I’ve decided to try something new. I’m gonna do an
episode-by-episode review of a short series, and I may make it a consistent
thing on here – after all, they’re short, and don’t require a great deal of
attention most of the time. I’m going to begin this strange tour with a
straightforward but potentially controversial statement: Angel Beats sucks. It really,
really sucks. It’s a pity, because it has a fascinating concept that deals with
touchy, grand topics like death, the acceptance thereof, purgatory, and the
afterlife. Unfortunately, it deals with these good-natured topics very, very
poorly. If we judge a product based on the creator’s intentions, then Fifty
Shades of Grey is the fucking Bible.
Episode 1 (“Departure”) isn’t exceptionally awful, though –
mostly, it’s just tepid. “Departure” starts with a pretty great opening shot:
the main protagonist waking up suddenly, lying on the cold ground in a Jesus
pose, wondering where he is. The camera pans over the landscape to reveal he’s
lying on the ground beneath a starry sky in some kind of courtyard. He doesn’t
remember a thing.
Before he has time to brood, a girl holding a sniper rifle
addresses him. She explains that he is welcome to the “Not Dead Yet Battlefront”,
and promptly asks him to enlist with said Battlefront; more importantly, she
informs him that he’s dead. Realistically, our protagonist has no idea what the
fuck Sniper Girl is talking about, but, unrealistically, he sure takes the idea
that he might be dead really damn well. In fact, he takes everything – the possibly
batshit crazy girl holding a very real gun, her request for him to join a
virtual militia– pretty damn well, and it was at this point my finely-tuned
suspension of disbelief broke. Even the most stoic of people would be more
confused than our hero is, and would be showing a broader range of emotions
than “vague confusion”, especially when faced with a girl who could easily blow
your head off.
The girl reveals who she’s pointing the rifle at – a young,
gray-haired girl named Angel. He decides to find a diplomatic solution,
ignoring Sniper Girl’s protests, and he has a conversation with the girl. Angel
says that she really isn’t an angel (the Student Body President, as point of
fact). She also reveals that there are no hospitals in the school, because
nobody gets sick, and reinforces Sniper Girl’s statement that everyone is dead.
Realistically, our protagonist has no idea what the fuck is going on, and
before he can get much closer, she stabs him in the heart to prove that he
really can’t die. Brilliant writing.
Our hero wakes up in the hospital in a Jesus pose (noticing
a theme here?), completely fine and unharmed.
It’s at this point he freaks out
and tries to leave but suddenly some dude with a scythe confronts him and
proceeds to beat the shit out of him for no reason, in a scene that tries
desperately hard to be funny.
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| This is all in the same episode, just so you know. |
At this exact moment, I nearly said “fuck this”
because I realized “Departure” has no idea what it wants to be. In the span of
seven or so minutes, it went from kind of edgy and mysterious to overly comical
and cartoonish, in the blink of an eye. After getting his shit beaten out of
him, our hero wanders around the school and finds the Principal’s Office, but
it turns out the doorknob was a trap and he gets hit with a gigantic hammer.
Comedy gold. He wakes up in an office and finds himself spectating a meeting
between Sniper Girl and her fellow Battlefront comrades, who have a completely
lifeless conversation about what their group’s new name should be. This sudden
burst of random, unfunny humor renders “Departure” incoherent and unfocused; it
clearly can’t decide on what type of edge it wants to take on.
He gets introduced to the Battlefront and learns their names.
Sniper Girl is apparently called Yuri, and she is the leader of the
Battlefront. Her comrades are Boring Guy 1, Boring Guy 2, Boring Girl 1, blah
blah blah, none of them are even remotely notable and interesting save for the
blue-haired guy – Hinata – a dude with a red bandana called TK, and a quiet
red-haired chick called Iwasawa. Our hero is called Otonashi (first name
unknown), which he apparently remembered all of a sudden!
Yeah, we’re about halfway through this episode, and while
nothing is exceptionally awful, nothing is exceptionally good, and one of the
series’ biggest flaws comes into full focus here: it’s incoherent as all hell.
It flies from mysterious and fast-paced to slow, awkward, and comical at
completely random intervals. As a result, “Departure” is very shallow and
intellectually shabby; it had something really interesting going for it in the
first five or so minutes, but the minute Otonashi woke up in the hospital, it
became all wacky and cartoonish that it makes you wonder what the whole point
of the opening was.
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| Don't worry. They don't get any more interesting over the course of the series, so don't feel bad if they get hurt. |
Finally, we learn some juicy information: the world they
live in is definitely a school, but all the other, non-Battlefront students are
soulless “NPCs” (non-player characters, yes, the video game types) that act
like regular student and faculty. We also learn some details about Angel; she
is apparently, quote, “emotionless, unsociable, and doesn’t talk much. That’s
what makes her unique from the NPCs.” Her role is to enforce order, and the
Battlefront opposes this order because they don’t want to get “obliterated”,
which basically means disappear forever. Any real person acting like a model
student = disappear forever. Ignoring that shitty moral, this is all genuinely
interesting, if a bit too expository, because it does hurl all this information
at you at a moderate speed and expects you to fully absorb it by the end.
Otonashi opts to buy time until he gets memories back. After
that… who knows? That’s for future episodes to decide. Yuri allows him to
participate in something called “Operation Tornado”, and then it launches right
back into sitcom farce action. The Operation goes off without any major
problems, we have a forgettable pop song, a fight scene, and the episode ends
with Otonashi reinforcing his decision to stay with the Battlefront for the
time being, even though he already said that less than ten minutes ago. “Departure”
is a pretty forgettable episode, and a bad pilot; it is peppered with numerous
flaws, as major as the episode’s inability to decide what it wants to be (the “comedy”
and “drama” parts of this episode exist in completely separate planes of
existence), or as minor as the irritating fact that Otonashi’s reactions to the
situation around him are unrealistic as all get-out. Couple in the flat humor
and so-far uninteresting characters, and the whole thing feels like a rip-off
of itself; though it has its moments, “Departure” isn’t much on its own, and it
relies wholly on the narrative potential of the second episode.
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| Also, it's never explained why Yuri was aiming a sniper rifle at Angel at this particular moment. |
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