And here’s where things get truly awful. After all of the messy
filler and embarrassing “comedy” that Episodes 4 and 5 were chock full of,
Episode 6 (“Family Affairs”) is the moment where the writers slapped their own
foreheads and realized “Crap! This series was supposed to be serious! Let’s
compensate for our forgetfulness by making the next episode incredibly edgy!”
And holy fucking shit, does Episode 6 suffer for it. It has violence, some of
it altogether grotesque, minimal attempts at humor throughout, and an overall
grim and chaotic tone throughout.
The Battlefront (and the high school as a whole) is being
subjugated to newly-indoctrinated Student President Naoi (who, like Kanade, is
human and non-NPC) and his strict disciplinary tactics. The Battlefront wonders
if removing Kanade from power was such a good idea at all. For once, the
writing is somewhat creative; it’s not stellar, but it’s challenging the
character’s ideals. They’re used to fucking around and not taking classes
seriously because they don’t want to get obliterated, but then suddenly some
strange kid takes over as Student President and tries to physically enforce
order unto the students. And by “physically”, I mean Naoi is willing to beat
the shit out of students to force them into compliance.
Herein lies the problem. Naoi is a brutal kid; he is one of
the very few people on Angel Beats you can imagine up and torturing somebody.
Unfortunately, his brutal mindset and all-in-all dark personality threatens to
take Angel Beats someplace else, someplace it tonally doesn’t want to go quite
yet. And rather than generating drama and character development, it makes the
entire episode unbalanced and overly edgy. I felt like I was watching an adult
parody of a kid’s show because of how lackluster and childish Episodes 4 and 5
were. Tonal imbalance. It plagues the series at every given moment, and it
makes Angel Beats look bipolar as hell. Things get worse from here.
 |
| There are animation and design errors all over the place, too. |
Naoi winds up arresting Kanade and Otonashi, which means
they aren’t present to witness Naoi’s open war against the Battlefront. They
manage to break out of jail, and this happens.
Quick recap: the last episode was about a group of immature
kids trying to sabotage a young girl’s exams for the fun of it. This latest
episode features a vicious, bloody massacre instigated by a Nazi-esque
psychopath with a hard-on for order and discipline. What the fuck.
Words fail. “Family Affair” is an absurd, poorly-written
collage of “dark and edgy” dramatic situations thrown together at random, and
it’s altogether some of the worst writing in the entire series, ugly and
incompetent and manipulative. The flaws in “Family Affair” are not just relative
to how far it falls beneath the tone and quality of previous installments, it’s
relative to how uninspired the story is and how oppressively dark and jarring the
atmosphere is. “Family Affair” isn’t even campy or ironically enjoyable; it’s
just straight-up awful and a pain to sit through because of the hyper-realistic
dread surrounding it.
Otonashi hugs Naoi for some reason, and then Naoi reveals
his backstory, not that it fucking matters, and then Naoi is suddenly a good
guy. Trying to make something Darker and Edgier almost never works, and it
certainly doesn’t work here. What an incoherent mess. Even if you remove the
whole massacre scene (which takes up a majority of the episode’s second half),
the writing becomes incredibly shabby after the episode’s strong opening, the
majority of the characters don’t go through any important character development
(the only one who gets even a little bit of change is Kanade) and the pacing is
all over the place; I guess “consistency” was shunted down the priority list
along with “logic” and “meaning”. Its overall doom and gloom is as far removed
from how Angel Beats initially presented itself as it could be, and if “Family
Affair” is not the nadir of Angel Beats, it is assuredly close.
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