Platinum End

Episode 23

Well everybody, we've made it. After months of increasing tedium and plummeting production values, we've reached the end of, uh, Platinum End. Yes, there's technically another episode next week, presumably an epilogue, but as of the credits in this episode we've at least concluded the central battle for God-hood. As you'd expect from this series, the resolution is a bungled mess of undercooked ideas and character moments that leaves you with negative amounts of satisfaction, but by the gods we're at the end of it. Not all of us made it here – I know we lost quite a few along the way – but we should all celebrate.

So, how does this whole stupid God debate/hostage situation wrap up? In about as anticlimactic a way as possible, in that everyone ends up agreeing to the plan they came up with like six episodes ago. If that sounds deeply unsatisfying to you, what the hell are you still doing watching this show? You should have known there was no satisfaction to be had months ago. What's notable, though, is just how much of a clusterfuck this resolution is.

Take Nasse, for instance. Despite setting up this whole story to begin with, she's basically done nothing but point her 5/10 butt at the screen and blithely encourage Mirai to murder people for his own happiness. It seems the writers realized this a bit too late, as they try to cram in something, anything for her to contribute to this final confrontation by saving Mirai from Yoneda's white arrow at the last second. This was technically hinted at earlier, with Yoneda figuring out Nasse was special for how she's the only Angel capable of touching humans. But that foreshadowing actually makes this bit worse because it ultimately goes nowhere. Nasse is demoted to Second Rank for interfering, costing Mirai his white arrow and wings, but that doesn't actually effect anything, and she gets her original rank back mere minutes later. All she accomplishes is stalling for a minute or two, which is a pretty mechanical way to treat divine blessings. It was hinted early on that Nasse had some sort of connection with Mirai, that there was a reason show chose him above anyone else to become a God Candidate, but apparently everyone involved has forgotten that by now. So in the end our hero's always-present guardian angel's only significant act is to make this episode last longer.

But hey, that does give the others just enough time to remind Shuji that he's 12, and not actually prepared to murder three people just because a smart guy told him to. It turns out the one flaw in Yoneda's plan is that most people aren't psychopaths who will kill multiple people just to find out if God is real or not. Utterly defeated by the power of what this show considers empathy, our villain thus despairs and gives one final, long-winded speech about how badly he sucks and how he was wrong and now he can't prove if God is real or not so he should just go kill himself. But wait! Shuji promises to become God, so that then he can learn everything and then pass on that knowledge to Yoneda so he won't kill himself! Why, everybody's just coming full circle as new people huh? Mirai even articulates that being happy means having somebody you'd give your life for, and Yoneda agrees to become Yuri's sugar daddy so she doesn't need any magic arrows to get by in life. All's well that ends well, and there's only several dozen corpses in the characters' collective wake, so it's time walk into the sunset!

It's an absurdly abrupt and abbreviated conclusion. You can practically hear the defeated “Fuck, I dunno” the writers must have uttered as they hastily threw together some semblance of an ending to a story they had obviously lost control of ages ago. There's some lip service to how much these characters have changed, but nothing on-screen suggests they've actually grown in any way. And I know that's the case because they all just immediately agree to let a suicidal 12-year-old become the literal, omnipotent God of all creation. They don't even discuss it again or weigh the consequences. They just go with it because even the characters just want this story to be over. The show does too, because this little edgelord's apotheosis takes all of about 30 seconds before he wipes the world's memory of this entire show and fucks off to heaven. This is the big, ultimate conclusion of the show's entire premise, and it's over with all the pomp and circumstance of getting your photo taken for your driver's license.

I certainly can't blame the creators of either version for that lack of give-a-damn, though. There's only so long you can devote energy to an obviously failed endeavor before your brain just refuses and you have to go do something else. From its beginning, Platinum End has felt like a show without a plan, being written by the seat of its pants and trying to outrun entropy as it introduced new characters and conflicts only to immediately discard them. It never knew what it wanted to do or what it wanted to be, and any semblance of cohesion was ultimately a bluff to keep you listening while it desperately tried to come up with something. It never did. It walked out on stage, stammered through an awkward improv routine for a bit, before devolving into a scattered TED talk about some mildly interesting philosophy books it pretended to read in college. And at last, the hook has reached out from off stage to mercifully yank it back behind the curtain. So let's all give it a pity clap and a sigh of relief.

…because it's about to give an encore.

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Platinum End is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.