Platinum End

Episode 4

Can a show be rushed to hell and way too slow all at once? Platinum End seems to be dead set on finding out. Quite a lot happened through its first three episodes: Mirai was saved from suicide, flew around the world, killed his aunt, got his uncle arrested, discovered he'd been drafted into a fight for godhood, and then spent a month as his crush's brainwashed slave, all while another teenager became a self-made superhero in the B-plot. But for all that transpired in that time, little of it has had any real consequence, with scenes being largely made up of clunky exposition occasionally peppered with clunkier nihilism, and our main character shrugging his way through it all.

That changes here in episode four, but for mostly the wrong reasons. Mirai stops being a dull cipher this episode, but only because he becomes a literal spectator for its entire run while the real hero of this story, Metropoliman, launches a Power Rangers-themed public execution. That's not a joke or exaggeration: for this entire episode, our protagonist performs the role of a side character in a sports anime, whose job is to provide commentary to explain things to the audience. Mirai sits down, holds his girlfriend's hand, and makes reaction faces for 22 minutes before possibly being stirred into action as a megalomaniac in a Halloween costume prepares to murder an elementary schooler on live TV. For the rest of “Time to Assemble," the screentime is devoted entirely to Metropoliman's Rube Goldberg Deicide Plan.

I mentioned last time that Ohba and Obata feel most at home portraying amoral geniuses who plan 18 steps ahead of everyone else, and that is on full display this episode: we follow a growing cast of gullible fools as they waltz into Metropoliman's kill zone, and to the show's credit, it's easily the most engaging moment-to-moment drama so far. Across the episode, we get to see Metropoliman's multistage, diversion-laden scheme to draw out and kill his fellow God candidates play out like somebody set off a “Mouse Trap” board while dressed in a knockoff Kamen Rider suit. He uses decoys, then decoys for those decoys, then switches places with the first decoy at just the right moment to kill off the overconfident candidates who thought they could out-strategize him. This whole endeavor is supposed to make Metropoliman look like a truly formidable and immoral villain, and it succeeds, but in a bit of (presumably) unintended irony, it also makes him immensely more entertaining than any of the good guys. Yes, he's doing reprehensible things for no justifiable reason, but he's also the only thing moving this story forward, and by that virtue alone he's my favorite character so far.

In Platinum End's defense, it does try to characterize a couple of these God candidates before they get offed. While the in-show reasoning for having all our potential new Gods be previously suicidal is questionable at best, from an audience perspective that at least means most of the cast is likely to have dramatic backstories that could make them compelling or likable if handled well. Tabuchi and Hatakeyama aren't the most engaging guys, especially since they're obviously written to be rubes who overestimate themselves and get slaughtered by our villain, but they have a certain camaraderie to their dialogue and story that makes them at least a little relatable. It was genuinely sweet seeing them promise to make the other guy happy if they became God, in perhaps the first real drop of humanity this story has managed to wring out of its own cloth so far. Chiyo, the little girl who trips right into this whole trap, is sadly less interesting. She gets to show up, say she was suicidal because of bullying, just to immediately become a helpless pawn in our villain's scheme and is sitting a few seconds from death by the time credits role.

Really though, the biggest problem with this whole conflict has nothing to do with the characters, but rather their shared supernatural powers. It turns out having a dozen people all capable of effectively teleporting instantaneously makes the logistics of a battle royale really goddamn complicated, eventually requiring one party to make a dumb mistake in order for any given standoff to have a conclusion. Large segments of this episode are just characters explaining why their strategy is perfect to avoid losing, to the point where Metropoliman straight-up predicts what will happen if either of them makes a move, and it immediately deflates any tension in the situation. That, more than anything else, bodes poorly for this show's future: if its central conflicts rely on one or both parties just being idiots to progress, they are quickly going to become a drawn-out chore.

But, again, it does at least work here, if only because it's a proper introduction to our villain and moves so quickly through the plot beats that there's no time to get bored. It's a far cry from the thrilling duel of wits between Light and L, but “not great” is still an improvement for this story so far.

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Platinum End is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.