scene where Hack finally manages to hit the Glitchy-Witchy with one of those darned paper airplanes. I won't complain about any of that.

What I will complain about, though, is how much Yurei Deco is struggling to convey any sense of dramatic urgency or weight, even in these ostensibly final chapters of the series. You'd think a trip to the hidden aerial server to hack into the heart of your society's entire infrastructure would be a suspenseful and exciting one, but the characters never feel as impressed or scared as they probably ought to. Even when they're in the middle of their most important mission ever, Hack and Berry treat this scenario with about as much urgency and seriousness as any other mission they've been on, large or small.

Well, that's maybe not entirely fair, since we do have that whole dramatic scene where Berry has to decide whether she deletes all of her data from the Tom Sawyer servers to save her parents from rotting away in the proverbial gulag. It's just that we didn't need to have a beat where Berry gets all weepy and emotional over realizing that her disappearance really messed up her parents emotionally. We already got a subtler (and more effective) version of this scene way back in Episode 4, and we also already saw the parents give themselves up to protect their daughter just last week. I did admittedly like the scene where Hack points out that “data is just data", and that deleting her records wouldn't suddenly make it so that Berry's family ties to her mom and dad are completely erased, but it doesn't justify all of the maudlin build up.

Also, can we all agree that the Mark Twain references are more distracting than anything, at this point? I doubt it comes across the same way to many of the non-American viewers, but I haven't been able to figure out what this show gains from cramming in reference after reference to different Twain stories and novels. I have to give kudos to the show for coming up with the much less racist name of “Injunction Jo", but I also have no idea what that character is supposed to be or how they relate to Phantom Zero, Mark Twain (the moon thing, not the guy), or any of the larger mysteries of the story, except for that Injunction Jo is some kind of threat, so…cliffhanger, I guess?

Honestly, I just want to know what Yurei Deco's endgame is already. Whether or not this story was ever building towards a meaningful and interesting resolution is basically going to be the deciding factor for if Yurei Deco ends up being an imperfect-but-generally-decent sci-fi romp, or a messy failure. I guess we'll just have to wait and find out.

Rating:

Yurei Deco is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.