My Favorite Shows of 2025

45. What If…? Season 3: And so, What If goes out, not with a bang, but by assuming I cared about the concepts it set up. They could have avoided doing the big crossover episode at the end this time, especially since the first half was mostly silly comedy episodes. It was cute how they made anime Iron Man look like Dr. Nambu from Gatchaman, but by covering like five in-universe years in a narrated montage of still images at the start makes the first episode feel like a bad, rushed sequel to a movie you haven’t seen. They also did a number of episodes that were just, “What if these characters were in this different time period?” with Howard Stark, Jarvis, Agatha Harkness, and Kingo making a musical in the 1930’s because something something destroy the world, one where Shang-Chi and Hawkeye are gunslingers in the Wild West (which, of course, brought back Walton Goggins’s character from Ant Man & the Wasp that everyone definitely remembered was in that movie and not just because that actor is famous for playing weird Western characters) and they did a silly episode about Howard the Duck and Darcy having a kid as a follow-up to an episode I suppose I was supposed to have an emotional attachment to from last season. It all wraps up in a retread of the old “the Watchers get mad at the Watcher for helping Earth” that the comics have done at least twice and probably many more. There were some nice things for the fans in that episode—alternate-universe mashup versions of the heroes, Alison Healy-Smith reprising her role as Storm once again to be a Storm-Thor hybrid, but there was nothing terribly compelling about it. They did at least come out and say the Watcher was making these universes better than the originals, which was why he had to be punished, but it doesn’t make for terribly compelling television, even given that these are all, by design, done-in-ones. You set up Mysterio as a world-conquering threat who was two seconds from killing Riri Williams, but the Watcher just says one word and suddenly she’s able to turn the tables on him without breaking a sweat because, what, she’s less sad now? That feels like Tuxedo Mask telling Sailor Moon not to cry—you didn’t DO anything! And because the Watcher doesn’t interact, just narrates, it’s hard to care when he and a bunch of other characters, some of whom we’ve never met or have only seen as a baby, have a big Dragon Ball Z fight with near-zero emotional connection. But it’s over, so, I don’t need to think about it anymore.

44. Dragon Ball DAIMA: When told by an AR director to emphasize “IN” before “July,” Orson Welles, after much overwrought kibbitzing, finally devolved into mumbling to himself, “Impossible, meaningless…”

I’ve been thinking about that when deciding what to say about the final eight episodes of Dragon Ball DAIMA.

In the end, DAIMA, at a total of 20 episodes, is just a filler arc with no show around it—but even that seems insulting, when I think back to the great filler arcs from Dragon Ball Z. Think about Garlic, Jr. Saga, where Gohan had to deal with his first crisis without his father around, and really discover who he was without his parents; meanwhile, Krillin finally found a smoking hot girlfriend he’d always wanted, only…she doesn’t respect him. Krillin starts to realize he wants something more than physical, and though it causes him real emotional strain to call things off with Maron (not to be confused with Marron), that little arc provides so much additional depth to the character’s mindset once he meets Android 18 and finally attains a relationship with both physical attraction and real, loving tenderness and emotional stability and availability, even though she is, I remind you, a serial killer who was never tried for her various actual crimes. Or even that Otherworld Tournament/Pikkon saga! Where Goku fought through some of his greatest foes and a bunch of other weird little dudes and made a new friend. That was fun and Pikkon has proven very memorable. Where was THAT in DAIMA? Oh sure, it had its moments, like Goku’s bar fight in episode 3 that I mentioned before, and when they corner Degesu trying to make his getaway, dudebro pulls a gun on baby Dende, which was hilarious. Goku can teleport, my man! That was never going to work! But it kept falling back into references and nostalgia, adding little details onto things that didn’t need to be explained so it could avoid the hard work of building an emotional connection to the new characters. The one thing I really connected with was Glorio’s torn loyalties between the heroes and the conniving Arinsu, and that came up maybe twice before they pulled the trigger and had him “Betray” the heroes, by which I mean OF COURSE HE WASN’T GOING TO BETRAY THE HEROES. He doesn’t even suffer from it. The bad guy just frowns and then Glorio goes and gets a hug from his friends.

DAIMA never transcends its source material. The main villain, Gomah, is sort of a lesser Emperor Pilaf, only he hulks out like second-stage Frieza (and fourth-stage Frieza, I guess) so the heroes can have a final fight. They certainly didn’t have one against Gomah’s supposed “elite guard,” who rehash the Ginyu Force’s schtick before Vegeta defeats them single-handedly without working up a sweat. The ending was kind of cute, a sort of accidental argument for open borders (Goku blasts through the walls built to separate, and thereby dominate, the three demon worlds, opening up every level to all classes and lifting the heavy gas that kept everyone from flying—nope, no metaphor there, please ignore, move along) with some nice animation and a wacky new king of demon world, but the jokes it was built on had been so underplayed in the series up until that point it hardly felt like a payoff to anything (I’m willing to allow a slight exception to that statement for Majin Kuu’s end point, but only slight).

I keep seeing headlines of other reviews talking about how great DAIMA was, how it was the perfect example of what the franchise should be. I wonder what show they were watching. Perhaps, in this new “second screen” world, where people just put on TV to have some noise in the background, that’s all that is needed. Heck, watch any sitcom from…any time, really. Maybe that’s all anyone ever needed. As long as Goku punches something sometime within twenty minutes, maybe that’s enough for a certified “Fresh.”

But I remember how Dragon Ball felt when I was a kid and it was new. I remember how I felt watching Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero earlier this year, and Broly. I remember how Akira Toriyama would pull some wild stuff out of nowhere, fluidly mixing the mundane and the terrifying in a way you hadn’t seen before, that wasn’t predicated on something he did thirty, forty years ago. That didn’t make you think, “Oh, like back in Saiyan saga.”

Any future Dragon Ball should lead with the heart, with character. I love Goku, but he has no depth, you need someone else to pull him along. Give me Gohan, give me Piccolo, give me Krillin and 18 and Bulma and fucking Yamcha if you want. Heck, let Goku die again, let’s have some time without him so we appreciate him more when he comes back. Give me SOMETHING I HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE. Don’t just hand me refried GT and expect me to thank you for it.

It'll never happen. Ah, but to dream…

43. G.I. Joe Extreme: There were several times in my younger days where I felt resentment that a show I liked was replaced by a revamped version. Batman (’66) into Batman: The Animated Series, Jonny Quest into The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, Transformers into Beast Wars—all these I came to appreciate in time, and in some cases even prefer to the original.

However, I can say that G.I. Joe Extreme is not worthy of such a reevaluation. (Although, admittedly when it originally released, I had only seen the DiC episodes of GI Joe, which aren’t any good themselves and far below the quality of the excellent, earlier Marvel-produced episodes)

I can’t say that I saw more than a handful of episodes of Extreme when they aired, and I don’t remember anything about them. Extreme has, to my knowledge, never been released on home video; and sort of…half-follows the pilot for Sgt. Savage and his Screaming Eagles that was the first attempt to revamp G.I. Joe in the mid-90’s and was only released in a pack-in VHS with one of the toys. If you couldn’t tell by the name, Extreme was clearly intended to capitalize on the success of comic book creators like Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane, but it happened to launch right when their comics were starting to go out of style (See also: Marvel Heroes Reborn). Indeed, the show is staffed by a number of former Marvel Comics employees—producer Roger Slifer wrote for a number of series in the 70’s, including some issues of Marvel Two-In-One I happened to read around the time I started watching Extreme, with episodes by Len Wein, Roy Thomas, David Anthony Craft, Marv Wolfman, and Steve Englehart; Bill Sienkiewicz was even involved in the design somehow (he is credited as “model stylist,” whatever that means—I assume the actual model designer used some style sheets he supplied). The first episode, by longtime classic GI Joe writer Buzz Dixon, is oddly a mess, a constant barrage of new faces and action sequences with no pause to catch your breath in-between; dialogue consisting mostly of quips shouted at no one in particular. One that stuck in my mind was when Jekyll-and-Hyde-like villain Rampage responded to an alarm with, “Intruders? Here? But a man’s industrial complex is his castle!”

In a way, this is not too different from the original GI Joe cartoon I hold in such high regard. However, I’m in the unique position of having re-watched that recently enough that it is clear in my mind, and I can say I stand by that assessment. There are a number of reasons: as I mentioned, GI Joe Extreme, especially in its first season, is a constant assault of action, action, action. The original GI Joe had a sprawling cast of toys to get your parents to buy (er, that is to say, characters), but Extreme focuses on a core cast of ten-twelve heroes (two are added in season 2) and five villains, but the narrative never pauses to focus on their motivations or traits beyond the surface level. The banter between them is generic, and gives no hints as to their relationships. In the original series, you immediately had the silent, mysterious Snake-Eyes, the womanizing, lazy Shipwreck, the odd couple duo of the loudmouthed, trash-talking Alpine and the terse, slow Bazooka among the good guys, and the craven, self-interested Cobra Commander, haughty, intelligent Destro and Baroness, cunning, sneaky Zartan, and athletic, bored socialites, Tomax and Xamot. Even after watching all 26 episodes of GI Joe Extreme, I don’t know how I would describe the personalities of these characters. I can describe their functions in the plot—Metalhead knows computers, Mayday likes to fly airplanes, Freight used to play football, Quickstrike was a member of SKAR until their experiments drove his brother mad; on the villain side, Iron Klaw posed as a peaceful ruler of a small country to infiltrate the “Inter-Alliance” (from what I can tell, in this show the Inter-Alliance is NATO and the Allied Nations is the UN, but they don’t go into much detail), Steel Raven is loyal to Iron Klaw, Wreckage is tormented and feels his actions are justified due to something that happened in the past, Rampage is treacherous, unhinged, and will flip out and kill people at the drop of a hat, and Inferno is treacherous, unhinged, and will flip out and kill people at the drop of a hat. Okay, that’s unfair; Rampage is rich and Inferno is poor, so they’re different. But you see what I mean? Even with episodes focusing on the characters, I don’t know anything about their interiority, even compared to the basic sketches of character traits given in a toy tie-in from ten years prior. The second episode focuses on Mayday: she breaks her leg and is left off the mission because she is legitimately injured, and she gets really mad because Lt. Stone won’t let her fly a plane into a combat zone while physically incapacitated. Which seems fair! Then Inferno and a bunch of robots attack the Joe’s island base and she defeats them all single-handed in a cast. What does this tell me about Mayday as a person? Well, as I said, she likes to fly airplanes, and also she’s trained in combat because, well, she’s a soldier. What does it tell me about Inferno? Well, an entire platoon of robot soldiers under his command was defeated by a single infantrywoman with a broken leg, so it tells me he’s completely incompetent and SKAR is hardly a threat worthy of a dedicated task force with a secret island base that is also a boat (they chop off the top of a volcanic island and attach propellors to it, yes really, yes at the end of season one they float it down the Potomac and the bad guys blow it up). GI Joe: A Real American hero would have episodes where Roadblock went to his family restaurant, where Cobra hypnotized the families of members of GI Joe, heck even the stupid DiC series had episodes about going to their high school reunion and Metalhead’s grandmother (this is a different Metalhead than the one in GI Joe Extreme). GI Joe Extreme has an episode where Freight rejoins his college football team while on leave YES WHILE STILL ACTIVE MILITARY HE JOINS A PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM and then feels bad about it and quits an indeterminate amount of time later. Add in the other oddities about the first season—each episode starts with a short live-action segment (the actors exaggerate their mouth movements when talking so the voice actors can dub over them later) that is largely unconnected to the episode itself (Mayday breaks her leg in one of these segments, but most of them are easily disconnected from the episodes—the uploads I found were missing a few and I had no problem following the plot) and each episode features a 1-2 minute segment of no dialogue or sound effects, just guitar solo over action. It might not seem like much, but that’s time that could have been spent making me care about these characters.

Wreckage, the SKAR member who believed his actions were justified, intrigued me, and seemed to be a favorite of the writing team as well. In his brief appearance in the first episode, he apologizes to some hostages, saying he held no malice against them, but they had to die for a greater cause: fighting the military. This is a good hook, much more than any of the other villains got, and reminded me of Ezekiel Rage, a memorable and unique villain from the Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. Alas, Wreckage failed to live up to expectations; after several episodes focusing on Inferno and Rampage, Wreckage returned and we are quickly told that he’s just mad because he was experimented on without his consent and turned into a cyborg by “the military” (they never specify which one, although season 2 makes it clear it has to be the American military) except WHOOPS haha don’t worry kids, obviously it was a trick by that mean old Iron Klaw. Like, very obviously; Iron Klaw uses disguise and deception several times in the series, and each time he gives himself away and we just ignore it. I can give them some leeway—in the original GI Joe cartoon, Tomax and Xamot should have been arrested for openly collaborating with terrorists several times, but we are assured they are “within their legal rights” even though the Joes clearly find them at the scene of multiple crimes where they attack US military performing their legal duty, but the show needs them to still be around; and so it is with “Count von Rani,” Iron Klaw’s alias. (also, Iron Klaw repeatedly displays an ability to walk into shadows and step out in a completely different outfit/disguise one second later, which they never elaborate on) Count von Rani often just happens to be around when something bad happens to GI Joe, or knows things he shouldn’t (when Rampage attacks an Inter-Alliance meeting against orders, Count von Rani is obviously surprised and angry right in front of GI Joe members Lt. Stone and Agent Clancy, in a way that implies he expected something else to happen, and he knew Stone suspected him at that point in the series—and no one bats an eye), but Clancy assures us that “The Inter-Alliance is built on trust, so investigating one of our members would betray that trust.” Excuse me, WHAT? Oh, and in season 2, after his cover is blown, Iron Klaw fakes his death and infiltrates GI Joe in disguise as Clancy. They eventually figure this out because Clancy dropped his sunglasses when he was kidnapped, but when they rescued him, Iron Klaw in disguise was—wearing sunglasses! Dun dun dunnn this takes them five episodes to figure out and Iron Klaw almost kills Stone to cover it up and then repeatedly leaves him alone in the hospital and even calls off his armed guard around the hospital once GI Joe leaves but one of those guards calls GI Joe to tell them about it but he doesn’t tell them the order came from Clancy because otherwise there’s no plot. What are we doing here, guys?

Like, when I say Cobra Commander is an idiot, I mean it in a believable way. He’s an egotist and a coward, who wants to project strength through money and through people under his command, but he has no conviction, no backbone. Even leaving aside the plays on patriotism from the comics that were too spicy to make it into the cartoon, Cobra Commander’s foibles and failings are depressingly recognizable in fascists and authoritarians in real life. Iron Klaw is supposed to be scarier and edgier and more REAL man, but he’s just bad at this. He sucks.

I lost my train of thought on Wreckage there for a minute, but that’s because his plot basically turns into any given issue of the Hulk from the 1970’s. He realizes he’s been manipulated and turns good, then turns bad again for an episode because he needs to realize he’s friends with Freight from back in ((A MILITARY ACTION IN SOUTH AMERICA)). That episode was written by Steve Englehart, so it’s easily the best of season 2, but it lacks the punch and depth of his long-form Marvel works from…well, from the 1970’s.

As usual with bad shows, I’ve spent too much time on this, but there’s so much to be frustrated about here. Like, the first season finale, where Iron Klaw kidnaps some dignitaries, mutates them into skull-faced zombies (???) and demands the President surrender the United States to him. I’m supposed to believe that the President of the United States would surrender the country to a terrorist just because said terrorist threatened to kill the leaders of OTHER countries? I don’t even think our current president would do that, and he takes anything Vladimir Putin says at face value. And then he orders the military not only to stand down, but actively aid the invaders against guerilla forces? I think we’d have a military coup before the terrorists would take over the country in that case. But SOMEhow, conquering the US and keeping the President tied to a chair in the oval office doesn’t give Iron Klaw access to the nuclear launch codes? Huh? The President is like, “If I’d known you wanted the nuclear launch codes, I never would have surrendered the United States to you!” bitch what did you think he wanted? And then, much like the final episode of Chargeman Ken, in the season 1 finale, GI Joe barely beats a couple of the villains, while the standard US Military mops the rest of them up without much problem. And when your show makes me think, “Hey, this is like Chargeman Ken,” YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.

Or there’s the season 2 finale, where they pull the old “I couldn’t tell you because your reactions had to be real” to Metalhead pretending to defect (and instead of the old standby of brainwashing, they try to make a realistic story where he falls for a girl and she love bombs him into joining SKAR, but their complete inability to even obliquely refer to any sort of moral stand or political conviction reduces the argument to, “SKAR was mean to me before, but now that GI Joe is being mean to me at the present because they think I’ve been selling secrets to SKAR, these SKAR people seem pretty cool!”) or earlier in the season when Metalhead goes undercover in a rock band to get near to a terrorist and the band introduce themselves to him one by one and then Quickstrike and Black Dragon find the bad guy without Metalhead and he ditches the rock band to fight him and we never see these three named characters again for the rest of the show but also Metalhead is supposed to still be in the band even though he no longer needed the cover and was active duty military jaunting around the world? Or, and I just want to mention this as an aside, half the characters had their toys cancelled due to the failure of the line, but not only did they keep appearing, they introduced new characters who weren’t even up for toys? Like, I prefer when toy tie-in media transcends its capitalist origins, there’s no need to limit themselves to what they can market to kids, but it’s just weird is all. I could go on, but I’ve said enough and honestly forgotten most of what happened in this show. It’s not the worst GI Joe show (barely), and it’s hardly unwatchable, despite what the first episode might lead you to believe (and despite the quality of the unofficial YouTube uploads I watched—it’s the only GI Joe show Hasbro doesn’t officially host on YouTube, too) but it’s still not worth your time.

Oh, one more thing: they did new “Knowing is half the battle” shorts for this show…but they all reuse scripts from 1985, just with the new characters and new animation. This is pretty funny, as morals like “Don’t tell strangers you’re home alone,” “wear a life vest,” “stop, drop, and roll,” or “Get glasses if you can’t see, idiot” look completely TERRIFYING with the heavy shadows and massive, roided-out dudes of GI Joe Extreme. Also, they only did like five of them.

42. Micronauts: I’m a big fan of Bill Mantlo’s Micronauts comic books from the late eighties/early seventies, especially the early and late parts of his run with art by Michael Golden and Butch Guice (who passed away this year). I picked up a few batches of issues back in high school after I saw a picture of Acroyear fighting Baron Karza (I think it was a late-series Guice piece, but I’m not absolutely sure) after looking up the toyline due to its link to Transformers, and picked up issues when I found them at conventions and stores until Marvel finally negotiated the rights to reprint them last year (except for the X-Men crossover miniseries, but fortunately I already had all of those). But that series existed in a weird rights limbo where Marvel owned the storyline and any new characters, but it was based off of toys and branding owned by Mego, which were themselves largely, but not exclusively, based on toys licensed from Takara in Japan. Subsequent Micronauts comics couldn’t use the same characters and concepts, and while Marvel COULD, there were still some characters like Acroyear and Biotron who they couldn’t. Subsequent Micronauts comic series struggled to distinguish themselves from the legendary original series, and pitches for cartoons floated around at least since 2005 without any progress.

Except there were rumors of a series in development from Hasbro (which had purchased the Micronauts rights sometime around 2010) by some of the same team from Transformers: Rescue Bots, which had a number of episodes completed before being shelved, but there was only so much information the creators could share.

Now, look. Sometimes I play coy about where I watch these shows, because sometimes they’re only available in English in fan-made subtitles, or sometimes the service I’m using to watch them drops the show while I’m halfway through. I can’t really do that with Micronauts. Someone uploaded the whole thing onto Internet Archive—the showrunner says it’s not him, because the copies uploaded are better quality than the ones he had, which included timestamps—and Hasbro didn’t take it down for five days, and by then clips and full episodes were all over YouTube. It’s out there now, Micronauts has broken containment after 5-7 years sitting on a shelf.

So, how is it? Well, I knew going in that there was no way it could live up to the heights of Mantlo’s run, but I did hope it might exceed the lows of the second year of the comic where it aimlessly drifted around the Marvel Universe with no goal in sight. After all, this was the team behind the surprisingly entertaining Rescue Bots, which I remember fondly, but haven’t seen since it aired. I was also surprised to see a stacked cast for this production: Sean Astin, Clancy Brown, Mae Whitman, Danny Pudi, Kevin Michael Richardson, Steve Blum; heck, even classic Transformers and Rugrats alum Michael Bell as one of the Council that rules planet Microsia (and don’t think I haven’t noticed how many of those actors were in the 2012 Ninja Turtles show that ended around the same time production on Micronauts started). Consider that Transformers: Cyberverse and Rescue Bots Academy, which started around the same time, used non-union actors; Hasbro must have had confidence to spend the money on this show, which gave me hope that I would have something to enjoy, despite the Flash-style animation.

No such luck. Sure, there are bits of interesting lore to hook onto—the governing council of Microsia is clearly corrupt, using the crimes of Baron Karza and the supposed crimes of the Micronauts chasing him to clamp down on the rights of citizens and create a virtual police state to keep themselves in power (later episodes would try to imply that only the most recent Council Member, Sinnesy, was behind the corrupt actions, as she manipulated Karza and set events of the series into motion as part of a ploy to gain power for herself, but early appearances imply the whole Council is complicit, and they would have all approved her plans, so I see no need to let them off the hook), and I was really please with the early episodes where the Micronauts’ young human ally, Cam, experiences real personal repercussions for his lies to protect the Micronauts and how it negatively affected his relationships with his mother and his friends, except that these repercussions never seemed to extend to subsequent episodes and were resolved by revealing the existence of the Micronauts at the end of the first season (that doesn’t make up for lying and breaking promises, guys!). As I implied in the preceding amazing run-on sentence, the series begins with Baron Karza, a fanatical xenophobe who is already in prison for previous crimes that are elucidated later, escaping prison, followed by a rag-tag team of people who just happened to be present, mostly other prisoners, led by Pellam, a young soldier of Acroyear rank, whose father, also an Acroyear, was framed for collaborating with Karza and disappeared. (Acroyears are traditionally villains in Micronauts, in keeping with their source material, Microman, but the Mantlo comics had a good Acroyear on the team and gave the species some depth in later issues, so I was happy to see that kind of picked up here, even if they just treated “Acroyear” as a rank, not a species—although they do introduce the “Acroyear II” robots as a compromise, based, of course, on the classic toys that inspired the character Shaitan from Mantlo’s comics) They go to Earth, of course, and team up with a kid so they can capture Karza and his robot minions and go back home to clear their names. It’s a simple and effective setup, but unfortunately it’s mostly used as an excuse for done-in-one episodes where Cam has to attend some social function, like a birthday or detention, while also helping the Micronauts with their latest plan. We have an array of supposedly “funny” characters, like his vice principal, or a local conspiracy theorist with inconsistent motivations and moral code, who supply what might charitably be called “tension” and “comic relief;” positions also taken up by some of the Micronauts themselves, like the Time Traveler Quintillus, who is originally portrayed as calm and emotionless but gets hit by a big blast early on and becomes the resident “zany” character, or Xant, a “Visserian” (which wasn’t a species in the original, but is clearly based on the old Membros toy—I thought he maybe had a bit of Antron in him too, but Antron does show up in one episode) who worked on Microsia as a diplomat and as a result is portrayed as a huge dweeb. Most of the adventures are low-stakes affairs based around misunderstandings at school or family squabbles, which is wild for a show ostensibly about alien fugitives trying to stop a xenophobe bent on interplanetary genocide.

Like I said, there’s hints of good things here. The writers were clearly pushing themselves older than the stories in Rescue Bots, with themes of families in personal danger, corrupt business owners, and government overreach, but they always back off or undermine them with jokes (overwritten jokes, too—which was a trend at the time, as my She-Ra rewatch reminded me, but this one is beyond the pale—and also, She-Ra used the light early adventures to build to something greater, which Micronauts never did, either by choice of the creative team or the rights holders). The whole thing feels like they wanted to target an audience between the age range for Transformers: Rescue Bots and Transformers: Prime, which IS NOT A LARGE WINDOW. Why not just go all-out for an action show? The whole premise of the series is that Baron Karza is a threat to an entire planet, or two, and the Micronauts HAVE to bring him home to prove their innocence, but he keeps getting away. Is it a good idea to show that threat pouting and listening to bubblegum pop about writing sad things in your diary? Which he does because his old friend who he MIND CONTROLLED after he was found in CRYOSLEEP after TIME TRAVEL…died? I wasn’t expecting the dictator who cannibalized his own citizens to prolong his life (and the lives of the wealthy) from Mantlo’s comics, who was given a personal taste of godhood and recoiled from it because it made him feel empathy, but I was expecting, you know, a THREAT. He’s outdone by a conceited CEO, the most basic stereotype of an evil robot, and the aforementioned Sinnesy. Never mind the fact that the Micronauts repeatedly go back to Microsia and learn the Council won’t listen to them, is convinced of their guilt, and is willing to manipulate the facts to maintain the status quo, rendering their plan to come back with Karza in handcuffs and say, “Hey, look, it’s all a big misunderstanding” completely pointless; no, heaven forbid we have people retain knowledge they learned elsewhere and amend their behavior based on it.

Like, they were clearly building to a big fight to overthrow Sinnesy, or maybe the whole council in the third season. That might actually be interesting, but we’ll never know, and will never happen, because IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE PRODUCTION ENDED AND THE SHOW NEVER OFFICIALLY AIRED. I don’t know why Hasbro would greenlight, fund, produce, and sign off on FIFTY-TWO fully-animated episodes (albeit with one weird mistake in the episode set in an observatory, where animation of Cam eating at home is played over a completely different scene) of a show they didn’t have a distribution agreement for, for a toyline they ended up not releasing, or even advertising. It’s a little sad seeing all the intended play styles for toys no child will ever play with…but only a little. But it’s maddening to see them try to stretch their legs, to reach for a greater goal with a compelling storyline and either give up or get cold feet. The Sinnesy plot is not even close to resolved at the end, except that she sends the robot Phobos to attack the Micronauts on Earth (Phobos swears to wipe out all organic life on both planets, but instead he just grows himself larger until the Micronauts shrink him again, doesn’t even kill one person). Could they have fit it in? Well, they would have had to cut out the episode where Cam’s parents show up unannounced. The episode where they attend an authorized biography of the billionaire who hates them. The Christmas episode. Probably a bunch of episodes, I don’t remember all of them, I sort of started spacing out after Pellam’s dad died, YES, there was plenty of time to move the plot forward and develop these characters, but they preferred to do stock sitcom plots instead. That worked for Rescue Bots, both because it was for younger children and because we still got wild stuff like the time-travelling mad scientist who wanted to kill LeVar Burton. Micronauts never reached a satisfying balance between its two poles of “political intrigue” and “kid-friendly adventure,” and considering it was in production at the same time as She-Ra, Tangled, Amphibia, Steven Universe, Owl House, and probably a bunch of others I didn’t watch, it would NOT have looked good in comparison. Hasbro says they haven’t given up on officially releasing Micronauts eventually, but I don’t know; with every year it’s going to look more and more outdated, and whatever toyline eventually materializes probably won’t reflect the series anymore. I’m glad it’s out there, I’m happy the creators get to share their vision. But I doubt I’ll be back to watch it again.

41. Ragnarok: I was worried about this one. It’s the first show my boss recommended that I pick up, and I like my boss a lot, so I was hoping I would find something interesting in…another take on modern day Thor. I understand why Norwegians would look over at America and think, “Hey…that’s OUR guy,” when we’re putting out movies where Thor is Very British because Stan Lee thought he could write Shakespearian dialogue (he could not). The start reinforced that they had Marvel’s Thor in mind, as the hero, Magne, has shaggy blond hair and his brother Laurits is so Tom Hiddleston-coded I was surprised it took seven episodes for him to become Loki. They have just moved back to their mother’s home town for a job working for the wealthy Jutul family who are up to some shady stuff like running around naked on a mountain and killing Reindeer with their bare hands because they’re actually the only four giants who survived Ragnarok and have been living on the mountain ever since, exalting in having humans worship them with no gods around to stop them. Also, they pollute and are super corrupt, and will shout down and intimidate anyone who speaks against the family. That’s a neat concept—Magne slowly awakens his Thor powers and discovers the corruption at the heart of the town and the learned cowardice of the townspeople as he tries to fight for political and economic justice—Thor as a green hero, one of the people, against the privileged class. It’s a take Marvel hasn’t made with this character (or, hadn’t—during this series, including and especially in the current Thor comics, he started taking on Roxxon, the big bad corporation in Marvel Comics—almost certainly a coincidence, but I can’t rule out Donny Cates or Al Ewing heard of this show, but we’ll put a pin in that for later) and I wish the inciting incident wasn’t that he made friends with the cool lesbian who is immediately murdered by Vidar Jutul, the leader of the giants. The cops think it was just an accident, but their story keeps shifting, and Magne is driven to stop the Jutuls, and is pushed into it by the mysterious woman at the grocery store while the Jutuls fear the worst and accidentally accelerate Magne’s drive to defeat them. Except for the “son” (they are posing as a family, changing their age each generation to switch out) who falls in love with a human woman, Magne’s classmate Gry, and starts working against his family out of seemingly legitimate concern for her, and no grudge against Magne. It’s an interesting setup, if this man can overcome the burden of destiny, if Magne can rewrite Thor’s death, as he collects other people with the power of gods and starts a real grassroots push against the Jutul family and their hold over the town (as an aside, I love how small the giant’s goals are—thousands of years on Earth, and they’re so proud of being the FIFTH-LARGEST CORPORATION…IN NORWAY! What an empire they’ve built.). There’s a good pile of fun, intriguing ideas in there, which the show is completely disinterested in exploring. After Magne kills Vidar in completely justifiable self-defense, Fjor dumps Gry and becomes unconsciously evil; by the third season he’s fat-shaming his employees for fun before he feeds them to the Midgard Serpent. The other gods come and go and never have much bearing on the plot, they exist mostly so there’s someone to forge Mjolnir and for Magne to either get mad at or abandon his brother for (Laurits/Loki at least is played queer, as many Loki stories are these days, to somewhat make up for killing their gays in the first episode), and the environmentalist angle fizzles after the second season until it’s almost an afterthought; the corporation promises to clean up and they do. Even after everything, Magne graduates high school and has to give a report on why Norwegian democracy is good (is that a normal part of graduating high school in Norway?) and his teachers tell him he passed but he is chastised for not having unquestioning faith in the police and implying that the citizens have an obligation to make sure their guardians remain uncorrupt, even though the cops only start investigating the Jutuls after Magne steals three barrels of toxic waste the Jutuls were trying to hide and dumps them right on the doorstep of the police headquarters (which was…closed overnight? In Deltarune that was played as a joke, do police offices close? Isn’t there crime…at night?)

As if that all wasn’t enough, they then have the gall to say none of it was real. In the last half of the last episode, after setting up this kid who would be out for revenge because Ran Jutul SHOT OUT HIS EYE WITH AN ARROW and then just…walked away and never got in trouble for it, the show says, no, actually, Magne is a little schizophrenic (which was vaguely implied earlier, but from the viewer’s perspective was from the Jutul’s control of the town, trying to keep their crimes under wraps by destroying Magne’s credibility—but apparently both things were true?) and he was processing his trauma through his memories of Thor comics he had when he was a child, and he decides to choose loving his girlfriend over his fantasies and throws out all his old comics because he’s going to live in the REAL WORLD where love is MESSY but it’s WORTH IT.

Um, okay. Thanks for telling me I should throw out my Thor comics. I’m so sorry that Al Ewing is a better writer than you, I should definitely feel bad about that.

Going the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari route is cowardice; as is mentioned in someone’s post I saw floating around while I was watching Ragnarok, they indulged in the power of fiction to create new worlds, then got scared and stepped back. Heck, in Caligari there’s nothing particularly stranger about the world presented in the twist ending than in the main film, it’s just that we had the protagonists and antagonists backwards; everything is still unsettling, just in a different way. Here, we’ve been led to expect people with magic powers and thematic relevance and it’s just been some dude being a jerk to rich people. I guess we were childish for wanting a big battle to fix things? And I suppose that’s true; you can’t fix problems by punching giants, even if they do run the fifth largest corporation in Norway. But letting yourself fall in love with someone even though it’s difficult to connect to them wasn’t really a theme in the show…at all? And didn’t have anything to do with Magne’s problems? But now he’s throwing away a box of comics while they play a horrible cover of “I Want to Know What Love Is” and the moral is…what? Don’t question society when it’s broken? Pushing for change is too self-aggrandizing, work within the system? Is it just that sometimes bad things happen for no reason and it’s no one’s fault? That works with the murder of Isolde which I guess was an accident after all, but it doesn’t work for the pollution. For the warehouse full of barrels of waste that the Jutuls covered up that Isolde and Magne DID find. Those barrels were real. It wasn’t a hallucination. They existed, those events were seen by other characters, they were investigated by the government, they HAPPENED. It’s one of the few things we can distinctly say Magne did not hallucinate, and the show is asking us to assume Magne hallucinated sequences he was not present for. Magne hallucinated people completely changing character and acting in ways they wouldn’t have before they became gods. It’s asking us to believe every motivation we saw was a lie—why? To justify Fjor getting a happy ending and a hot girlfriend after he murdered three people with no remorse or repercussions? But no, we shouldn’t ask these questions. We should put away childish things, like comic books with a consistent plot and motivations. We’re too adult for that.

I’m not sure they thought through the atheist implications of applying 1 Corinthians 13:11 to a belief that you are god and man in one body.

Look, if Magne doesn’t have superpowers, how did he sneak the barrels of toxic waste onto the steps of police headquarters? Did he steal a forklift, drive them down the street, and put it back without being noticed? And why did Gry steal a photograph of Vidar’s ancestor/previous incarnation? Did that actually happen, or did Magne invent an entire scenario for something he wasn’t involved in? Did he invent it to explain why Fjor would want to kill Gry? Because something like that still had to happen, because Gry acknowledged there was a confrontation between her and Fjor that Magne witnessed, so presumably Vidar had to be there. I suppose he could have just hit Vidar’s car with a hammer up close, but he still threw it in the football field, right? Sure, most of the time Magne runs fast he is by himself, but that cop acknowledged he would have had to run down the mountain in thirty minutes when it would usually take five hours, that’s a physical impossibility we can’t account for without him lying about something mundane—did he get a call that his mom was in danger EARLIER on the hike and just believed it happened by a bridge that was there but he hadn’t seen at that point? Why did Fjor turn evil after he was the face of protesting against his family? DID Vidar just have a heart attack? What was the point of the scenes where Ran confesses everything to the high school counsellor if that was all stuff Magne imagined anyway? What’s the deal with all the stuff with Saxa? What was he threatening them with, if not a magic hammer? If they were real people who were skilled archers and axe throwers and had the ability to call the police, why were the Jutuls afraid of a teenager with a big hammer in a bag? Where did Laurits get the snake if he didn’t give birth to the Midgard Serpent? And what was the point of the scene where he steals Wotan’s blood and shoots up with it to recreate Loki being Odin’s blood brother, that never amounted to ANYTHING. It blows up all the stuff that worked in furtherance of, what, talking down to their audience? A bad ending to a mediocre show. There was something in this, something that could have worked, and they didn’t go for it. Cowards.

40. Saint Tail: Another show I saw Discotek license and wanted to see before I decided to buy it, Saint Tail…definitely isn’t worth buying. Which sucks, because Discotek was using it as a judge of how well shojou magical girl series could sell. My understanding is, it did not sell well! Guess I’m never getting Creamy Mami and Cutie Honey Flash on blu-ray…

Saint Tail feels like a show made by Madlibs: a young Catholic school student and her friend, a nun, get information about thefts during confession and then use their magical powers to steal the items back from the culprits and return them to their proper owners while avoiding the police, because they send notes announcing the thefts. Saint Tail is pursued by the intrepid Detective Asuka, who also tends to be investigating whoever she robs; for the most part, Saint Tail is actually pursued by Detective Asuka’s son who has special dispensation from the mayor; the inventively-named Asuka, Jr. (it just makes him sound like Kana-chan’s nephew who wrestles in Mexico) Saint Tail/Meimi is of course in love with Asuka, Jr. in that typical anime “your first crush is the person you are destined for” style, although they do have a little chemistry, which is exponentially more than most anime couples. And, why are Memi and Seira the nun doing this? How did Memi get her magic powers? Well, that is never explained. We know she didn’t get them from God; she apologizes to him for using real magic every time she transforms into Saint Tail. Her mother was a thief and her father a magician, but he uses practical tricks, not real magic, and it is implied Meimi didn’t know her mom was a crook until the final four episodes when her mother’s rival comes for revenge. The show just jumps right into the concept without explanation. Maybe it’s in the manga? My understanding is this isn’t a very accurate adaptation.

Aside from the kooky premise, there isn’t much to say about Saint Tail. Each episode follows the same formula, where people just happen to go to church to tell the same nun their problems every time, and she immediately tattles to a fourteen-year-old girl. The explanations for why these people can’t go to the police and why they have no legal options to regain their property become increasingly ludicrous and/or flimsy as the series goes on; I remember one episode in particular where a guy has his house repossessed because he cosigned a loan with a scam artist who was in it to seize his home. This dude was living in a massive mansion, he couldn’t make the payments? And then the crooked loan agent sells it to someone who demands he tear down the house as part of the sale price…this just seems like a bad deal, I think you should have waited for another buyer. The other premise is that Saint Tail has to keep her identity secret from Asuka, Jr., which leads to a number of Cat’s Eye-like sequences where she’s standing right in front of him but he can’t see her because it’s dark, or her bangs are over her eyes, or she’s standing like fifteen feet away and for some reason that’s all it takes. She does have a pony tail as Saint Tail and wears her hair down otherwise, does that count? So, yeah, in some ways it’s worse off than Cat’s Eye, since the girls in that had a consistent reason to steal things, but Saint Tail is better off because she turns the stolen goods over to their real owners instead of perpetuating Nazi crimes so that’s one thing in the show’s favor. But, aside from a few episodes that introduce new recurring characters, like the blonde girl who wants to be a cop and arrest her or the blond guy who wants to take her picture, nothing changes. I could just sit there and ignore the episode and still follow everything, and I was watching it in a language I do not speak. Unremarkable.

39. Powered Armor Dorvack: Dorvack didn’t need to be good for me to want to watch it, all it needed was what it had: the two robots that were the basis of the toys that got released in the US as the Transformers characters Roadbuster and Whirl. Now, Roadbuster, based on the main Dorvack robot Mugen Calibur (only ever called “Calibur” in the show), I have no problem with him, one of the main wreckers, there was a bit of a plot about him becoming obsessed with battle, he’s okay. But Whirl, based on Oberon Gazette? I always dug the more robotic design, but writer James Roberts made Whirl one of the main characters of his seminal More Than Meets the Eye run, THE greatest story in the history of Transformers, and that made Whirl one of my favorite Transformers of ALL TIME, a twisted, violent man, the wrecked remains of what used to be a gentle artist twisted by an oppressive state who maimed him to stop him speaking out against their abuses. THAT is a compelling character. I will recommend those Transformers comics to anyone, and of course I have the more recent toy release.

So, Dorvack was never going to be that good. I knew that. I accepted it. But is it any good at all? Well, the back of the box says it’s by the GoShogun team, that was a good show—oh, wait. It says it’s by the COMPANY that made GoShogun. Different writer and director. Hm. Well, it’s a post-Macross Real Robot show, those can go to some neat places, or they can just meander around like Dancougar did. It has nice animation…for the fight scenes, which are mostly done by whatever that one team was that always did really cool action but would mess up the foreshortening on the arms to characters’ hands hang around their waistline instead of their thighs for some reason. And uh.

Look, it’s just boring, okay? I zoned out of episodes all the time, but I didn’t miss anything; and this is a television program in a language I DON’T UNDERSTAND and have to read to follow. It had Kobayashi Kiyoshi in it, hearing someone who sounds like Jigen is always a plus. But the plot was nothing new! An alien species comes to wipe out humanity and conquer Earth because they destroyed their own planet—that’s Baldios. They then reconsider their conquest because it turns out they’re a related species to humans—that’s Macross. And Layzner. And Baldios. Arguably, God Mars and Voltes V had similar elements in their protagonists, too. One of the aliens is a zealot who pushes his love away while still assuming she will follow him; I’m sure there’s a million of ‘em, but Daimos springs to mind. And on and on and on. They even kill off one of the main guys and replace him with a near-identical dude, like Getter Robo G or any number of Power Rangers shows, or kind of like Kamen Rider; at least Gundam had the decency to make Slegger Law a completely different person than Ryu Jose when they pulled that. They even try to do the exact same thing Macross did and wipe out the villain, only to follow it with ten episodes where the humans and aliens are trying to live in harmony but insurgent elements still destabilize the peace, except they do it in the most ham-fisted way, where the villain gets what he wants but all his minions are dead or working for Earth now, and everyone moves on as the villain consolidates power and starts attacking again, including COMPLETELY GENOCIDING ALL THE ALIENS WHO HAD MOVED INTO RESERVATIONS ON EARTH except for one who has to fulfill a prophecy or something, which I think they really undersold; instead they went for a “Oh look, aren’t people prejudiced” plot which, yeah, they are, but did you guys not hear about how the aliens all switched sides to fight against their leader? Their…immortal, formless leader, who came from heaven and brought the aliens the technology to advance themselves but also encouraged them to live beyond their means until they burned out their planet, and went to Earth but also the previous priests of the Moai who ruled the culture of planet Idelia before they were displaced by the bad guy fled to Earth and integrated with the populace but not before they left warnings that one day the bad guy would come for Earth?

Yeah, does that sound interesting? Well, it doesn’t pay off in a satisfying way. First, they never explain why, if the Priests of the Moai (because we can’t let the Moai just be a kingly symbol from a short-lived culture representing actual people, no science fiction is allowed to let a non-white society just…have. A culture.) didn’t like…Zelar, that was the bad guy’s name…if they didn’t like Zelar, why did they build a giant Moai temple that he could use to power himself up and raise an evil continent with even crazier robots than before? Why did they keep a locked box that a trio of crazed tomb robbers would convince themselves was the Ark of the Covenant (Raiders was only two years old at this point, you see) even though the Bible is pretty clear on what the Ark of the Covenant looked like and it wasn’t a small locked box, and anyway, in the plot the box plays out more like Pandora’s Box, which was actually a jar but I’m getting off track…I figure the ending was rushed, but if it was so rushed, why did they cram the bit about the thieves in there?

As for the robot action, like I said, it was well animated…in the fight scenes. Usually. Otherwise, it’s completely unremarkable. Dorvack is classed as Real Robot, and certainly by the end the transforming “Variable Machines” are deployed by militaries worldwide, but at the start the soldiers are all using Starship Trooper-style “Powered Armors” (the disc I bought includes a short film where series stars Masato and Louie are Powered Armor pilots who fight an alien invader; I must assume that was a pilot film they used to pitch the concept before a toy company picked it up, but I can’t be sure) (The disc also includes a short film where the Dorvack crew go to the beach and harass Minky Momo, which, uh, no thanks) and the Dorvack team are a three-person independent military unit who just wreck house whenever they show up. This is, admittedly, not too far off from the concept of the original Gundam, but the execution is all wrong, stuck halfway between styles with none of the advantages of either. Dorvack is completely inconsequential, the mathematical mean of robot shows; it does the things you expect, it never surprises, except perhaps by accident. Big emotional reveals, like finding your dead friend’s ex-girlfriend the writers foreshadowed twenty episodes, just to pick a random example, play out in the most conflict-free, emotionless manner. A dude is introduced and gets a main character killed with his insubordination and then just…goes away. There’s a whole episode about birds because the bad guys killed some birds for no reason other than cruelty and because we decided this episode was about birds.

Well, at least we got Whirl out of it.

38. Record of Lodoss War (OVA and TV Show): I should probably split these into two, since each Lodoss War cartoon was done by a different team, for different mediums, about half a decade apart, but they’re all based on the same books which were based on a D&D campaign so, eh, I don’t care.

Lodoss War was one of the first big high fantasy series in Japan—at least, Tolkein-style high fantasy; and all because a bunch of novelists got together in the early eighties and played an epic Dungeons and Dragons campaign that they serialized in D&D fan magazines, which was the equivalent of a live play series at the time. It has a lot of elements one associates both with tabletop and JRPG’s of the time; don’t think I didn’t notice how, in the OVA, when two characters are written out at the end of the story the heroes meet two new friends for the next arc. However, its format is also its weakness: while Lodoss would have been very impressive in the 1990’s video market, up against modern anime like Frieren and even Western series like Game of Thrones, Record of Lodoss War seems so…basic. There’s a bad guy kingdom who’s always starting stuff and teaming up with goblins and dark elves. There’s a cool elf lady (Deedlit, who is the most famous character in the series; I wanted to compare her to the modern popular elf ladies, Frieren and Marcille—Deedlit does not stand up, I’m sad to say) who hates dwarves and loves the paladin. There’s a magic artifact with an ancient sorcerer inside who will control your mind. It’s all sort of…been done elsewhere, and better. There’s nothing to make this unique, except that it existed in a time and place where other books of this type were uncommon, and it got two anime.

The first anime, which adapts the first book and a bit from books 3&4, was an early-90’s OVA, so of course it looks absolutely gorgeous, and might be the best option to go with just from the design sense alone. The TV series suffers from a TV budget and schedule bringing down the quality of the animation (not that you would be able to tell from the gorgeous theme song, of course) but it has the more complex plot, at least for the amount of threads and characters it juggles; it adapts books 3&4 in full, without the changes made by the first cartoon, and then does books 6&7 (I do not know why books 2 and 5 were skipped, except that they must be short adventures designed to fill what is presented as a time skip in the second anime and provide more information about changes for the characters—marriages, etc. The first anime cuts out the time skip and just flows from book 1 into book 3 without stopping). The characters look the same between both cartoons—obviously there must have been standardized designs for the main cast between the book covers and the manga adaptation—but the dragons and monsters look much cooler in the first one.

Anyway, I wish I could say more, but nothing stuck out to me across the stories. There’s really no great twist or shocking revelation; everything goes down just about how you’d expect it to. The characters aren’t particularly deep or compelling, and several of them have very generic English names that the subtitlers try to cover up with unusual spellings (Flaim, Kashue, Neece, Akroyd, Woodchuck). It’s not bad by any means, but something of a relic of the Suncoast Video era of anime fandom, picking up a few episodes and thinking, “Man, they never make cool fantasy TV shows like this.” Now we just have cooler fantasy TV shows.

37. Detective Conan: This is the show that never ends…

Possibly the most interesting thing that happened this year was they made the theme song for the first six months focus on the three candidates for Rum and then they didn’t meet up until the end of the six months. That was a fun case that explained a hilarious misunderstanding that led to the assistant teacher at Conan’s school wants to kill the chief of police, which of course remains unresolved, because why clear up any plot threads ever? There were some more adventures with the hot motorcycle cop, including one where she and Sato were in a comically compromising position that I enjoyed sharing without context, and we got to learn the secret origin of the girl who love’s Heiji…’s butler. Her butler’s origin. They’re clearly setting her up to be with the butler after she gets over her crush on Heiji, but I don’t know about that, guys. He’s an adult.

Yeah, that’s it. Conan keeps going.

36. Dexter’s Laboratory Season 4: “But wait, Eric,” you say. “Dexter’s Laboratory is one of your all-time favorites. You watched every episode back when you were a kid, you watched it all the time, you would leave Cartoon Network on while doing other things and let Dexter wash over you as the background noise to your life. What do you mean, reviewing it now?”

Well, yes, you’re right, I did. I watched every episode multiple times, dozens of times, over the years. But we got Cartoon Network in late 1997, when they were almost done making episodes. I only remember seeing a few—definitely LABretto, probably Last But Not Beast, and Ego Trip, the TV movie—when they first aired, the rest I experienced in reruns. And then, in 2001, they announced new episodes, and I was so excited.

But here’s the thing: Genndy Tartakovsky was working on Samurai Jack at that time, and he’d brough Paul Rudish and Rob Renzetti with him, and Renzetti was about to dip to do My Life as a Teenage Robot. Butch Hartman was already working on Fairly OddParents, and Craig McCracken was still doing Powerpuff Girls, which was one of the biggest kids’ shows in America at the time. Season 3 of Dexter’s Laboratory was left to the supporting crew, the people who had worked under the main storyboarders and directors for the first two seasons, and they fucked it up. I was astonished to realize I’d seen all but maybe one and a half episodes of season 3, and I was all set for it to be fine, assuming I had judged it harshly at the time because it looked different, but no, honestly, I had been too easy on it at the time. I don’t want to spend too much space reviewing a cartoon I’d already seen, but season 3 was listless and lifeless, to the point that episodes would sometimes forget to have, like, jokes (Looking at YOU, “That Magic Moment”). Even when they did something clever, like the Pink Panther pastiche in “A Silent Cartoon,” pale in comparison to the more dynamic and inventive earlier episodes dealing with similar setups, like the wonderful “Dim” from season 2. The storyboards are mostly flat shots of the characters in profile, Deedee hardly does anything, Dexter just repeats catchphrases and insults from previous episodes (not unlike in the fan-written episode, “Dexter and Computress Get Mandark”, but without the clever wackiness of that story), and Mandark’s parents were a MISTAKE. In fact, many of the episodes seem designed around explaining things that didn’t need to be explained—why does Dexter like science instead of magic? Well, the x-rays show his brain is HUGE, there should not be a fuss! Why did Dee Dee confuse Dexter with her grandfather? Because he’s OLD, I don’t need to see Dexter’s grandfather! What does Dexter’s Dad do for a living? That doesn’t affect Dexter and Dee Dee so it’s not IMPORTANT, who cares? On and on like this for thirteen excruciating episodes.

That was also the season where Christine Cavanaugh had to retire for reasons that I assume had to do with her passing away 13 years later, and her replacement, Candi Milo, never quite got the same range out of Dexter’s funny accent as Cavanaugh did; of course, these things take time, and she only had about twenty-three episodes with the character, so that’s somewhat understandable, but still disappointing.

So, no, I did not stick around to watch the fourth season when it premiered in 2003, and after reliving season 3, I approached it with some hesitation. And for the most part, I didn’t miss anything; there was a clear desire to course-correct from season 3 as they went back to consistent 7-minute shorts and individual title cards for each, and more time is spent with Dexter and Dee Dee messing around in the lab, which is what the people want to see anyway. An early gem is “Sis-tem Error”, where Dee Dee accidentally completely shuts down Dexter’s Lab and follows him around with a flashlight pretending to be the voice of his Computer so he won’t notice, but the rest of the season had difficulty rising to the inventiveness of the original. I suppose it brings home how essential presentation is to comedy; a lot of the jokes and premises of classic Dexter’s Laboratory episodes are fairly standard stuff, but the storyboarding, the timing, knowing when to speak and when there should be silence—the new team simply wasn’t as good at these things. Genndy Tartakovsky and Craig McCracken were masters of silence and the drawn-out moment, or they could make you laugh by repeating the same line over and over and somehow it was still funny (DOES ANYBODY WANNA PLAY JACKS AFTER DINNER?), and so many of the season 3 and 4 episodes are so desperate to fill the air with unnecessary exposition as characters explain every move they make (“second-screen filmmaking” is nothing new, sadly). Things did pick up by the end, not the least because Tartakovsky came back for two episodes (“Chicken Scratch,” which was made to run before the Powerpuff Girls Movie and so features theater-quality animation that, for the first time, made me understand why someone might compare Tartakovsky’s style to John Kricfalusi, and the frankly superior “Comedy of Feathers,” where Dexter watches with glee as Dee Dee makes a nuisance of herself at the zoo), but “Dexter’s Wacky Races” (a much more direct parody of its old cartoon subject than the earlier classic racing episode, “Mock 5”, which brought back the Justice Friends for some classic gags and finally remembered Monkey loved Agent Honeydew only for them to do nothing that episode), “The Lab of Tomorrow”, “They Got Chops”, and “Poetic Injustice”, while not better than any given episode of the first two seasons (okay, maybe better than “Star Spangled Sidekicks”, but no others), showed that the creators were actually getting back into the hang of this thing before the show was cancelled. Ah, well.

So, it’s hard to think anything other than that Dexter’s Lab would have been better off with 52 nearly-perfect episodes, a movie, and a secret episode they made specifically so it would get banned from television. But perfection so often eludes us, and what corporation can resist buying new episodes of something people love, without understanding why? I can’t imagine that I will come back to these disks of my complete series collection often, except that one of them has Ego Trip on it and that movie rules, but I have experienced it now. Their existence does not diminish my love for the whole, but I cannot deny, I wish these seasons did not exist.

35. Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance: A CGI Gundam show about Zeon troops has been done before, and being a Netflix exclusive animated in a program for videogames (even one as versatile as Unreal 5) didn’t inspire much confidence, but I had a few days left on my Netflix subscription so I gave it a shot. The series follows a troop of Zeon soldiers who, like Char, pilot red Zaku IIs, presumably because, like Char, they racked up a lot of kills at Loum. A more military-fiction take on Gundam sounds like the sort of thing executives would think would appeal to a more American audience, but the execution relies too heavily on stereotypes; like a minute into the first episode, a Zeon soldier says this is his last mission before his enlistment is up and immediately takes a bullet to the face, so that’s the level of stereotypical we’re working with here. Trying to reach a broader American audience is probably why the lip-sync (such as it is) was done to the English track, even though it’s rather unimpressive stuff—the deliveries vary from listless to overacted, and never in a way that suits the action. The character designs are good enough, especially for the main character, Captain Solari, but rendering in Unreal 5 just makes everything look like a videogame. It looks better than the Netflix Transformers shows, yes, but that’s a low bar.

The real innovation of the series, and the main discussion point in every conversation I’ve seen about it online, is the portrayal of the Gundam from the Zeon point of view—basically, it's a slasher villain, an implacable foe that gets up from their best shots and plows through them. I have some difficulty believing that an elite Zaku crew wouldn’t have heard about Amuro Ray’s Gundam by November of 0079, since he would have killed a member of the royal family a month earlier, but we’re not dealing with Amuro here. Just another one of the bundles of Gundams the Federation shipped off to wherever the miniseries we’re making right now is set, with no consideration how the original series and Zeta acted like there was only fully-fledged Gundam in service and the Federation only had the supplies for the cheaper GM models, no let’s keep making more models to sell at the expense of the canon…

Ahem. Where was I?

The Zeon push into Federation territory in Europe quickly turns into a retreat back to outer space, and the scrappy team’s slow disintegration in the face of the Gundam as they just try to get back home (where the captain, of course, left her little boy) was entertaining enough, and there were a few interesting characters in the motley crew, but with only six episodes there was no room for any of them to stand out, with the possible exception of the stuffy Major Ronet, who was written like they wanted us to hate him for chewing out the heroes but he was also 100% correct to do so, so I was kind of rooting for him the whole time (he lives!). The ending is suitably bleak, except I don’t really understand why a desire to keep child soldiers out of the war would cause someone to go join a troop based out of Africa—doesn’t that just, you know, PROLONG the war? I had fun yelling Gundam things at the TV while it was Gundaming (“Don’t shoot, we’re retreating!” Uh, yeah, back to Side 6 where they’ll redeploy you to Solomon or A Baoa Qu to defend the Solar Ray construction; I completely understand why the Federation doesn’t want you to do that.) But there’s also not much here you won’t have seen in other movies; it’s mostly standard military fiction stuff, including an infiltration mission that only exists to kill time and get the main character to meet the Gundam pilot for some minor drama in the final fight. Not bad by any means, but there is better Gundam out there.

34. Sandman (Season 2): “Okay, Sandman the TV show, you’re doing my favorite issue of Sandman the comic, where he goes to hell and Lucifer is like, ‘What up, bro, let’s walk and talk.’ Whatcha got for me?”

“Well, walking around Hell costs a lot of money, we only have this throne room set. So what if, instead of strolling around Hell with a lot of examples of what they’re talking about, Lucifer just says things while strolling around a room?”

“Um. I guess you gotta’, money and all. Is Lucifer really chummy and friendly, like I imagined him?”

“No, she’s every bit as maudlin and self-important as Dream.”

“Do you at least have the guy who’s chained to a rock because he hates himself?”

“That would require paying another actor to put on makeup.”

“Oh, come the fuck on, that was the best part!”

“Don’t know what to tell you, man.”

“I can’t imagine standing around a room is a whole hour.”

“Nah, we’ll knock that out in fifteen minutes and get to the contest over who gets the key in the same episode.”

“Which is a bunch of people standing around a different room and talking at each other.”

“Yes.”

“Does it look like cutting off Lucifer’s wings HURTS, at least?”

“Nah, they pop right off.”

And so it goes.

Sandman was never going to do the whole comic book. I mean, I guess it COULD have, with one or two more seasons, but this thing must have cost a fortune, and Netflix LOVES dumping all their money on season one and then, eh, I guess we could do more, yeah, but we’ve already moved on to the next thing. Oh, and then after season one everyone found out that Neil Gaiman had been an abusive sex creep for decades. That kind of put a damper on things. So, instead we have Alan Heinberg saying that actually when you get right down to it the PLOT only comes up in a few books so they’ll just focus on the Dream stuff and everything else, well, they’ll use the important parts. You have to do the Shakespeare story that won that award, right? Of course, we’ll just slide that one in and…

Look, I’m not saying you shouldn’t like the plot of Sandman. It’s a pretty good plot, I guess. But that never struck me as the draw of the series. The variety of stories that came out over the run, the unique experience of picking up an issue and maybe Dream’s not in this one, even. Maybe it’s about Caesar Augustus’s trauma today. That was what made it unique. That, and the art. Each arc, each standalone story, had a different artist, interpreting this world and these characters through their own lens; unlike a superhero comic where you have to stay “on model” or even, God forbid, within a “House style,” in Sandman even the main characters were malleable by nature, able to blend into a background or a style as needed. This was always going to be something any live-action adaptation struggled with, and would only become worse as the series got away from its pulpy horror roots and became more metaphysical. So, cut all that stuff out, problem solved. Especially since the budget was obviously cut substantially between seasons; might as well avoid all those big special effects!

Except it turns out most of the plot of Sandman, when you just get down to the stories that focus on Dream, are people standing in a room. Season of Mists? After you get through the journey to Hell (truncated, as mentioned above) and excluding the origin of the Dead Boy Detectives (dropped completely, and their show was cancelled anyway), you’re left with a bunch of people standing in a room, talking. Brief Lives? Well, there’s some driving around, but mostly Dream and Delirium are going to rooms where they can talk to people, until they find Destruction’s house, where they have a conversation. The Kindly Ones has some action, of course: a baby gets set on fire and his mother makes a deal with supernatural beings for terrible vengeance, but a good chunk of the action is just the Corinthian looking for people to interrogate, here aided by Joanna Constantine who they heavily hint is going to enter into a relationship with the Corinthian (which is gross but, being that she is an adaptation of John Constantine, I think maybe Corinthian got the raw deal here), and you know what let’s just skip all that World’s End stuff and the bits where Wesley Dodds and Superman show up to contemplate the loss of the man who unknowingly shaped so much of their lives and just cut to the part in the Wake where everyone stands around a room and talks and call it a day, alright?

It’s BORING. IT’S SO BORING. There are things that work on a page as you contemplate mental states, as you look at a beautiful illustration, as panels guide you around an image so a story unfolds, that don’t work in film. Adaptation has to consider its new medium, or you lose something. Sandman loses practically everything. And I know why: this adaptation is simply too reverent of its text. Sure, it makes changes; almost exclusively for the worse. But each line is delivered as if its holy writ, even when the script doesn’t call for it. Sure, Dream is sullen, morose, and eloquent; that’s the character. But, with few exceptions (Death, Merv, Matthew, Corinthian, Constantine) everyone ELSE acts the same. Shivering Jemmy, despite retaining the cockney cant from the original comics, speaks in eloquent upper-crust British, slowly delivered like a creepy kid in a horror movie, regardless of the frivolous nature of her words. Lucifer’s renunciation of Hell, which I read with the comical resignation of someone who is just DONE with this job and the boss can go to, well…instead, each line is delivered with morose self-pity, leaving me to complain for the THIRD time this review about how they ruined my favorite issue. Delirium might get it the worst; instead of being, you know, delirious all the time, half out of it and confused, looking at something beyond reality only she can see, she is instead just a nervous girl with unusual fashion sense and a ponderous way of speaking. And somehow, Sandman presents a worse Thor than I’ve ever seen, who delivers his boasts in a low murmur, as if unsure of himself. You don’t want to think “Man, Chris Hemsworth would have delivered that line better” when you’re watching a Serious Adult Drama, I think. Heck, I would’ve taken the guy from Ragnarok over this. But, that thought aside, I honestly don’t blame the actors for this, they’re just following the direction they’re given. It’s just that direction seems to be, “Don’t outshine our star,” which is entirely wrong. Everyone outshines the Sandman in Sandman. That’s the point. He’s the unseen power, the man lurking in the background, the source of beauty you’d never expect. By making it all about him, we lose what he meant to the world. We’re left with a guy who was in prison, got out, pissed everyone off, and died. If this is your introduction to the series, you might wonder what the big deal was. Well, I read it late and did think it was slightly overrated, but still. Better than this.

I could just leave things there, but there are a few other observations I wanted to make. One was about the fairy, Nula, whose transformation after she drops her glamor is reduced from the comic’s transition from a very Tolkeinesque elf (the false image) to a grubby, skinny little forest sprite with frizzy hair (the true self). The need to use only one actress reduces this to the same person with less makeup, slightly tousled hair, and what may charitably be described as a “Northern English accent” that mainly comprises changing her pronunciation of her brother’s name, Cluracan, to sound more like “Klerkin.”

You may also notice, from my list of storylines the show adapted, that along with the single-issue stories, A Game of You is completely gone. That means that setting up the character Barbie last season was pointless, as we lose her fall into depression, soul-searching, and redemption that The Doll’s House set up. It also means we lose Thessaly, a hugely important character who still felt underutilized because some of the most plot-important stuff happened off-panel. We’re talking about a mousy, uncompromising, librarian-chic, spiteful, cunning, vengeful murder witch, who was one of my favorite characters for obviously purely literary reasons, cough cough. What’s more, she’s a perfect foil for Dream, someone who can bounce off of him and present a counterpoint to his romanticism for an imagined past, a darker interpretation of old gods that are less accepting than Gaiman likes to portray elsewhere. She also was another little puzzle piece to humanize the story, like with the travelers at Worlds’ End or the visitors to the funeral who had nothing to do with the story or the victims of the spirits leaving Hell who are all completely absent from this adaptation. I just remembered they never even establish that God sends those two angels to replace Satan and they hate it and start holding hatred for God in their hearts since they can’t comprehend His plan! That’s a great bit that makes Season of Mists all worth it and it’s completely missing!

Wendy, from A Game of You, isn’t missing, but she might as well be. Brought in to replace Ruby from Brief Lives, the painful bit where Thessaly and Selene herself are complete gender-essentialist douchebags to trans-woman Wendy is dropped, but also so is her defiance, her insistence on herself, and her whole story. Wendy is reduced to one scene where she has a conversation with Delirium about how, yeah, she would still like to reconnect with her homophobic parents, and then she blows up. This is not terribly different from what happens to Wendy in the comic, except that there, Wendy was a main character for the entire arc. We got to know her, and feel for her. This show doesn’t have time for Wendy. It had time for her funeral, attended by Dream. He doesn’t like that Wendy’s parents deadname her on her grave, so he wipes it away. I’m not sure that’s a power Dream has, to rewrite actual reality, but this is based on a scene in the comic where Barbie scrawls “Wendy” on her grave in her favorite, bright red lipstick. It’s not as evocative as that. Barbie’s act is a scream, a howl for a lost friend, done as a fuck you to the world, to show that someone cared, someone accepted her. Dream is a god being, male-presenting, who thinks he knows best. He handwaves it, and it’s done—no consequences, no threat to him. Acceptance from someone whose acceptance doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even make sense that Wendy’s aunt asks Dream to stand in the back; in the comic, Barbie shows up in clothes that would offend the religious family’s sensibilities, Dream shows up in a black suit, he’s positively dapper. It loses something. It’s sterile.

Just read the damn books. Preferably in a way that won’t give Gaiman residuals.

33. Acro Trip: I know I’m always watching anime no one has ever heard of, but they’re usually just…old. This one’s pretty new. I saw an ad for it last year, which sounded intriguing: a girl is a fan of a local Magical Girl (a Sailor Moon-type superhero, basically), but has become bored with her formulaic battles. To spice things up, she teams up with the villain to make sure the fights are more interesting. “Aha!” thought I, as any sane person would, “Like Bat-Mite!”

Well, no, not quite like Bat-Mite. For one, the fifth-dimensional imp was always upfront with Batman about his intentions. Date Chizuko is very embarrassed about being against Berry Blossom, although she also usually is starstruck beyond speech whenever she meets her idol. I also don’t recall, and I admit I haven’t read every appearance of Bat-Mite, but I don’t recall any instance where he approached a middle schooler, glint in his eye as a stray blonde hair falls seductively in front of his face, and said in that alluringly evil voice, “Help me little girl, I have no idea what I’m doing.” Bat-Mite don’t roll like that. So, on the one hand, I was disappointed that the main character wasn’t more cutthroat. Acro Trip (I have no idea why it’s called that, my best guess is it starts out with Chizuko visiting her grandfather while her mom is away on business, and she decides to move in once she realizes the town has a resident superhero) is more of a…maybe not “cozy” comedy, but a low-stakes sitcom, more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. The characters are all complete anxious wrecks, which anime commonly portrays as normal, who quickly form a small friend group where they all know where each other live and have everyone’s phone numbers but through contrivances Berry Blossom never really puts two and two together that Date Chizuko is General Dante, and same for Chizuko and Berry’s alter-ego, even though the villain Chroma (the subtitles say “Chrome,” but Chroma seems more appropriate as a transliteration to me) and Berry’s talking animal sidekick Mashirou have it all figured out. A common punchline will involve Chroma’s cheap magic plan that only allows a certain amount of MP per month, so he gets his speed throttled in a battle, or Chizuko’s grandfather just blustering through everything like it’s not a big deal, and there’s a weird recurring joke where one of Chizuko’s classmates really wants to be her friend but Chizuko is so wrapped up in Berry Blossom business that she never notices which never really pays off except for a quick gag in a montage at the end. It’s all fun and inoffensive, and Chroma’s minions, the kuma kaijin (translation: mysterious bear men/monsters), who he can summon from midair and can only say “bear” in English. An astonishingly middle-of-the-road anime: I have no complaints, but nor do I have compliments. It did what it intended.

But I do have to assume there’s more to adapt from the manga. The twelve-episode season ends with the wild reveal that Mashirou was originally Mashima, Chroma’s school chum who was turned into a cat man as punishment by the leader of Chroma’s criminal organization as punishment for losing control of his magic powers, who recruited Berry as a way of getting his revenge. Mashirou is kidnapped and taken to another town, and Chizuko follows. Chroma and Berry pursue them…to the hot springs. Then every major character just takes a hot springs vacation. The end. What? They…you just…I WAS PROMISED SUPERHERO FIGHTS. What’s the plot? What is the Fossa Magna organization for? Why does this billionaire leading a self-proclaimed “evil organization” punish his minions for being mean? Seriously what’s the deal with the girl who wants to be Chizuko’s friend? I may never know. A sequel season seems unlikely, and I’m not searching out the manga. But still. Not bad.

32. Transformers: EarthSpark (Specials): Ah, hey Billy we thought you were dead.

Yes, they brought back EarthSpark OVER A YEAR after the previous episode aired to dump two TV movies on streaming with two weeks’ notice—what is this, a sci-fi show from the 90’s?—which get to be included here based on the “I guess I included the final year of Owl House” rule, not the “I skipped Adventure Time: Distant Lands” rule. The results, clocking in at about five episodes’ length, cover a lot of ground in a short time, but also feel insubstantial, although I think they were slightly more successful than season three. Both episodes focus on conflict between the brother-sister pairs at the heart of the show: the first, human siblings Robby and Mo Malto, and the second the Earthborn “Terran” Transformers, Twitch and Thrash, to really hammer home the “family” theme every piece of children’s media will beat you over the head with these days. The first special followed up on one of my favorite parts of EarthSpark, the brutal and emotional first season finale, by suddenly introducing Agent Croft’s daughter, who apparently was told by her uncle that her mother was “gone” and instead of asking for clarification (or…having a funeral?) just assumed that she’d, you know, GONE somewhere and used that to justify spending a week harassing a fifth grader on the orders of a mysterious benefactor who of course is the evil Mandroid. And she just accepts the word of this head in a jar without question! This one’s plot was extremely contrived, and required several characters to refuse to communicate with the people who loved them out of stubbornness and spite (“Mandroid has taken over Starscream’s body and is threatening to blow up the Autobot base that runs under town, should we tell Optimus?” “No, we can handle it!” two minutes later “Optimus or Megatron could have handled Starscream by now!” YEAH DUMBASS THAT’S WHY YOU SHOULD CALL THEM). Despite these obvious flaws, it did get the closest to the themes of prejudice and regret that I appreciated so much about the first season, and were completely absent from the episodes made by the new production team.

However, the second, longer special, which finally moved the action to Cybertron, was perhaps better overall, even if it relied too heavily on stuff from the “Aligned”-verse, “Binder of Revelation” (Look at Optimus talking like he was physically present for the banishment of Liege Maximo, that’s the sort of “Binder of revelation”, “Optimus is a reincarnation of a dead god” bullshit that cheapens the strength of his character, coming from a middle/lower class and becoming leader through his sheer goodness and strength…also, look at Liege Maximo appearing on a TV show, that’s a long way from showing up in the final panel of a comic book from 1994). Last-minute appearances by Hot Rod, Mirage, and Scorponok spiced things up a bit, even though every choice they made for this version of Hot Rod was utterly baffling. Twitch was long my favorite of the new characters they made for this show (sorry, Nightshade), and I appreciated her arc far more than Robby’s “I have to be the HERO, without that I’m NOTHING” grandstanding, even though…she was kind of going through the same thing. Twitch solved her problem by talking things through and being open with herself, instead of flinging herself at every problem without a plan until one finally worked. She also never posed like King Arthur on top of a sacred relic. I vibe with that resolution more.

All in all, an improvement but still not up to the level I hoped this show would maintain. The decision to end the series with Megatron and Bumblebee having their memories wiped so they don’t remember anything that happened for decades before the first episode is so weird, too. It ends on a cliffhanger, but also on a triumphant shot of the whole cast posing before they jump into a space bridge, so I don’t think we’re coming back this time. Megatron will just be out there, somewhere…and very confused.

31. Lady Georgie: A few years ago, Discotek licensed an anime that I would never pay for: a 45-episode shojo series about a little Australian girl that was apparently a big hit in Arabic nations in the eighties. “Well,” thinks I, who has no interest in any of the popular modern period dramas actually made for discerning adults but who will watch the shittiest kids shows if he hear about it on IGN when he was in Middle School, “that sounds interesting, but I don’t want to pay for it.” So it got added to Retro Crush and I watched it.

Lady Georgie sure is an anime.

Set in a nebulous period when Australia was a penal colony—I’ve been saying a standard of deviation around 1855 because there’s an episode where a train line is dedicated in Sydney and that’s the earliest date Wikipedia gives for that, but of course it wouldn’t have been a fancy PASSENGER line at the time, so who knows—they do establish that Victoria was queen, so that narrows it down to two thirds of a century—Lady Georgie follows the title character, an orphan who was adopted by a small farming family after a tree fell on her mom. Her adoptive family, with the completely normal and not made-up-sounding name of the Buttmans, have two sons who immediately take to the young girl and a mother who hates this vile intruder for being the daughter of a CONVICT, which is definitely something an English person would be prejudiced about, not just a disturbingly common prejudice in Japan or anything. Also, Mom is afraid her sons will fall hopelessly in love with this girl who grows up thinking she’s their little sister, and to be fair to Mom, that is exactly what happens.

Why do I watch anime

Yeah, okay, yeah…there’s an odd trend in anime of siblings being, like…way too close. I first picked up on it watching Fighting Foodons on FoxBox and I’m going to die someday. It was kind of the cool new thing in the early-eighties; Miyuki, a manga and anime about a boy who falls in love with his sister he never met, was popular around the same time Georgie ran, and this is far tamer than that, kind of Wuthering Heights through the lens of Little House on the Prairie, but with boomerangs and koalas. And so it coasts along with every character understanding exactly what’s going on, except the main character who just loves her idyllic family and her wonderful childhood out in the wilderness except for the part where their father dies because he’s crushed by a canoe in a massive flood and she’s left to be raised by the woman who hates her and her dad forbid her to ever take off her fancy bracelet but she doesn’t know why. So there’s about twenty episodes of the kids just playing around and having mild mischief and then Georgie FALLS IN LOVE WITH A BEAUTIFUL NOBLEMAN. By which I mean, she jumps over him on a horse and then rips his clothes off. Typical meet-cute stuff.

So that’s when the plot arrives. They’d toyed with the family having conflict with high-class women before, but it quickly devolves into Georgie pulling this dude away from his bitch fiancée and her brothers getting jealous without explaining why. Admittedly, a rich pretty boy fucking around with your sister as his side piece and then leaving her after a year or two was a real concern at the time, but there’s never any question that Lowell Gray really loves her and would leave his fiancée for her and the brothers are just jealous. Which makes Mom mad, so she tells Georgie that her parents were criminals, and then Georgie almost dies of pneumonia and then her brother Abel tells her he’s in love with her and that he’s secretly known the truth the whole time and he wants to marry her and she has the reasonable reaction of, “Hey, this just got weird, I’m gonna’ peace out,” and disguises herself as a boy (with the totally not-made-up name of Joe Buttman) and flees to England after her boyfriend. And then her brother Abel follows her on another ship because he’s a sailor. And then Mom dies and their brother Arthur also follows them to England. FOUR SHIPS headed directly to London in such a small period of time, what are the odds? I would think it would take them longer than that.

Then things really go off the rails, as they all get wrapped up in a plot by the diabolical Duke of Dangling (an appropriate name for the nemesis of the Buttmans, don’t you think?) who framed Georgie’s biodad and is also the uncle of Lowell’s fiancée and he’s keeping a dude prisoner who he calls Cain but looks just like Arthur and of course he’s Arthur because Arthur is Abel’s brother BUT DID DANGLING KNOW THAT WHEN HE STARTED CALLING HIM CAIN? And someone tried to kill the Queen and Lowell is dying of Uncurable Movie Disease and like…it’s a lot. I had fun yelling at these characters. I had fun making my friend who loves sailing ships yell at how the ships were portrayed in this show. But what the fuck is all this?

Because of course, they have to go the most boring route possible and make Georgie a secret noblewoman and that fixes all her problems. Of course! The old, “you aren’t special because of YOU, silly, you were BORN that way.” Four days after I finished this series, I watched the pilot for Knights of Guinevere, which included the line, “All monarchs are usurpers and descendants of usurpers.” I think that’s a better moral. Is Lady Georgie good? I certainly watched worse shows contemporaneous to it. I think the main character was pretty charming, and I think everyone else was pretty reprehensible. I think Abel is a moron for not making his move with Jessica, who is hotter and cooler than Georgie, even if Georgie can do sick boomerang tricks. I think a Koala would make a horrible pet. But give me Rose of Versailles over this any day.

30. Digimon Beatbreak: The new Digimon show was announced at the same time as another Adventure-universe story that turned out to be a novel instead of a movie, even though they did a fully animated and voice acted trailer. So that was disappointing, but it has nothing to do with the actual show, so let’s talk about it on its merits. Sure, okay.

Digimon Beatbreak is a conscious attempt to make a Digimon show targeted to the older audience that has traditionally been drawn to Digimon for its darker themes, even though it’s still largely a kids show, designed to sell toys. In practice, this means they integrate aspects used by shonen manga: digivolutions are treated more like Super Saiyan-style powerups, and the show takes the whole first twelve-episode “cour” to get to one for the main character, and very few other human-allied Digimon can do them. They also prioritize multi-episode arcs over single-episode fights, where the enemies are fellow humans with complex motivations. This isn’t entirely successful in execution, but it distinguishes this show from what came before, avoiding the pitfalls of shows like Xros Wars, where the plot was built around justifying the new toy Bandai was trying to sell.

Set in the near future, Beatbreak hypothesizes that all of humanity would buy and use an egg-shaped digital pet/personal organizer AI called a Sapotama. They remind me of the egg baby from that episode of Batman Beyond. These devices measure human energy called E-Pulses, and those with the best behavior and strongest E-pulses are allowed to live in a super Megablock run by the primary manufacturer of Sapotamas for the elite of society. If that all sounds horribly dystopian, yes, there is a great plotline about a single father using his daughter to regain his position in the megablock and regain his social status to her detriment, but so far the show hasn’t hinted at any organized rebellion, outside of the minor efforts of the heroes. Well, and the main character’s origin: Tomoro Tenma is one of the lower classes; his parents were accused of a crime and disappeared by the state or something, and he was raised by his older brother. However, Tomoro has something wrong with him that interferes with Sapotamas, which, through complicated circumstances, leads to a classmate of his being attacked by Digimon, his brother being put into a coma by Digimon, and his Sapotama turning INTO a Digimon—his partner, of course. You see, if a Sapotama glitches out, it will turn into a Digimon, and they have to feed on human E-Pulses to live, and eating too much at once can freeze them and put them into a coma. Tomoro is recruited into a group called Glowing Dawn, which is one of several subcontractors working to recover and turn in rogue Digimon to cover up for the Sapotama corporation. Their leader, Kyo, is doing his own thing to protect Digimon without letting the corporation know, and the members of Glowing Dawn are all people who aren’t terribly interested in reintegrating into Sapotama-dominated society, but there are plenty of others who toe the line as antagonists.

So, there have been some good storylines—the one about the Pandamon who makes a deal with an old-school yakuza oyabun to protect a neighborhood from large corporate gentrification, which includes a scene where the gangster offers to commit seppuku to buy his friends’ freedom, was wild, and the aforementioned plot about the evil dad was good supervillain stuff, especially the part where the douchebag doesn’t get what he wants. I was disappointed that Tomoro’s classmate who was important for the initial episode didn’t become a regular, although she did return a couple episodes later. At only twelve episodes, though, I don’t have any connection to the characters; and conversely, it’s easy to tell where this is going, especially as we’ve been introduced to Kyo’s evil former teammates. Still, it’s shaping up to be on the higher side of Digimon quality, so I’ll keep checking and see how things play out.

29. Invincible Fight Girl!: I picked up Invincible Fight Girl both because I, of course, want to encourage new animation (although I really should have watched it as it aired last year to do that, oh well) and because I have been intrigued by this trend of integrating shonen anime tropes into American cartoons—which shouldn’t come as a surprise, as it’s been almost 30 years since the anime boom brought on by Pokémon and all the new crew of animators would have joined the industry with anime as their inspiration, instead of old Hannah-Barbera and Loony Tunes like the animators working in the US at that time. I had expected something like OK KO or even a bit of the tournament arc parody from Punch Punch Forever, but instead I just got a straightforward shonen anime…at first. Also, I had expected the “Fighting” of the title to be focused around exaggerated martial arts action like Dragon Ball Z and old Shaw Bros. films, but I was very surprised to find this is a pro wrestling show, played mostly straight with exaggerations, unlike even the comical weirdness of Kinnikuman (which you may also know as either M.U.S.C.L.E. or Ultimate Muscle, depending on which decade you were born in). These first episodes set up the premise, as we follow Andi, who comes from the Island of Accountants who do the taxes for the Wrestlers who inhabit the rest of the world—but of course, she doesn’t want to be an accountant, but has trouble talking to her parents about it. There’s a big misunderstanding, there’s a fight, she wins, they talk it out, she goes on her typical worldwide journey and picks up some friends (Mikey is kind of the Brock of the group, Craig is kind of the Slippin’ Jimmy of the group) and they all work together to train her to become stronger…I’ve seen this show before, you know?

It did pick up at the halfway point, when they started to investigate the premise and its consequences—when, looking at the jaded old woman her hero, Quesa Poblana, has become, our heroine Andy asks herself, “How could something as great as wrestling make someone so bitter”…girl I got bad news. That also leads into the Rough & Tumble/Bertie arc, which is my favorite for the way it avoids the typical happy ending of so many similar kids stories about divorce or emotionally distant parents, especially among anime where (with the unavoidable exception of mecha anime) the main hero is chastised when they understand their parent DOES love them, they just never showed it or expressed it or provided any visible affection but how DARE you question that your parents care about you, stiff upper lip, tough it out, quit whining and understand this is all for your own good. Not to give anything away, but having the moral be, “Sometimes your parents don’t care about you, can’t understand your pain, and will never act in your best interests, and that hurts more than anything and you don’t have another option but to cut them out of your life” was very refreshing. Please don’t read anything into that, my relationship with my parents is great, they have always supported me and shown affection. I’m just saying. Sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.

The final arc brought things full circle with a wrestling tournament and got all the major characters together for a good convergence of the major arcs—even the Narrator showed up in person (and we’re always happy to hear Keith David around here). I know they won’t be able to do it all the time without losing the kids, but I hope for more things that take advantage of the creators’ ability to look at the standard Shonen tropes and turn them on their heads, like Mob Psycho 100 and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, rather than just following them. What’s the point of melding two styles of storytelling if you can’t say something about the pros and cons of both of them?

28. Nobody’s Boy Remi: Well, I’m about out of free things on RetroCrush I’d like to see, maybe I’ll give this Nobody’s Boy Remi series a try, it looks like one of those World Masterpiece Theater anime adapting classic novels for the kids, worth a shot “Directed by Osamu Dezaki” I CAN’T GET AWAY FROM THIS MAN.

Though not part of World Masterpiece Theater, Remi is adapted from the novel Sans Famille by Hector Malot, which Wikipedia tells me is sometimes translated as Nobody’s Boy but won’t tell me which printings used that name. Its premise is noticeably similar to Lady Georgie’s, but in France instead of Australia: Remy is a young orphan boy taken in by a peasant couple and raised as their own. His adoptive father found him and took him home, where he lived happily with his mother until his father hurt himself working in Paris and all the family’s money went to his medical bills and his legal case against his employer, which he lost. The father comes home and immediately proposes sending Remi to the orphanage because they can’t afford a child, he instead sells Remi as an indentured servant to a travelling performer known only as “Vitalis,” who takes Remi on a trip across France with his troupe of performing animals: the dogs Cappy, Zerbino, and Dolce, and the monkey, Joli-Coeur.

Now, leaving aside that a child can do more work on a farm than a crippled old man and Mr. Barbarin is an idiot for getting rid of one of his only ways to run his sole remaining source of income going forward, Remi is very fortunate that Vitalis is actually a really good guy who purchased a child worker because he saw the kid was in a bad situation and wanted to help him out, instead of, you know, any other kind of person who would pay to have a kid wander around France with him. Their life on the road is cruel and painful, of course, and the gang have to eke out a living on the kindness of strangers as they cover the countryside between towns. Though this period in the narrative was the most straightforward and devoid of other major characters—only Remi and Vitalis, with the animals providing either comedy relief or new complications in turn, especially from Zerbino, the worst-trained of the dogs—I found it the most entertaining, largely due to the artistic production in the series. Remi was an early Madhouse anime, funded by TMS, and they pushed the limits of what a TV budget could do in 1979. Each shot has three background layers, so they could create detailed parallax effects, often moving the backgrounds far faster than realistically possible, as if the expanding countryside or each new city twirled around Remi in dazzling beauty. The clouds in this anime are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, whirling through the sky in fauvist colors of sunset, framing the beautiful countryside. Most of my appreciation of this anime is how gorgeous it is.

The plot is nothing to speak of, really: typical of anime and French novels, the primary theme is the arbitrary nature of justice and how the system is stacked against the poor. This is a good lesson, but the need to keep piling on the pain for fifty-one episodes gets tedious, especially as plots start to repeat: Vitalis is wrongly imprisoned halfway through, Remi at the end; although Vitalis serves out his sentence and Remi has a daring escape. Vitalis’s imprisonment does leave Remi alone long enough to meet the wealthy Mrs. Milligan, who is the kind of mythical rich noblewoman who will seriously consider adopting the street urchin she hired to perform for her tragically sick son. Granted, that’s because Remi does remind her of her own missing firstborn, who was kidnapped when he was just a baby, and if your foreshadowing detectors aren’t going off yet, don’t worry, the NARRATOR GIVES AWAY THE END OF THE STORY. Yeah. Mrs. Milligan is also the person who will leave the decision of if she should adopt a son to a travelling performer who just got out of a prison sentence he received because he wasn’t honest about his true identity decide if the little boy they both care for should stay on her boat where it’s warm and he has servants, or wander off into the woods in the middle of winter, and when Vitalis says, “I’m training Remi to be tough,” she lets them go.

Now, it of course would have saved a lot of time if she’d adopted Remi, since he was her son. And it also might have saved a life, since Vitalis got a respiratory illness in jail and Zerbino and Dolce are eaten by wolves and Joli-Coeur gets sick from hiding from wolves in a tree all night and Vitalis dies in a snowstorm that almost kills Cappy and Remi as well. But, hey, if that hadn’t happened, Remi wouldn’t have met his future wife, who I was all set to describe as a cute nonverbal autistic girl until it turned out she lost her voice from a fever (?) when she was three (???) and she completely remembers how to speak after saying “Remi” one time. He also wouldn’t have met Mattia, who is the kid who busts Remi out of jail and also ends up getting adopted by Milligan. However, despite having more theoretically exciting plot twists, the finale left me cold. The easy solution of Remi actually being someone important is played-out, although the narrative did have the foresight to understand that NOBODY EXCEPT MRS. MILLIGAN WOULD BELIEVE THIS RANDOM KID WAS HER SON, especially since tons of liars would have tried to pass themselves off, the police drive to, uh, get a five-year-old to confess to crimes when actually he was a kidnap victim is ridiculous (and why didn’t Remi just ask the cops to talk to the lawyer who had sent him to the people who pretended to be his parents? He could have corroborated some of the story, at least. And no, I’m not going to elaborate on that storyline, because it bored me.) The plot contrivances don’t even leave Vitalis alone, even after he dies: I mentioned that he was reluctant to reveal his identity, and because in another episode Vitalis mentioned he knew Murat when he was King of Naples, I assumed that Vitalis was a Bonapartist travelling through France in disguise so he wouldn’t be arrested. The show isn’t exactly clear when it was set—the novel was published in 1878, which seems far too late for someone to have known a Napoleonic general, but I could believe the story took place during the Bourbon Restoration, or even more likely the July Monarchy. However, it turns out Vitalis was just an opera singer who quit when he…had to cancel a show because he had a cold? That’s the best you got?

I realize these are problems from the source material, and not necessarily with the adaptation itself, but I found the adoptive father relationship between Vitalis and Remi, and the mystery of Vitalis’s motivation, far more intriguing than the “Is Remi secretly rich?” plot. I had just seen it play out in Lady Georgie, yes, and I have to admit Remi’s version is better done, but as a result it was also lest interesting. I could rag on Georgie with my friends, but Remi was so well-thought-through it didn’t give me the material. It didn’t help that the frantic uptick in plot also ate into the team’s ability to show off their artistry, as the need for beautiful backgrounds was subsumed by carriage chases and fights on collapsing fire escapes. Which sounds exciting, in theory! But I found myself in an unenviable situation of imagining a better story before I found out what the real one was.

Still, those beautiful clouds do make me put this one above Lady Georgie, although, while I don’t expect to revisit either show, I’d probably be more likely to show episodes of Georgie to people, if only to watch their reactions.

27. CB Character Go Nagai World: I picked this one up because I was promised Getter Robo, and there were no more Getter Robo shows available in the US at the time. As I’m writing this on January 6, 2025, I have no idea if that will change this year. I hope so. Anyway, Getter Robo does show up—it’s hired to repair the Flying Fortress Ghoul from Mazinger Z. And it does. Help the bad guys. None of the individual pilots appear outside the robot and only Getter 1 and Getter 2 are formed. Getter Dragon is in the closing credits but never appears (Cutie Honey is in the opening credits, but never appears). Well, mission accomplished, I guess.

From the theme song (and the fact that it’s a show about Super-Deformed/Chibi versions of famous anime characters), I had assumed Go Nagai World would be a comical series about all his characters just hanging out and getting into mischief. This isn’t wrong, per se, but I was immediately surprised when the first episode starts off in a manner similar to many of the side-adventures in Devilman, with Akira waking up in Miki’s house to find that he’s been shrunk, as has Miki and Ryo, and they’re slightly out of phase with their normal reality. A strange, mishmash world stretches before them and they go exploring. This first episode parodies several plotlines in Devilman, with a focus on the turtle demon Jinmen (who gets decapitated by Miki and follows them around as comedy relief for the entire three-episode miniseries) and the ever-popular Sirene, as well as a few also-rans who don’t get as much attention. Baron Ashura only rolls up in Flying Fortress Ghoul at the end of the episode, and the second episode introduces Koji and Sayaka and a few other classic Go Nagai robots like Steel Jeeg and Grendizer; the Devilman and Mazinger characters start to get mixed up in intriguing ways here, like Ryo taking over Dr. Hell’s forces and Dr. Hell trying to marry Sirene (?!?). The second episode is also where the plot solidifies; the characters, through the power of fourth-wall-breaking humor, start to remember the plots of their series. More to the point, the Devilman characters remember that their series ends, shall we say, TRAGICALLY. The argument between Akira and Ryo over whether they even want to go back to their “cool, eight-heads tall world” if it means they will have to resume their war between man and the forces of Hell was the high point of the series for me. Ryo has remembered his true form—you know, SATAN—and Akira knows everyone will die at Satan’s hands, or at the hands of the humans he has riled up. Ryo declares imperiously that Karma can be changed, and Akira replies that it already has—the world of cute, chibi characters is their reward. They can be happy and carefree here! But Ryo will have none of it—he has found out that Go Nagai, represented by a big goofy head in the center of the mini-universe, is their God, and Satan can countenance no God but himself.

There’s no way they could wrap that all up satisfactorily in one episode, so the third one is a little rushed, especially since they wanted to cram some Violence Jack stuff in there too. Since Nagai had already reused some of his earlier creations as new characters in Violence Jack (similar to the Osamu Tezuka Star System; Nagai had done this earlier in Cutie Honey as well) they have a little metafictional fun with it, but basically Nagai/God just wipes Ryo/Satan’s memory and everyone else goes home. Well, at least they got an ending; I was all ready for a Dragon Half/New Cutie Honey/Fire Emblem OVA/probably a million anime I’ve never heard of situation where they just cut out on a cliffhanger because funding ran out. I also could have done without the two “jokes” based around the sheer number of androgynous characters in Nagai’s fiction, but it was 1990 so I definitely should have steeled myself for something inappropriate in that direction; it could have been worse. All in all, I got more than I expected from this one, which was a pleasant surprise.

26. Scissor Seven (Season 5): Over a year since these episodes dropped in China and they finally came to the US. Picking up where we left off…where did we leave off? Oh yeah, Seven was delving into his subconscious to find his former self while looking for Plum Blossom Thirteen in the land of assassins. Well, he accomplished those things. The end!

Not to be dismissive, but there’s not a lot to talk about this season. I think last time I complained that the show lost something by taking Seven away from Chicken Island and his goofy friends, and while only one episode went back there (it followed the deadly assassin from earlier seasons as he adjusted to life on a peaceful island like his dead love wanted for him), this season did find more comical adventures for Seven and Dai Bo as they bumbled their way through unfamiliar territory (the gags with the restaurant they go to for information were cute). There was also some nice character development for Seven, as he became aware of who he used to be and grappled with whether it mattered to him or not if he ever recovered his full former self. Thirteen got some nice training montages, too, but the season was otherwise light on her, unusually so. It was nice to see her cooler, eviler sister and her dumb boytoy the Indestructible Virgin, too. But, despite ending on a big fight scene, the last two seasons have felt incomplete; the character growth is minor and the plot barely progresses, just adding new bad guys to fight. It’s a bit like One-Punch Man these days, where every volume just gets deeper into the fight with the Monster Association with no end in sight. Well, now I’m reminded of that time I complained about how I wanted Inuyasha to defeat Naraku and move on, and someone said, “But then the show will end.” If Seven defeats these enemies and goes home, that’s probably it, right? But then again, he could always go fight Stern, the science people. The action’s good, the animation is often incredible, but there’s not a lot to latch onto for a review.

25. Dallos: The first OVA! And of course, it’s Studio Pierrot, and Mamoru Oshii, who were doing their best to push boundaries within the standard distribution channels at the time, but also came up with the idea of using the video format to budget for more elaborate animation, somehow beating pornography to the same idea by three whole months, good job guys. Instead, we get a retro-sci-fi series about a rebellion on the moon, but with very Star Wars technology and anime people in a sort of midway point on the design scale between Leiji Matsumoto and Buronson; like you’d see in Area 88 or that one about the team of women assassins that gets used in a lot of music playlists (Desert Rose, we looked it up a year ago and I still haven’t watched it). It’s also SHORT; it’s about the length of a movie, but it ends in a way that implies they wanted to do more but the format wasn’t ready to be successful yet—that came later (if I had to guess, the porn probably helped OVA’s gain traction, just like it boosted VHS in the US). It’s gorgeous, although they used maybe TOO many frames for some of the human motions—things tend to slow down as people complete their beautiful walk cycles or turn their heads in immaculate detail.

Set about a hundred years in the future, mankind has colonized the moon to use it as a mining resource, but due to the massive cost of setting up a moon colony, the moon is basically in debt to the Earth. The first generation of miners are starting to die out, but they still feel tied to Earth and sympathize with the propaganda that the moon people must work to help Earth’s economy recover, but the younger generations never knew the Earth; they’ve never even seen it, as the only city on the moon, Monopolis, is on the far side, and travel to the near side was forbidden some time after colonization. Only in the third generation have people started to fight back against the colonizer’s oppression and increasing greed for the moon’s resources. The moon people have no say in their governance; all overseers, even those from the moon, are appointed by Earth, and those that aren’t from the moon look down on them and try to clamp down on any rebellion with increased force. The government maintains its control by staging terrorist attacks, which they use as justification to further clamp down on the rights of the moon miners, installing rings in their heads that track them and store their personal information for immediate identification at all times, until they die and are disintegrated for raw materials. With no chance for personal betterment or advancement, the moon people have turned to worshipping a mysterious statue known as Dallos, a huge head emerging from a crater on the far side of the moon. They acknowledge it must have been built by the scientists sent before the colonists arrived, but no one knows why. Passages extend into the moon from the Dallos head, and a mythology and folk religion has sprung up around it from ignorance and helplessness.

And that constitutes the most interesting ideas in Dallos, which at four episodes feels unfinished. The plot follows a group of rebels trying to push back against the oppressive state and make themselves be heard by Earth by stopping production, but it ends on a cliffhanger where Earth has decided to further oppress the moon, even as the head of police from Earth has come to better understand the moon people’s plight (and his fiancée is entirely on their side, and basically was from the start). I started watching the first episode with my friend Jake, just because we were bored and scrolling through Crunchyroll, but he was disturbed by what he felt was insufficient stance against the fascist police. We DID stop right before a police dog attacks our innocent hero, Shun Nonomura, unprompted, and then Shun gets thrown in jail because he was standing nearby when something bad happens and the cops knowingly keep him there even though he wasn’t involved, so that was bad timing, although the choice of music didn’t help—aside from the grandiose Dallos theme, the music is all upbeat ‘80’s electropop, so battles where police officers are mowing down striking workers or chasing people using invasive surveillance systems or, yes, ATTEMPTING TO KILL GOD, all sound heroic in a way the writing implies is unintended. But the plot plays out as a series of cliches—Shun falls for the first Earth woman he sees, who of course is kind and understanding in a way her boyfriend in a position of command is not. While the government is corrupt and irredeemable, the main villain, who is driven by commitment to his ideals (and as an idealist, a threat to the corruption already in place, so they try to kill or undermine him to maintain their own position) is portrayed as favorable but flawed, instead of making the very reasonable point that ideals like, “The workers are revolting because you haven’t oppressed them ENOUGH,” are not ideals worth having. The series does end with Shun finally deciding to go all-in on being a rebel, not because he’s sure that it will work or even that a rebellion will make things better for the moon people, but because he doesn’t have any other action left available to him and must do SOMETHING or nothing will change. That’s good, at least.

But the mystery of Dallos, the war with Earth—it’s clear the team wanted to do more with these concepts, but couldn’t, either due to budgetary considerations or some other behind-the-scenes nonsense. Oshii would have Angel’s Egg out the year after Dallos ended, so he clearly moved on fast. I don’t feel disappointed by Dallos; it has plenty of fun sci-fi fights and intriguing mythology, but it never advanced to the point where it affected me emotionally, and I’m not sure if that’s a failure of design or of backing. As anime I have watched because they are historical artifacts go, that’s still better than most.

24. Aim for the Ace!: I just keep coming back to Osamu Dezaki, don’t I? I mean, it doesn’t hurt that he was terribly prolific, but even I find it odd that I keep coming back to this one director I have not been terribly impressed by; at least, not by the themes he chooses to explore, his animation and design sense is impeccable. So here we have one of his earliest hits, his adaptation of the manga of the same name by Sumika Yamamoto. Why? Well, because it was a big influence on Aim for the Top! Gunbuster, which I absolutely adored—and by “big influence,” I of course mean Gunbuster ripped off its main characters and the premise of its first episode from Ace!. However, where Gunbuster moved on to original, deeper stories after its first episode, Ace! hits its high early on and then coasts towards the abrupt ending caused by its sudden cancellation—one of many anime from the 1970’s that bombed when they aired and became more popular in reruns.

We start off with our protagonist, Hiromi Oka, joining her school tennis club as a freshman to get closer to the cool upperclassman, Reika Ryūzaki, known as “Madame Butterfly” because…she’s…really good…at tennis? And has long, curly blonde hair. I guess. When Hiromi and Reika happen to run into each other at a sports store, Hiromi offers to help Reika by picking up a racket she had left for repairs that aren’t done yet. When she does, a man asks if she is Reika, and she calls him a moron and walks out. The next day, that man turns out to be her new tennis coach, Mr. Munataka.

Coach Munataka should not be allowed near children.

Japanese media is only now starting to get away from the “just tough it out” mentality imbued into the populace by the torrent of pro-military propaganda in the early Showa wartime era, and Ace! certainly wasn’t about to buck the trend; not when that was still a prevalent moral even in other countries’ sports stories, into the next few decades. What’s especially disturbing about Ace! is that, unlike Gunbuster after it where Noriko wanted to be a great pilot, Hiromi Oka doesn’t particularly care about tennis when Munataka PROMOTES HER TO THE TOURNAMENT TEAM AND DEMOTES A SENIOR TO LET HER ON, with no more explanation than that the senior has the same playstyle as Madame Butterfly and Hiromi shows potential; and they have to drag those explanations out of him over the course of 26 episodes. The man willingly places Hiromi in a situation where she is immediately disliked by everyone else in the club, hounded by rumors and overcome by expectations she is not at all qualified to meet, and her only support group is her best friend, her cat, and sometimes that guy who looks like Lupin III who works at the candy store (TMS’s animation in this show was clearly done by some of the same team that would go on to animate most of the early Lupin III part II episodes—their way of drawing jacket tails especially stands out). And, of course, this is a Japanese show, so nobody can stand up and defend themselves eloquently or explain the situation, they just keep silent until yelling “BUT--!” and then decide not to complain after all and just take the abuse or run off with their head down. No matter how much potential you think this girl has, that’s an absolutely horrible situation to put her into, and then continue to pressure her to stay on after the pressure almost breaks her, because of course YOU WANT TO SEE THAT SHE CAN STAND UP TO THE PRESSURE!

And the sad thing is, the plots about high school bullying are the best parts of the show, with real interpersonal drama and emotional stakes. Once Hiromi starts getting good and winning at tournaments, and also her bully reveals she has a horrible wrist defect and her tendon is disintegrating the more she plays tennis (this would have been right around the time they invented Tommy John surgery, so way too soon for that to be feasible for a high school girl from Japan) so she has to stop playing BUT ALSO she wants to GO OUT WITH A GREAT GAME so Munataka lets her continue playing even after he finds out because he doesn’t care about the health of these children, he just wants a tennis cultist to work out his theories. The show didn’t even run long enough to get to the part where he dies from a convenient movie disease! Seriously fuck this guy and all the fictional characters who stand up for him.

Anyway, the rest of the show is a slew of near-identical tennis matches where the opponents have some cool technique that usually boils down to repeatedly hitting Oka with the ball and Oka and Reika tough it out and win. The matches are artfully done for the amount of animation they could afford on a 1974 TV budget and schedule, but it’s one of those things you can forgive if you’re into the genre, and I am not. Even Dragon Ball Z in its final arcs had more variety in its fights—nobody merges into one person and splits when they get eaten in this show. Very enlightening, but not particularly compelling. Oka is going to burn the hell out and hate tennis forever, but for the duration of this show she’s got depression and things she can plow on through. I’m sorry this happened to you, fictional person.

23. Creature Commandos (episodes 6 and 7): Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would. Inevitably tragic, yes, but the twist wasn’t quite the twist I thought they were lampshading—although, in retrospect, they WERE lampshading it. To what END the villain was doing what the villain was doing, we may never know, considering the ending; a little rushed, a little too clean, but in a way that makes me think of all the unexpected callbacks from John Ostrander’s classic Suicide Squad series, from which all other portrayals of the Suicide Squad have sprung. I think, perhaps, there’s a little bit of the DNA of that series in this one, and I am not willing to completely close the door on the plot threads from this first season yet; but I don’t expect to see them back right away, either.

As for the rest of the storyline, they continued their flashbacks to the origins of the Commandos in the final two episodes; Dr. Phosphorous unwittingly fulfills Joker’s hypothesis of the “one bad day” to a T, up to going completely insane and becoming a crime boss with a creepy theme and a coordinated dance routine. Nina’s origin was perhaps the most disappointing; they never really got into why she was in jail, other than simply…existing. I would have preferred to see what arguments, if any, she put up in favor of her human rights—as she IS a human—in court, even if it was all just her being numb from the horrible police murder that preceded the, uh, proceedings. And, well, with two episodes…that’s about it. Creature Commandos season 1, everybody.

22. Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Season 2): Well, this was more of the same from last year, but that’s not bad. I had assumed we would get two storylines from the perspective of Donatello and Michelangelo this season, and we did, but instead of two long plots they did four short ones, so each turtle got a story to tell. The writers sort of lost the plot on the “Let me tell you a story” concept; two of the stories are told to people who were present (three, if you count the Turtles reading Leonardo’s diary), and in one of them the audience confirms that the events depicted never happened—or, at least, they weren’t actually present for them? Because Bishop still made the giant robot in the frame story, not in the story Mikey was telling, but will we ever see the follow-up to that, since the cartoon is cancelled? Will that happen in the upcoming movie? I guess I’ll have to wait to find out. Probably not.

This show’s relation to the movies means they can’t disrupt the status quo or introduce any major characters that would be in the upcoming film, so no Shredder, no payoff on Dr. Utrom from Mutant Mayhem. Their unique version of the Mutanimals still gets some good moments, mostly from Leatherhead and Wingnut, who were voiced by people who aren’t massive celebrities—Splinter is still speaking in chittering noises, and Rocksteady and Mondo Gecko spend the whole season hypnotized so they don’t have to pay Jackie Chan, John Cena, or Paul Rudd. They also took the time to introduce some more classic TMNT characters, just for fun—Tokka and Rahzar, Muck Man, Irma, Jordan Perry, and most surprising of all, IDW comics villain Old Hob, here renamed “Scratch” because that euphemism for Satan was more likely to get by Nickelodeon Broadcast Standards and Practices. He wasn’t how I would have portrayed Hob, but it’s practically tradition for the cartoon version of a Turtles character to barely resemble his comics inspiration.

All I can say that set this season apart from the previous one is the animation is, based solely on my unreliable memory, even better than before, with several gorgeous fight scenes and even lovingly animated closeups of people just…talking. Dramatically. I don’t expect that many frames to be put into dialogue outside of a theatrical film, but I appreciate it. There was also some just gorgeous storyboarding; the shot of supervillain La Fleur ringing a hotel bell while her minions pose behind her was immaculate. I’d watch it for the artistry of the animation alone.

But that’s it, no more. Just movies.

21. Doctor Who: Ncuti Gatwa Season 2: Let’s not talk about that season-ending cliffhanger. We don’t have to talk about it! Unimportant. Moving along!

This season was a little less up and down than the last one, so although that means it never quite reached the same highs as 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble for me, it never disappointed either. Part of this is due to the more obvious ongoing plot of the Doctor and Belinda’s struggle to get back to Earth on a specific day, although this plot is also the biggest weakness of the season—it apparently never occurs to them to just travel to the previous day and hang out for a bit, but of course if they did that the bad guy’s evil plan wouldn’t work, so they have to solve the mystery of why they can’t travel to May 24, 2025, which only comes about because of the actions they take to travel to May 24, 2025. The Doctor is a smart person.

Ignoring all that nonsense, the episodes this time are a mix of silly adventures and cool horror stuff. “The Robot Revolution” and “Lux” kick the season off with two very different adventures about a man who can’t get over his ex: the first is a tragicomic sci-fi romp where, yes, people do die tragically, but the villains are big silly robots and the instigator of the conflict is a sad little nobody who thinks he is owed the love of a woman even though he always mistreats and talks down to her, all on a planet called Miss Belinda Chandra. The second is a follow-up to the previous episodes “The Giggle” and “The Devil’s Chord” that takes a metatextual look at the Doctor’s adventures, with a comical villain who is made sinister by his actions and the way he manipulates his pitiful catspaw, an awkward man who just misses his wife. These are good, classic Doctor Who setups with a new twist for the Ncuti Gatwa era, and were a great way to start the season (I need a .gif of Lux’s death, who knows when such a thing might come in handy?), but they were eclipsed by the following episode, “The Well,” which was a great Tennant-era-style horror story with a neat hook and some interesting characters, including one of a type I’m trying to seed into my book—you know, the meathead who can’t respect any decision that doesn’t escalate a situation, with a helping of unacknowledged prejudice on the side. His death was cathartic, but, of course, only comes after he needlessly kills others. As always.

The high point of the season, for me, was “Lucky Day,” a gut-wrencher that speaks to the current moment. They swerved me, making us think we’ve figured out the villain from his obvious creepy mannerisms only to reveal that the rot is so much deeper than we assumed. A handsome influencer with a chip on his shoulder; someone who wants to be seen as having saved the world, regardless of if he’s made it better or worse. Perception is all that matters to him, not truth: even once the truth is revealed to him, even once he knows, he can’t ADMIT it, because then he wouldn’t be in control. My only complaint about this episode is that their metaphor about someone creating a false narrative to discredit a government aid organization involves UNIT, a military operation. Sure, we know UNIT is a very open and accepting place, and I’m a little more lenient about supporting the military after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made me rethink the importance of keeping your military hardware up to date, but it was kind of a stretch to make me feel bad that the big tower with cannons hidden in it had to pick up and move the aliens they have imprisoned without trial to another city on the continent. They did call out Kate for overstepping the bounds of good sense in her little revenge ploy at the end, but I do sympathize with her desire to do it. They should keep up these little episodes where bad things happen the Ruby Sunday, they’re magic.

“The Interstellar Song Contest” and “The Story and the Engine” I don’t have much to say about; “Song Contest” tried to do too much with the relationship between the Doctor and Belinda in too little time, perhaps, and “Story” was just a fun thing, tying in to Gatwa’s heritage and doing the type of story that would be read as paternalistic or condescending with a white Doctor; they also swerved me with a good twist about the weakness of gods and the importance of crediting authors, two motifs I’m always excited about. I thought the bad guy was going to be someone else in that one! Honestly, it reminded me of “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” for a bit at the start, too.

But let’s talk about the finale.

Davies, in his first run as showrunner, would basically reintroduce one or two classic villains per season; usually there would be one or two episodes mid-season reintroducing the villain, and then there was a two-part finale. Daleks in the first season, Cybermen in the second; the third switched it up with a three-part finale with the Master but they seeded hints throughout the season about a mysterious person that we knew would be involved in the finale, just not who he was, and the fourth season used the Sontarans for the mid-season two-parter but revealed the big season-long plot was actually Davros, which wasn’t jarring because the Daleks had been around. (Okay, the Macra in “Gridlock” was also technically a returning enemy, but don’t nitpick me) Moffatt kept this up for a while by reintroducing the Silurians and the Ice Warriors, but they were never the season-ending villains, who were often new or big threats that had already been reintroduced like the Master and the Cybermen, and Chibnall barely reintroduced any old enemies that hadn’t been on the new show—just the Sea Devils, I think, and they were basically different-looking Silurians (that’s not an insult, it’s in the episodes that they’re related species). My point is, they’re kind of running out, and I worry the show is wallowing in its history, which is never a great place to be to set yourself up for longevity.

Like, the Rani and Omega. Okay. Sure. They were recurring villains who cast a shadow over the series; Omega was the villain of the tenth anniversary story, the first multi-Doctor adventure, and the Rani killed the Doctor once (and strapped Mel to a bomb and shot her into the sky, which is why she’s so pissed when the Rani reveals herself in the finale). But their episodes aren’t, like…good. I’m sorry, “The Three Doctors” has some sick lines when they all meet up, but it kind of drags, and “Arc of Infinity”, “The Mark of the Rani”, and “Time and the Rani” were from that period where the writing was dropping off and episodes got chopped to hell in editing. Heck, “The Mark of the Rani”, which introduced the Rani as a new villain we were supposed to be afraid of, undermines her by having Anthony Ainley’s Master, one of the most scenery-chewing performances in the history of television, running around sucking up all the air from the performance of this new villain we’re supposed to be afraid of! So revealing Ms. Flood as the Rani was not quite the big “GASP!” moment I think they were hoping for. Omega got a gasp out of me, but only because I know what he MEANS to Time Lord lore; as a villain he’s just a guy who is angry because he was left to die in an antimatter black hole and his good buddy Rassillon got to go home and take all the credit. Understandable, but not the greatest motivation for a villain; I think just making him a big scary skeleton who was only on screen for five minutes tops was probably a good idea. Lots of big scary skeletons in this one, that was nice.

So did I hate the finale? No, not at all—well, except that it fell into the “Children are the real greatest adventure” trope that everyone is doing lately and I am sick of (When Captain Kirk finds out he had a son he never knew about because his ex didn’t trust him not to traipse around the galaxy sleeping with whoever, I felt something. When it happened to James Bond? And then Bond died because he felt bad? Fuck off, you don’t understand what Bond is about.) Giving a right-wing influencer absolute power and telling him to make the world good, and he makes a Leave it to Beaver world based around saccharine television, rigid gender lines, and generic white-collar office work (oh and everyone listens to him, of course) was appropriately chilling, especially the portrayal of the intense sadness below the smiles, represented as identical coffee mugs smashing onto the ground (it makes sense in context). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the standoff between Conrad and Ruby Sunday stole the show, as it was infused with real emotion and tension in a way the big world-shattering events of the Doctor/Rani plot wasn’t; although I guess it says something about me that the plot where the woman is disappointed in her horrible ex-boyfriend resonated much more than the one where the woman wants to save her baby, although I guess Ruby ended up involved in that too. Oh, and what was the deal with those flashes of Susan? That never amounted to anything! You can’t keep hinting at Susan, especially right before going on a long hiatus, Davies! Carole Ann Ford is 85, she won’t live forever!

And speaking of coasting on nostalgia for older episodes, boy, how about that final shot, huh?

20. Castlevania: Nocturne (Season 2): Picking up where we left off…where did we leave off? Picking up from way too long ago, Castlevania: Nocturne wraps up the loose Rondo of Blood/Symphony of the Night/Harmony of Dissonance mashed-up adaptation in the French Revolution that knocked my socks off back in 2023 with flair and aplomb and still too many actors muttering their lines because it’s supposed to be more serious or whatever. Seriously, just get a better voice director and this show would be even better than it is.

The French Revolution setting does a lot more heavy lifting this time. Where, in the first season, the Revolution happened in the background to set the stage for the conflict with religion and secularism that drove much of the plot, here it’s on the front line: a brigade of Revolutionary Guards are demolished by a demonic force and brought back as monstrous soldiers for the vampires, our heroes journey to Paris where they of course arrive just in time to see Louis XVI get his, and Alucard busts into a late-night political meeting to personally ask Robespierre for help fighting the evil army by throwing a severed vampire head in his lap (the implications that Robespierre, radical secularist, is aware of the existence of the undead opens up all sorts of story possibilities that I doubt they’re going to get a third season to explore—the old, “I have to kill all of you so I can be right about you not existing”). As is typical for this type of show, most of the early episodes are spent wandering around doing character work with a few fight/slaughter scenes thrown in for flavor, to save money for the big battle at the end where everyone’s doing crazy flips and shooting fireballs (taking a page from Dad’s book, eh, Alucard?) and playing music from the video games. However, Nocturne made the intriguing choice to spend the first scene of each episode on the backstory of the villains, detailing how Drolta, servant of Sekhmet, survived through the years, looking for someone worthy of embodying her god and getting revenge on those who desecrated the sanctity of her shrine—a desecration the series puts at the end of the twelfth century, so she would have been practicing in extra secret since Egypt was heavily Muslim by that time. Admittedly, the vampires who attacked her were wearing Crusader armor, so clearly something messed up was going on. It’s a good look back into the villains’ motivations and helps build Drolta and Erzsebet as threatening villains beyond their little cult from the first season. It’s always nice to have a villain you understand who is still terrifying.

Speaking of, they doubled down on making Maria OP in this season. This is good, as she is clearly the superior character in Rondo of Blood. I had struggled with Richter in that game (I eventually got the hang of it—I had already gotten used to Simon in the original ‘Vania, after all) but when I switched to Maria on a whim I blazed a trail of destruction across that game I wouldn’t have anticipated. So when, in the television show, huge chunks of episodes are spent with people begging Maria not to give into her destructive urges and just kill huge swathes of bad guys, it seemed right to me. That is exactly what would happen, Maria would summon a dark dragon and incinerate her problems, that is correct, I saw her do that in the game. I told her to. Her relationship with her newly-vamped mother was more complex; Terra’s struggles not to turn her daughter, to give her something more, the real life that was the whole reason Terra let herself be turned into a vampire in the first place, is classic post-Anne Rice stuff, but it works. When Mizrak tries to attack her and Terra just floats past his sword to calmly power-walk out of her own house—well, it’s great character work, I’ll say that.

The romances? Well, Mizrak and Olrox brought that grade-A self-hating gay couple energy that I know people will eat up (That’s a vampire pun, son—smart boy but a little slow on the uptake. Talking about myself, there.). I was glad they capitalized on the chemistry between Richter and Anette; in the games Richter is dating Maria’s sister and saves her from Dracula but that’s super boring, Anette is a Haitian revolutionary geomancer who could survive the power of a god, this is trading up—and it gives them that quality “Don’t give in, I’m here to pull you back” moment that all fantasy romances crave.

So, is this the end? I haven’t heard otherwise, and this is a show on streaming, so I assume so. They left enough threads open that it could continue, but they also split the party, which is recoverable but also is what happened in the worst season of the first Castlevania show. I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix decides two years between seasons is bad for the algorithm or whatever jargon execs use to justify suppressing artistic creativity. But six seasons of Castlevania on television is more than I ever dared hope, so I am satisfied. An excellent adaptation that had the guts to diverge from the source material when that meant succeeding in its new format. Hell yeah.

19. Cyberpunk Edgerunners: I don’t care at all about Cyberpunk 2077. I don’t care if it’s better now, I still see nothing but glitch clips from that game. No thank you.

And that’s why I never watched Edgerunners, even though I heard good things, even though it was directed by Imaishi whose other works I love. But then last year Chris watched it and man, I guess I can’t have not seen an anime Chris saw, so we’re doing this.

Blah blah blah it’s the future and everything sucks because corporations are in charge and they’re disconnected from any consequences and have no incentives to protect the lower classes, you’ve seen Blade Runner and Akira and maybe even read Neuromancer, you know how this goes. Heck, maybe you know it because you’re alive; the sequence where David can’t wash his clothes because he hasn’t paid the WASHING MACHINE SUBSCRIPTION brought back memories of that absolute ghoul from—was it last year?—who went to a tech conference and pitched having a mouse that ran on a subscription service for updates as something “their customers would appreciate” like we haven’t been able to buy mice for five dollars and have them last for twenty years since the 1980’s—heck, she probably said that BECAUSE of that. (Have you noticed corporations love telling themselves what their customers want? I picked up on that working fast food.) Heck, my dad was just complaining about his old devices not working and the subscription services that replaced the old internet don’t do what he wants, and I was just thinking, that’s because no one makes money by doing things the way we want. They want us to think the way that makes them money.

So, yeah, the setting resonates, but that’s why everyone liked cyberpunk stories already, except the people who became corporate executives, who apparently liked them because they thought the braindead villains were so cool. It’s a world where businesses have their greedy little tendrils in every aspect of your lives, and the only way to get out is to be a criminal—or so you think. That’s the trap: the corporations are doing all the crime, too. Because of course they are. I think it was episode three when I turned to Hank and said, “Okay, I know these guys are all going to be dead by the end of this, because I’m genre savvy and it’s been three years so I’ve seen spoilers, but I feel like THEY should know they’re going to be dead at the end of this.” (I honestly thought Rebecca might make it out for a second; I now understand why everyone likes her, and I was even ready to start saying “best girl” and I never do that, despite the copious amounts of great female characters I have grown attached to over the years) It’s a tragic love story, boy meets girl, boy takes dangerous risks for girl (and also because you won’t survive a second in Night City without taking dangerous risks, corpo or no), boy slowly destroys himself because the only other option is capitulation, and once you do that you’re dead anyway. It’s solid, it’s well written, it's absolutely beautiful (Imaishi knows how to animate a man going insane—and I appreciate the absolutely BS vehicle physics, perfectly capturing the glitchy nonsense of the games and collision physics that don’t account for deformations in the car bodies; no notes) and it’s full of fully-realized, loveable (and hateable) characters.

And…that’s it. But this is an Imaishi show, isn’t it? Well, sure, he DIRECTED it, but neither he nor Kazuki Nakashima WROTE it, which means the end result lacks a certain energy and unpredictability of their other works. I imagine this makes it more digestible for people who aren’t absolute weebs; but, while Cyberpunk is still fast-paced and exciting compared to any number of other television shows and anime, I can’t help but think about Promare and Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill and how much FASTER they were. I suppose I didn’t have that problem with, say, other Trigger shows, like SSSS.Gridman, but they surprised me in other ways. There was never a moment where I didn’t know what was going to happen in Cyberpunk, and while that didn’t detract from what it did do well—and it must, MUST, have a tragic inevitability to it, after all, or you’re dropping the ball thematically—it kept me from loving the series, too. More is coming, allegedly, but I must assume it will be about new characters in this world—not everyone was dead, but damn well near.

Gonna have that Franz Ferdinand song stuck in my head for a while, maybe.

18. Yuri!!! On Ice: Well, as long as I’m stepping outside my wheelhouse to watch classic sports anime, I might as well watch the most famous one of the recent anime generation, right? Plus, I’ve become infatuated by a surprising number of cartoons about lesbians in the past decade, why not give the guys a chance?

Created by Sayo Yamamoto (Michiko & Hatchin, which I haven’t seen, and Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which I have conflicting feelings about, but most of my problems stem from the script) and manga creator Mitsurou Kubo (whose other works I’m completely unfamiliar with, but I can see the influence of a manga creator in some of the storyboarding, with little cute jokes in the background and exaggerated expressions I associate with anime adapted from manga, although this one wasn’t), Yuri on Ice was one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, anime of 2016, a sports anime focusing on the unusual choice of figure skating, with the added bonus of a gay romance. So you can imagine why I’m only watching it nine years later. It’s not my thing! But it is immensely important, and after my friend M reminded me that it existed, I decided to give it a shot, since I’m running out of shows I wanted to watch and, while a big hit among anime and skating fans, is less of a “You haven’t watched THAT?” kind of show than, say, the Wire or something. So, going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Now, my experience of sports anime is still small, but my understanding, in general, is that they still follow typical motifs in Japanese media: push through the pain, push down your feelings, and become a machine focused solely on (sport) so you can outthink your opponent’s crazy move and seize victory. Typically the protagonist will be some sort of underdog and we follow their internal narrative as they force weakness from their body by working past the point of exhaustion, which somehow leads to them finding extra reserves of courage despite the physical impossibility. You know, the kind of thinking that got swathes of soldiers mowed down in World War II, that shit. What a refreshing surprise that Yuri on Ice completely foregoes that nonsense for a frank and understanding portrayal of an incredibly skilled young man (he’s 23, which will be an important distinction to make in a moment) who isn’t treating his anxiety well and struggles to deliver a performance that is worthy of the person he wants to be. I was also pleased that the series portrayed the skaters as largely friendly; sure, they’re rivals and they want to defeat each other, but my (outsider’s) experience of these sort of small professions is that everyone is generally friendly and supportive of each other, and you need friends to get by. I mean, you’re always going to have a Tonya Harding to spoil the bunch or whatever metaphor I was going for there, but I thought it seemed much more realistic than the comparison of small time musicians playing in clubs around a major city to wargaming and Machiavellian palace intrigue that formed the focus of Ya Boy Kongming, for example (for clarity, I’m talking about how the PERFORMERS treated each other, not how record companies treat performers). Yuri’s character as someone who can’t integrate with the other skaters, who is so in his own mind that he avoids them just by habit instead of any malice and so can only count a few friends in the sport reminded me of some of my own flaws, it felt real. However, the nature of figure skating, especially SINGLES figure skating, did take away the biggest advantage of the sports anime—competition as battle. Instead of a new opponent with a new skill, or the protagonist being thrown into an unusual variation of their sport, the competition parts of the show are done all alone on the ice, with only the protagonists’ own thoughts playing out in their heads. Each character has their own two performances they play out each time, over multiple episodes: the same songs, the same routines, with variances for a missed jump here or a change to a more difficult combination there. It’s great character work, but not exactly thrilling television—especially since it’s scripted.

But you’re not here for that (ladies)! You’re here to see DUDES KISSING. Well, I’m sorry, but you don’t get to see that, because this is Japanese television and portraying that without expressing that it is morally wrong and physically disgusting might be seen as promoting political change, and if we did that the LDP might get mad (not that America has much of a leg to stand on in comparison—this was right about when Rebecca Sugar was throwing themself into a depression spiral against Cartoon Network every time they wanted to have Ruby and Sapphire show up in an episode of Steven Universe—but, look, Kotaku had a good article about this right after Witch from Mercury ended, back when the Yuri on Ice movie was just postponed, not outright cancelled). Instead, what happens is: Yuri has spent his whole life crushing on Victor Nikiforov, the most skilled and handsome ice skater ever, but he can’t bring himself to talk to him, except for when he was really drunk which is only introduced as a retcon at the end of the show to make their relationship seem a bit less unequal. Because what DOES happen is, Victor is on top of the (skating) world and feeling a bit bored when he decides, after seeing Yuri skating one of his routines in a video posted to YouTube, to (following Yuri’s drunken suggestion from that retcon we learn about later on) fly to Yuri’s house and offer to become Yuri’s coach. And the first thing this extremely famous and powerful man in the world of skating does upon putting himself into a position of power over this aspiring young skater who looks up to him is show Yuri his dick.

Realism!

Joking aside, that sequence is one of the few times the supposed romance in this romance anime actually…happens. It feels like the series was built around bringing in girls who want to see hot boys kissing, and stringing them along to see how far they’ll be allowed to go. Young men work themselves up on the ice, and end up breathless and sweaty, with lip gloss glistening in the light. Sure, okay. But as mentioned before, the ice skating takes up most of the plot time; each episode has multiple two-minute blocks where the characters are left alone with their music and their thoughts. This does allow for a great look into the minds of the characters, but a lot of them are stock anime archetypes: the guy for whom this is a sex thing, the guy who is WAY too into his sister, and of course the raving egotist with an obnoxious catchphrase and signature pose. Oh, and there’s also the OTHER dude named Yuri who is already close to Victor, but, despite being one of the few things I knew about this show before I watched it, he didn’t make much of an impression on me. He’s the rival, the Gary Oak. He’s also fifteen, so thankfully he was never truly treated as a romantic option for either of the mid-20’s protagonists, WHICH IS A CONCERN IN ANIME.

But the focus on Yuri’s anxiety means most of the “relationship” between him and Victor happens in Yuri’s mind—or Victor’s, in the one episode where he spends some time as the narrator. They’re close enough that they’re completely willing to talk about how “Victor taught me what love is” on national television and buy each other wedding rings and get congratulated by all their friends (neither of your countries has legalized gay marriage, this is a PROBLEM, especially for you, Victor, you’re RUSSIAN) but aside from the scene where Yuri breaks up with Victor to create some forced drama for the final episode (I was going to yell at him for making himself sad before the big final round of the biggest skating competition in the world, but who am I kidding, the kid has undiagnosed anxiety and was probably purposely sabotaging himself like he’d done every other competition, and Victor was smart enough not to fall for it) there are no portrayals of private moments between the two of them except on the court. I never felt any tension between them, I was never ROOTING for them like Adora and Catra, or Luz and Amity…heck, I was more invested in Isami and Louis in Bravern, and I wasn’t sure that they were doing that on purpose until Louis was dead (okay, that’s a lie, I saw the closing credits to Bravern, but WITHOUT those credits, it was a lot more subtle). Sure, the sexual tension in the famous kiss-but-not-a-kiss scene in episode seven was PALPABLE, but outside of that? It didn’t do much for me. And sure, part of that is because the story is, consciously, unfinished—in the final episode Yuri remarks that the best stories never end, which I guess as a superhero comic fan I’m sort of forced to agree with, against my better judgement. But it would have felt better with a movie to close it out; that Adolescence of Utena moment where it all comes together in a way they couldn’t do on TV (it was even going to be called Ice Adolescence!). But I guess a Yuri on Ice film just “wouldn’t have been economically viable” or whatever coughbullshitcough.

I feel bad about not liking this show more. It’s beautiful; I’m even willing to forgive the heavy rotoscoping because HOW DO YOU ANIMATE ICE SKATING OTHERWISE, that would be a chore. It’s unique, and while it isn’t tied down by anime stereotypes, it isn’t afraid to get cartoony when it needs to be, either. Even the theme songs are much, much catchier than I expected them to be, or I want them to be. But I think I’m just too far out of the target audience to truly love it like so many others do. I might recommend it to my mom, though.

17. Blue Comet SPT Layzner: I keep watching these robot shows and going “Damn this premise is ALMOST SIMILAR to the one in the book I wrote and have no idea how to market and am too introverted to publish without a plan I DO NOT HAVE” but it hasn’t been the same yet, and anyway alien invasion plots are so common that I think I’m clear on the plagiarism department.

Anyway.

It's 1996, and the Cold War is heating up! However, in the interest of international cooperation, the United Nations has started the Cosmic Culture Club, sending a select group of children from all over the world to the new experimental Mars base to learn about science and learn to respect each other, and if you read any of that and thought “Yeah, seems about right,” where the hell have you been the past forty years? This show came out in 1985, even if they could not reasonably have foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Mars base thing would have to have started construction by then to be already in operation in 1996, but whatever, nitpicking. The UN picked a bad time to start this Cosmic Culture Club, however, as they picked the DAY the Cold War turned hot.

Or…did they?

As communications with Earth are jammed, mysterious robots appear outside the UN base, all teaming up on one blue robot but also shooting down any space fighters from the nearby American and Russian Mars bases (as a reminder it is 1996). As the robots are scared away, one man emerges from the blue robot, and approaches the humans. He takes off his helmet—and looks just like them. “My name is Eiji Asuka. I am from Grados.”

Which is disappointing, right? I was looking forward to a plot about children trying to navigate World War III while escaping the DEATH TRAP that is being fourteen and on Mars, not to mention the nuclear missiles the US and USSR would (and, in a matter of episodes, did) launch at each other, and for it just to turn out to be aliens was a bit of a letdown. They did find a way to make their hero still Japanese, though: he’s the son of the astronaut from the SECRET first Apollo mission to the moon that everyone thought failed and so they never told anyone about it, which would totally have been a thing that happened, yep, the realism, very much. It’s—and this was the part that made me nervous for comparisons to my book—very post-Macross, except the aliens that end World War III are much more active, and successful. It’s also very clearly by the VOTOMS team: although Layzner isn’t as depressingly nihilistic as VOTOMS (and that’s saying something, considering some of the stuff that happens in Layzner), the first ten episodes, and several more thereafter, are just a barrage of people dying horribly and pointlessly; many of them children. The cast quickly coalesces into a core group of children: Anna, our narrator; David, who hates Eiji due to the death of his best friend in the initial battle, but comes to respect him over time; Simone, the cool French kid who becomes a complete badass in the final arc; Rohan, nervous and introverted but useful in battle; and Arthur, a coward who avoids conflict and will back down whenever his opinion is contradicted; all corralled under the only responsible adult left alive, the head of their program, Dr. Elizabeth. They struggle to get home as they are immediately distrusted by any authority figure who comes to them, first because their story is so unbelievable, and then because Eiji is an alien so they want to experiment on him and use him as leverage. It’s that good, good shit you get from anime, where there’s an inherent (and warranted) distrust of power structures and ESPECIALLY the military, who, probably due to experience of the Japanese armed forces during World War II, either from memory or received experience, are quick to anger, overly proud, and fond of corporal punishment.

Grados, the bad guys in this conflict, wish to cut off Earth’s advancement into space before it threatens them—you know, The Day the Earth Stood Still stuff. Instead of just turning off the power and loosing a robot onto the world, however, they are out to get humanity to wipe itself out so they can swoop in and clean up the pieces; make a nice little colony world. Eiji’s betrayal and leaking their plans really pisses them off, so they set out to wipe him out. Also, they keep going for the poetic justice angle, by sending his best friend and his sister to kill him, which is some great drama but maybe not the way to get what you want. Despite the sympathetic characters of the aforementioned Gale and Julia, the rest of the Grados crew are real “Post-War Japan making Nazi-coded bad guys for the Japanese to fight to project their guilt in collaborating with Hitler onto someone else” masterclass: a bunch of racist assholes who consider humanity just apes unworthy of their “Help” by “civilizing” them under Grados, which will involve sending us back to Victorian-level technology to be more easily managed and integrated. Horrifying! That all kind of goes out the window after the US Air Force sends a space fleet to attack an unknown combatant and they all die, though. After that it’s just open combat and horrible secrets. Horrible secrets like, wait, why could an Earth man have children with a Gradosian wife…?

Anyway, it’s good mid-80’s Sunrise stuff, with absolutely gorgeous animation, like geez, they brought the A-Team this time, unlike VOTOMS which was clearly second-best behind…I guess Dunbine was the other robot show then. Layzner ran alongside Zeta Gundam, too, it’s not like that show was a slouch in the animation department either. Sunrise firing on all cylinders, robots doing crazy flips, going Super Saiyan (excuse me, “V-Max,” their explanation of why one guy with a robot can hold off whole battalions…hey, it’s better than “You are the Perfect Soldier chosen by the Communist Gangster Computer God,” ain’t that right, Chirico?). It’s got the right amount of rising tension and tragedy of misunderstanding the best real robot shows excel at, even if it is also one of those anime that’s a bit…TOO invested in the teenage girls’ infatuation with the older man spending time with them (How much older? Unclear, but they say Anna is fourteen and she does NOT look it.). This all culminates in an exciting battle in space, as our heroes rush to the alien mothership…

THREE YEAR TIME JUMP!

I have to admit, that took me by surprise. Also surprising: how ANGRY I was to see cartoon racists destroying the New York Public Library and the Met. I know they’re still there, but just…maybe it’s the times, maybe it’s how politics are right now. Maybe it’s because of how senseless, meaningless and petty I knew their opinions to be, and how that sort of cowardly pettiness is so hard to beat, because it refuses to recognize itself for what it is. Maybe it’s because of that same Japanese memory of World War II, where the banning of Earth media, Earth-style stories, classic Earth books, is so easily compared to the banning of any literature or media that could stoke nationalistic feelings in Japan during the American occupation, the reality of that feeling of oppression from experience, and my own country’s actions being compared to this TV villain. The hypocrisy, idiocy of racism laid bare, that it’s false, that we’re all the same. There’s no such thing as a superior culture…I got mad. I got real-life mad at a cartoon. This was real, solid, challenging writing from a robot cartoon. I was excited to see how they would deal with this alien conquest plot.

Then Layzner pivoted hard left into Fist of the North Star.

Like, I’m not saying they dumped the robots and started doing karate, this isn’t G Gundam, they’re still in real robot territory. But the aesthetics, the villains, Eiji’s new outfit…it’s very Fist of the North Star. The bad guys hang out in a giant pyramid with an overlook room held up by Roman columns for crying out loud! That’s Shin’s HQ from the first arc of Fist of the North Star! What are we doing?

What follows is an exciting if by-the-numbers revenge plot that fails to live up to the premise of the early time-jump episodes. There’s some nice bits, like Rohan becoming a traitor and confidant to the alien commander, Le Cain, son of the leader of the conquest, Gresco. Characters from the first arc persist. But it starts to fall back on stereotypes: the saintly resistance leader, something alien at the Nazca Lines. And the whole time, Eiji just sort of…never gets around to telling people the horrible secret linking humanity and Grados that he found out at the end of the first part of the show. Oh and also it was abruptly cancelled, so the next-to-last episode ends with a cliffhanger and the next episode begins with Anna saying “Anyway that resolved itself, blah blah Gresco died, we only have twenty minutes, moving on,” but they got an OVA to flesh that out so I’ll consider that the real finale, which is satisfying enough, even though Le Cain doesn’t fully get what’s coming to him. It’s disappointing when a show with an ongoing plot gets cancelled with threads still dangling, and from what I hear this team’s previous show, Panzer World Galient, might get that even worse, but Layzner wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen that handled…well, the OVA wasn’t, the final episode is a mess.

All in all, a satisfying, interesting, if incomplete, show I wish more people knew about. Just don’t ask me to be okay with the “romance” between Eiji and Anna, that’s a mess.

The scene where the Demon Squad soldier throws Gaw the dog off of him and Gaw just flips around and launches back onto him off the ceiling was so badass.

16. Mobile Suit Gundam: GQuuuuuuX: There’s a way of reviewing GQuuuuuuX without spoilers, but I feel the result would insufficiently represent my opinion. If you have somehow made it six months past the end of this show without being spoiled by the millions of Facebook accounts that were waiting to destroy my authentic experience every Tuesday evening, well, congratulations on being better about protecting your opinions from the Zucc than I.

Oh, uh, Gee-Kwucks. It’s pronounced Gee-Kwucks. What’s it mean? No one knows. Not even the characters. Anime names, man.

Before we had a release date for this show (although, in the event, it was only a couple of days before we knew the release date of the show) I actually got friends together to see the first few episodes in theaters—I’d later find out that it was the first three episodes and part of episode eight, although there was also some new animation referencing the original Gundam that they threw in at the start that didn’t make it to TV. I was excited for this series: the Rebuilt of Evangelion team doing Gundam! Granted, I watched the first two episodes of Evangelion in (checks the Wikipedia page for Toonami) 2003 and bounced right off of it and never looked back (not yet, anyway), but I’ve come to appreciate Anno’s other series in recent years (ever since Shin Godzilla knocked my socks off) and even though he was only a co-writer, he was co-writer with the scripter of Revolutionary Girl Utena (which I, of course, started buying the Blu-Rays of right before they went out of print, so I’m stuck with just the first arc) and FLCL (which I’m disappointed in myself for not owning, but it wasn’t a priority while Johnny still lived here because he had a copy) and directed by the DIRECTOR of FLCL, and those are some of my favorite anime ever. That’s a killer team, and I haven’t even gotten to, uh, the character designer for Pokémon Sun and Moon? Yeah, the character designs for this one were real slick; I was a big fan of Annqi’s design although she pretty much bounced from the plot halfway through. Basically, those guys are all big nerds but they’ve also done great stories about teen angst with deep, intertwining plots and unspoken desires that I was certain they’d deliver a killer Gundam show for the ages. Even if it WAS another What-If alternate timeline.

Because you see, the big hook of GQuuuuuuX is, “What if Zeon won the One-Year War of 0079?” But from the trailers, I thought this would be, you know, background noise. I walked four friends into a Gundam movie: two deep Gundam nerds like me, and two people who had seen some Gundam but none of the original UC timeline, and I thought we were going to meet some characters and well-known Gundam villain Char Aznable would pop up at the end.

Instead there was 40 minutes of deep Gundam lore before we even met the actual protagonist of the show.

So, first of all, the episode order of the TV show fixes that by doing all the Gundam-explaining in the SECOND episode, splitting up the main character stuff that was back-to-back at the end of the movie. The premise is, effectively, this: in the original Gundam, three Zeon soldiers with the unlikely names of Slender, Denim, and Jean, attacked a secret Earth Federation military installation on the civilian space colony Side 7 against the orders of their commander, Char Aznable the Red Comet, killed a lot of innocent civilians and got their asses kicked by an angsty teenager who stumbled onto a secret military prototype and skimmed the manual, and would go on to win the whole damn war for Earth, which caused all sorts of problems for outer space people. GQuuuuuuX asks: What if Jean was sick that day? What if Char went himself? So we’re presented a whole alternate timeline where Char remains Zeon’s golden boy, never chasing the Gundam to Earth—he captures the Gundam and paints it his signature red, and the White Base becomes the Zeon-green Sodon. Not gonna lie, I was geeking out at every little thing they threw in to those forty minutes, every bit of worldbuilding, because it all felt like, yeah, this is what would happen if Amuro never set foot in the RX-78-2 and, well, Bright Noa was DEAD, man. Challia Bull got to live! And do things! Good for him. Char’s still a little bastard at heart, of course, and the tease of Sayla Mass piloting a GM got me thinking of what they could do with that in the narrative. But the real treat was once they got to the actual narrative: 0085 on the prosperous, unaligned Side 6 (smack-dab between the time frame of classic Gundam series Stardust Memories and Zeta), where we see that, if Zeon won, everything would still suck, but different. Instead of space being patrolled by the fascistic Titans police force, Zeon has taken a slightly imperialistic position as the superpower, exerting economic control over the unaligned Sides and the Moon while offering the Earth bits of charity to repair its biosphere out of pity and the desire to flaunt their power and get a foothold on their old oppressor’s territory. The only reason Zeon hasn’t completely solidified its power over all of the inhabited solar system is, well, it’s run by the dang Zabi family; specifically, Ghiren and Kycilia, who spend most of their time trying to kill each other or survive the other’s attempts to kill them, constantly surrounded by sycophants and a rotating cast of potential assassins. In the middle of this, refugees from the last war have amassed on Side 6, where they have congregated into semi-legal slums that are regularly patrolled by police-issue Zaku mobile suits sold by Zeon as military surplus. Some of these mobile suits are sold on the black market, mostly to the poor refugees, who stage illegal “Clan Battles” in space outside the colonies and broadcast them to take home gambling winnings (the government usually looks the other way—but not always). None of that really mattered to Amate Yuzuriha, disaffected rich girl, daughter of an emotionally distant mother and a physically distant father who has checked out of school and spends most of her time doing handstands out of boredom. One day she accidentally runs into the refugee “delivery girl” known only as Nyaan, and is passed Nyaan’s package so the cops wouldn’t catch her with it. This leads them both to Shuji, a homeless boy who paints what at first appear to be abstract street art—but Shuji has Char’s red Gundam, after Char disappeared during a mysterious Newtype incident at the end of the war, and Challia Bull is looking for the Red Gundam, and through a complicated series of events Amate steals a NEW Gundam, QuuuuuuX, and enters Clan Battle under her childhood nickname of “Machu” so she can earn the money to run away to Earth with Shuji.

This is a FASCINATING premise, so full of the promise of political maneuvering, corruption, backstabbing, and double-dealing that Gundam excels in, and to the team’s credit, we do get a solid eight episodes of exactly that (okay, well, scratch the flashback stuff—six and a half). There was a wonderful mix of the new (everybody fell in love with the Federation pilot who showed up in episode 4; a very classic Gundam relatable antagonist, with the great double-lines of “Newtypes are Zeon propaganda” followed ten minutes later by “This pressure…I haven’t felt this in a long time” like people denying the existence of Newtypes may be Newtypes themselves, girl), but I felt like following that up directly with the freaking Black Tri-Stars was a bit too much…but as it turns out, this is another one of those anime that are only 12 episodes long. Sure, lots of big names, can’t spend the money, I get it. But 12 episodes is not enough for most stories, and it certainly isn’t enough for A GUNDAM SHOW, where I expect at least three changes of everyone’s situation, including which side their on, six backstabs, and several meaningless deaths. A Gundam show should be somewhere within a standard of deviation of 50 episodes to really get everything. Most of them got close, and Witch from Mercury, as great as that show was, still felt like it was just stretching its legs when it ended at half that. GQuuuuuuuX has 12. That means the teen angst hits like a HAMMER six episodes in when the girls realize they both love Shuji even though they did also both see him cold knife a single mother in the back two episodes prior, and they kind of start to resent each other. Okay, fine, I can deal with that; I can deal with another callback (and a very funny extrapolation for a new character’s name) in episode 6, mostly because episode 7 was dope as hell, revolving around a Federation plot to assassinate Kycilia and a bunch of Mobile Suit cameos—sure, it was derivative and relied on old music cues, but when the Flying Air Conditioner transformed, I popped off, and don’t pretend like you didn’t.

But that felt like the end for references, you know? Like, after that, what other tricks could they have to pull? This was Machu and Nyaan’s story, and they were at their emotional low point—Shuji disappeared, they were split up, they were bitter and angry and being manipulated by two sides of a budding Zeon civil war. Now, that’s dope as hell, and I wanted to see more of it.

So of course we go visit LALAH FUCKING SUNE and it’s the Lalah and Char show for the next four episodes, until the end. And that’s where they lose me.

Continuity is great. I’m an old-school Marvel guy, you know I love the deep cuts and the weird references, and it still irks me when comics fudge what happened in old stories for new ones. But I also don’t want new media in old franchises to keep going back to the same well, you know? GQuuuuuuX had a fascinating new premise and new characters, and I was excited to see how they maneuvered through an extremely dangerous political situation, came back together, maybe fell apart again, fight it out…Kycilia’s manipulation of Nyaan was especially interesting, providing more depth than that character had received in 45 years of storytelling, at least on TV. Actually giving depth to Challia Bull, a character who died in his first appearance, delving into his despair as he recounted a command that went poorly, his desperation for a friend in Char Aznable, and the slow reveal that he learned a lot about keeping your feelings close to the chest from his “MAV,” it was incredibly interesting.

And the writers said, “Fuck that, TIME FOR A MULTIVERSE STORY KIDS.”

So Lalah of the GQuuuuuuuX timeline is matron of a Zeon-run whorehouse but she has memories from other timelines of her love for Char and Gundam killing Char (“So, the white mobile suit pilot is your enemy?” “No, I love him” haha yeah that’s our Lalah) and she is haunted by this life she’ll never live. And the reason she keeps thinking of this is because the thing that caused the Newtype flash (the “Zeknova” in this show’s parlance) that led to Char’s disappearance was the MOTHERFUCKING ELMETH with Lalah inside it, fresh off watching Char die in an alternate version of the battle between the Gundam and the Elmeth, and she’s been dimension-hopping to try to find a Universe where Char didn’t die, and the only solution she has found was to make a universe where Char never met her. But Shuji, who reappears as a ghostly Newtype-flash entity…okay, I didn’t have space to mention, but Shuji had been Newtype-flashing for a while and introduced the girls to it and kept saying he was talking to the Gundam, which was a fakeout because you would obviously assume he was talking to Char’s spirit outside of reality because of the Zeknova, but Char was doing his own thing to undermine Kycilia’s plan and Shuji was really talking to the spirit of…well…

Like, while this is going on, Kycilia kills Gihren (kind of a shame to have so little of that character in this show, but also suck it you Hitler-worshipping patricide) and manipulates Nyaan into using an experimental weapon disguised as a weather satellite (that’s an over-simplification, don’t worry about it) to destroy A Baoa Qu to remove all of Gihren’s supporters before Challia Bull can put HIS plan into place to kill BOTH Kycilia and Gihren at the same time and he has to fight his own lieutenant who was working with Kycilia all along, and Machu is on Challia Bull’s side now but Nyaan doesn’t understand what’s going on and is on Kycilia’s side and also Char infiltrated the team creating Kycilia’s mega weapon to turn it against her. Again, that is all DOPE AS HELL, and I was really digging it, but once Shuji shot a black hole out of his hands and the original Gundam from the very first cartoon from 1979 emerged from an interdimensional portal to the tune of TM Network’s 1987 song “Beyond the Time” I began to think the references had gone too far. And I was right.

I have seen so many posts about how people loved the end of this show, and I can’t agree. Yes, they got the original actors for Char and Lalah back for a couple of lines. Yes, a bunch of red mobile suits. Yes, references to Evangelion. But, like…Machu and Nyaan were fighting. There were a lot of emotions bound up in each other, and their jealousy over their silly high school crush on the artistic dirty boy. And this is resolved by…Machu saying “Hey, Nyaan, we should team up in this mobile suit fight,” and Nyaan just sort of remembers that…they’re friends. And helps. They move to Earth together and get a beach house, which explains the ending theme song animation which made NO SENSE for the entire show. I guess Nyaan HAD just shot her mentor/evil mother figure for Machu, so maybe she was already working it out, but I would have liked a little bit of a look into her mental state, but we had to take the time up with clips from a fifty year old cartoon. They recreate the famous murder of Kycilia, but with a mobile suit, and actually less graphically than it was done in 1980. Challia Bull turns on Char for like two minutes and Char leaves him with, “Guess I’ll go live my life in a way that won’t make you want to kill me” which of course means he runs into this universe’s Lalah. Shuji, who is trying to kill Lalah because the GUNDAM, the UNTHINKING ROBOT ITSELF, wants her to die to reset reality, is stopped because the VOICE OF AMURO RAY TRANSCENDS REALITY AND ASKS THE GUNDAM NICELY NOT TO KILL LALAH LIKE IT DID IN THE ORIGINAL SHOW.

I’m so happy y’all worked out your trauma about a cartoon you watched when you were (checks their birthdays) oh God they were older than I was when I watched the original Gundam. I was kind of invested in the trauma of your main characters. Remember them? I would have liked if their story wasn’t completely subordinated to the story of characters I’ve already seen kill each other, thanks.

I have so many mixed feelings about this show. It got some of the most genuine, thrilled emotions out of me, more than any show this year, as of June 27, when I’m writing this. But when it came to building something new, something its own, and not just relying on something I already liked, it…it didn’t fail. It succeeded. But they focused on the former, and I wanted more of the latter. So I can’t, in good conscience, fully recommend it.

And now I complain about plot holes.

Why would Sayla become the queen (Princess?) of Zeon? Sure, I guess Ramba Ral called her the princess (and was that him cameoing as part of her entourage?), but wasn't Zeon Zum Deikun an elected leader? The Principality was declared by Degwin Zabi, and passed down his bloodline. Wouldn’t the throne pass to someone from the Zabi family? Even with Dozle still being dead in this timeline, I have to assume Mineva was born, where is she? Does Haman Karn have her, still? And didn’t they say Garma was still alive, presumably chilling with his hot, rich, Earther wife? I mean, leaving aside that my read on Sayla is that she didn’t want to be leader of Zeon (although that was also my read on Mineva, that she’d rather be Banagher’s Audrey Burne, but that’s the difference between a refugee raised by rich, listless Teabolo Mass and a figurehead raised by cunning, ruthless Haman Karn, I guess) since Sayla would have had a different, potentially harsher experience of the One Year War in this timeline, my read on her personality is possibly out of sync, but she’s got a couple of potential claimants gunning for her, even if ol’ brother Casval doesn’t care. She’s not the rightful ruler! This is a coup!

The author would like to state that he believes the concept of a “rightful ruler” is bullshit and only a democratically elected legislative body can truly be said to be “rightful,” but even if Challia Bull had succeeded in killing Char so he wouldn’t have a claim to the throne through primogeniture, Sayla being a monarch is bullshit. Also, Sayla only showing up in two scenes is bullshit, but whatchagonnado?

What was the point of showing us Bask Om in a toque? When Bask Om showed up at the end of 0083: Stardust Memories, it was an important plot revelation. For anyone who had seen Zeta Gundam, we now understand that Anavel Gato got PLAYED like a PUNK, and his entire Neo-Zeon plan was a Federation false flag operation to justify expanding police powers and getting Bask Om what he wanted—what we’d already seen in Zeta Gundam, the Titans. Likewise, the similar scene earlier in 0083 where Haman Karn took one look at Gato’s plan and said, “No, this is not going to help ME, this man is an idiot, I have my own plans,” reconciled her Neo Zeon we knew survived with the plot of 0083. Om showing up here only exists to foreshadow that we’re dealing with Murasame Labs, which we could have already figured from every other hint, and also Gates Capa was RIGHT THERE. It’s just fanservice for fanservice, and was a bad sign of what was to come.

Deux Murasame, pfft.

GFreD sounds like something Barney Rubble would say.

What fucking OoP Art did y’all find that had Amuro Ray’s soul in it? Oh! Duh, the Omega Psycommu, never mind, that makes sense actually.

Are we saying that the original cartoon where Lalah died is the timeline she chose AFTER the events of GQuuuuuuX? Because she said she only found universes where Char died in that fight. But then, why did Amuro remember her already dying?

15. Lazarus: In 1998, Shinichiro Watanabe and Keiko Matsumoto created Cowboy Bebop, a 26-episode anime series, greenlit for that most noble of purposes: so Bandai could sell more models of spaceships. Aside from the directive that it must have spaceships, they had no further instructions. The result, which was shown in a butchered form on TV Tokyo before being rebroadcast in full on cable station Wowow, was an artful, musical, spiritual exploration of the lives of four broken people and a dog as they travelled through what man had made in space, and had adventures that ranged from harrowing, heartfelt, and sometimes just plain wacky. It did okay in Japan, but once Bandai brought it to America, well, we just went nuts for the thing. It was unlike anything else on TV, or in anime, or just…anywhere. It remains one of the best television programs I have ever seen, which is why I’m so scared to watch the live action show everyone but my brother hated.

In the years since, Watanabe and Matsumoto have collaborated on a number of other television programs, all excellent: Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy, and Carole & Tuesday—but in all of these, Matsumoto was just an episode writer, not the head writer. Not that Matsumoto was without other career highlights in this era, as she co-wrote Tokyo Godfathers with director Satoshi Kon, and that’s one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time…oh, and I guess she created and wrote Wolf’s Rain, which did not click with me, unfortunately. This year’s Lazarus was supposed to be their true reunion, the return of the collaboration behind America’s favorite anime (other than Dragon Ball Z, which is every country’s favorite anime, so it doesn’t count).

Then Matsumoto died. So, Watanabe finished Lazarus himself, as his memorial to his friend.

Well, himself, and with the help of Chad Stahelski, the stunt coordinator for John Wick…AND composers Kamasi Washington, Bonobo and Floating Points. I was all ready for Lazarus to be far and a way my favorite show this year.

Set in 2052, Lazarus’s world isn’t far from our own, just living with the consequences of our actions today. Rising sea levels have flooded small islands, sections of the Middle East are in constant war, and homelessness is taking over the cities…and nobody really cares. Enter Deniz Skinner, famous chemist and pharmaceutical developer, and his miracle painkiller Hapna, a more effective painkiller with little to no side effects. After the FDA approves the drug, Skinner abandons his patent, making it easy and cheap to produce, so Hapna quickly replaces all painkillers as the go-to for any little ache and pain…and as a party drug…and a way to push your depression into the back of your mind. It’s available over the counter, anyone can just use it. It won’t kill you.

So it turns out Hapna will kill you.

With 30 days before the secret poison lurking within Hapna kills everyone who ever took it, even once, the government pulls together a crack team of weirdos to go find Skinner, who has promised to give the cure to whoever finds him first. It’s an interesting premise, and provides for a lot of action sequences and backroom dealing. It’s exactly the sort of thing that’s always going on in the background of a Shinichiro Watanabe show.

Except…that was always going on in the BACKGROUND of a Shinichiro Watanabe show, right? Nobody watches his shows for the plot. Do you REALLY care about Spike vs. Vicious and the Syndicate in Cowboy Bebop? Be honest now. Yes, “In the rain, in the rain,” it’s a great scene, but there are FIVE EPISODES devoted to the “plot” of Cowboy Bebop. Julia shows up and immediately gets offed. It’s not ABOUT that. The joy of Cowboy Bebop is about the small character moments with the cast, or with people we only see once, how they build over 26 episodes into a rich tapestry that has something for everyone. In Samurai Champloo, did you really care what the deal was with the Samurai that smelled like sunflowers? Or did you just want to spend more time with these three unlikely friends? In Space Dandy, Dandy and series villain Dr. Gel don’t even meet face-to-face until the final two episodes! Did that make “A Race In Space Is Dangerous, Baby” any less of a triumph? I still think about “An Other-Dimensional Tale, Baby” all the time. Heck, the only one of Watanabe’s anime (HIS anime; he’s also directed some adaptations of the work of others and I guess there’s this anime called “Terror in Resonance” that didn’t make much of a splash that I thought was based on someone else’s work but…apparently isn’t) that followed an important plot throughout the series was Carole & Tuesday, and even in that, the major, all-important “Concert that saved Mars” was a rushed afterthought tacked onto the end of 22 excellent episodes about two (three?) girls trying to speak for themselves in a world that overvalues disposable AI pop (prescient!) and basically any episodes where they interact with DJ Ertegun is an immediate favorite for me, but especially the one where his manager steals all his money and he hallucinates a more successful version of himself mocking him from the mirror. Watanabe excels in character moments, and the plot and length of Lazarus allows for so little time for that. Oh, they’re still there; little faces, awkward situations…but I never get a full episode to someone like in Bebop or Dandy, you know? The closest we get is in episode 6, “Heaven is a Place in Earth”, when Elena goes home, or in episode 2, “Life in the Fast Lane,” where they go find the man in the bunker—now that guy was a Watanabe character. I guess you could say episode 8, “Unforgettable Fire,” where Chris reunites with her old girlfriend, but that one was perhaps the most contrived and cliched of the bunch, unfortunately. I think Adult Swim’s decision to not make the Japanese-language version available on Max immediately, but only after a week or so, may have also hurt my appreciation; it’s so much easier to be disappointed in performances in a language you understand, so when the English dub is listless or the script needed a bit of polish, I hear, where when a subtitle is bad I can more easily imagine how it SHOULD have been translated, and if the delivery sucks, well, I only know every other word, so how should I know where the emphasis goes? But too much modern anime is dubbed in a laid-back, overly-serious style, which doesn’t translate well to the screen, and certainly not to cartoons. Enunciate, guys!

Except…laid-back is kind of the perfect attitude for Lazarus. It’s a show about the end of the world, impending death of most humans; characters commonly assume it means all humans, but, of course, everyone just goes on with their lives. They don’t know what else to do, right? Several characters, especially in the episode where they have to go extract an important suspect from a club, express exactly what everyone must be thinking: “SOMEONE will fix it. I’ll be fine.” Then they all try to avoid and undermine the people who ARE trying to fix it (there’s a big plot where a corrupt guy in the NSA tries to kill one of the main characters to cover up something he did that will come out in the investigation into Skinner—it’s never said outright, but for plot reasons, let us assume this guy never took Hapna and could only benefit from letting the president die). Petty jealousies and prejudices persist, and governments don’t stop acting badly just because it might not mean something in a month—because what if it does? My favorite episode was the seventh, “Almost Blue.” That’s the one that felt the most like something from Bebop, to me. The team goes to investigate land Skinner bought in islands all around the world, looking for anywhere he might be hiding, and it’s all underwater. The people they meet all explain--yeah! They used to live there. They were all ready to stay until everything was underwater, try to eke out a living somewhere else. Then Skinner came and bought everyone’s land at generous prices. They were all able to move elsewhere, escape the effects of global warming and live comfortably continuing their lives as fishermen, craftsmen, etc. The characters realize, in trying to find Skinner, in tracking down every little connection they could find to him, they’ve been retracing his footsteps as he came to the decision to poison everyone with Hapna. Skinner is purposely leading them on a wild goose chase so they understand why he made the choice he did. It’s High and Low by Akira Kurosawa, it’s Patlabor: The Movie by Mamoru Oshii, condensed into twenty minutes. It’s beautiful. The whole show is beautiful; great rotoscoped fight scenes, and they even use computers to create convincing parallax as they pan around buildings—not CGI, but warping the digital background paintings in a natural extension of the old “sliding background pieces” technique anime has been using since the eighties, at least. But I think that episode said what Watanabe wanted to the most. That, or episode 3, where they drop a huge hint in one shot that I PICKED UP ON, I WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW, I HAVE A WITNESS I DISCUSSED IT WITH, I’M NOT JUST SAYING THIS BECAUSE THEY POINT IT OUT IN THE FINAL EPISODE, I PICKED UP ON IT and it made me suspicious of Doug the entire show. And what he wanted to say is: it’s so easy to ignore problems, to paste over them, to look for easy fixes. And it might seem like they go away, but they don’t. While we’re having a good time in our gleaming cities, making money on stocks and Tiktok or bitcoin or bullshit, there are poor and homeless right down the road. There are people on the other side of the world paying the consequences for our actions. And everyone thinks, “Someone else will fix it. I’m too small.” What do we do? What CAN we do? Can humanity be saved from itself, and does it deserve to be? Lazarus doesn’t have the answers. Not sure anyone does. Sometimes it is nice to be reminded.

So I’m conflicted. Lazarus isn’t a bad show—all the time. Lazarus isn’t a good show—all the time. Lazarus is an interesting try by a great artist. Sometimes those are the best art of all. Maybe it will grow on me. I didn’t hold Carole & Tuesday in as high esteem at the time I watched it as I do today…not sure I felt that way about Cowboy Bebop in 2001 either, to be honest (Honestly? My anime of the year for 2001 would have been Transformers: Car Robots at the time. I still love it to death, but not my best choice.). But I always wanted it to be just a little bit something other than what it was. And that’s a shame.

But I’ll be back for the next one, Watanabe-sensei.

14. Spy Family Season 3: After I was disappointed in the last season’s focus on Anya shenanigans, this season pleased me by refocusing on the spycraft and international politics angles. They kicked off with a few silly stories, but that’s just a downside to the seasonal model being deployed into manga adaptations: sometimes your season break falls when the manga isn’t doing anything of consequence. However, episode two and three were a flashback storyline about Twilight/Loid’s childhood, focusing on his perception of the outbreak of the war between Ostania and Westalis, and how his father tried to push back on state propaganda, but the trauma of losing his parents and the intense violence of those early days left him vulnerable to manipulation by the state. His meeting with Franky, who apparently was originally an Ostanian defector, allows him to see the other side for the first time since he was a child, but obviously not enough since these days BOTH of them are working for WISE. But, since I always loved the way this series portrays the hypocrisy of their governments, it was nice to return to that theme, even in a flashback.

They also did a wonderful Anya storyline without Loid and Yor, where Anya’s schoolbus is captured by terrorists (and can I just say how funny it is that Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure changes everyone’s names so they don’t get sued by rock stars, but Spy x Family sees no problem with naming a terrorist who threatens children with violence “Billy Squire?”). Anya using her powers to deduce a solution is clever and cute and all, but the flashback to Squire losing his daughter when the police suppressed a student protest movement, and how that violence radicalized him and the movement itself into becoming what they were always accused of being…chilling. The final arc of the season, where Loid and Fiona work to silence a defector at cross-purposes against Yuri who is trying to protect him was fun, but nowhere near as thematically deep as the previous two major storylines. It was nice character development to see Loid be worried about offending Yor, despite himself, and that moment where Yuri has a moment of doubt, thinking, “Why would Twilight disguise himself as ME, of all people?” could set up some tension down the line (he shrugs it off here) but the big moment of the storyline was Fiona beating the spy so hard she breaks her own arm, which just reinforces what we already knew: Fiona is crazy.

However, all that focus on Anya and Loid left our last main character, Yor, without much to do. She befriended Damian’s mother, which is a neat thing to set up, and Mrs. Desmond seems to have a split personality which, in the absence of other information, seems to have been caused by her husband’s domineering (emotionally abusive?) personality. There’s also an episode where Yor goes out drinking with her coworkers and gets a really stupid drunk idea that causes problems for a few hours and hurts Loid’s feelings. That’s it. Well, she got the whole boat arc last time, she deserves to chill.

But seriously, more smashing the state, please. I know the cute kid sells comics, but I want to see a corrupt government topple. That would be cathartic for me.

13. Baman Piderman: I almost didn’t include this one, as I haven’t included some other online series with similar formats, but I watched ENOUGH of this that I can’t justify not including it. Also it’s good. So.

Also I was expecting, from posts on Smallbu’s Bluesky, that there would be episodes from the fourth season this year, but I guess Mondo just didn’t want to cooperate. Fuckers.

I watched a couple of episodes of Baman Piderman back when it first dropped on YouTube, wayyyyy long ago in college. They were cute and inconsequential, along the same lines of stuff that was published to YouTube in those early days, with little regard for, you know, copyright (do not let their appearance fool you: Baman and Piderman are completely different from those other two similar-looking characters you may have heard of). I didn’t think about it much until clearly Baman Piderman-like jokes and animation were in the middle of episodes of Adventure Time and I began to realize that these creators had a whole footprint in modern animation that I had been completely unaware of. They did the Adventure Time opening this year! They did animation in Deltarune Chapter Four! And, of course, they both ACT in the excellent Big Top Burger series of short animations from WorthyKids that are too short to make this list but you should all watch!

But Baman Piderman itself was sort of sequestered away in a moldering old YouTube playlist from a dead channel because Mondo went out of business like ten years ago. I’m not sure if they did them for Mondo the whole time, or if Mondo bought the rights early on in exchange for backing the further development of the series, and I don’t care, except that the creators—Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera, married couple animators, in case my just dropping the name “Smallbu” without explanation confused you, look, I know you all have Google sometimes I just say names so I don’t have to care about what you understand—were building to a conclusion that never arrived, and that can be so frustrating. After some backstage wrangling, the creators were able to license the rights to finish the series except they apparently have yet to receive permission to finish the series come the heck on people give the go-ahead.

Anyway, in anticipation of the coming new episodes, I went back and watched everything I hadn’t seen before. I remembered maybe the first four or five cartoons vaguely; Baman and Piderman just flopping around doing nonsense things. The animation is extremely fluid and expressive, especially for early YouTube (Charlie the Unicorn this is not) but the stories are completely surreal and inexplicable—“random” humor, in the parlance of the time. This slowly changes with longer adventures into a consistent, though bizarre, world around Baman and Piderman’s houses, picking up with the introduction of Squib, a sentient mass of vines, and the granting of a body to Pumpkin, a pumpkin. Baman and Piderman, while never disappearing from the series, start to take a back seat to Pumpkin and Squib, who have a little romance going on that’s really cute. When the series went on hiatus, the storyline hinted that Squib was considering going into a cocoon to take a more human form like her evil counterpart, Red Squib, but I was against it. The image of Pumpkin contentedly sinking into a mass of Squib tentacles was just too cute; she shouldn’t feel pressure to change. But that’s just my opinion.

I think the creators may have been pushing against the boundaries of their creation by the end. The Ghost House cartoons, while the most complex of the series, also feature more conventional plots. The character of Wanda, with her conventional, direct way of speaking, feels apart from the rest of these weirdos and their romances with Tubas and battles with doppelgangers who live in the basement and travel through magical pizza faces. Perhaps it was evolving into something else, but it did feel more like something other than itself, unlike, say, Adventure Time, which has never lost its core even while changing wildly over the past fifteen years. I had hoped to have a definitive answer one way or another, but, well, I repeat myself.

Despite this, blasting through every episode in one night and then realizing the next day I accidentally skipped episode sixteen which is retrospectively really important because it’s when Wanda gets out of the wand and Pumpkin picks up guitar, was, well, a blast. There’s something deeper in these videos about weird guys who look like Batman and Spider-Man for no reason other than to get eyes on the cartoon, and it touched my heart. Give ‘em a look. They’re wild.

12. Doctor Who: Sylvester McCoy season 2: I have a friend who has been BEGGING me to watch the three-part episode The Happiness Patrol for ages. WELL GUESS WHAT I did and it was good.

BUT FIRST, Remembrance of the Daleks, which looms large over modern Who because it was retroactively used (albeit, never on screen) as the Dalek’s justification of the Time War. That moment is almost an afterthought in the episode, however, which has a complex interlocking plot involving the Doctor travelling back to a month after the first episode of the show, revealing that his impulsive kidnapping of Ian and Barbara interrupted a plan involving an ancient Time Lord artifact (not for the only time this season—my understanding is, they were planning an ongoing plotline to reveal the Doctor was more important than previously revealed that was cut short by the show’s cancellation, oh but here comes Chris Chibnall thirty years later with a DIFFERENT plan…) that the Daleks want to continue their war between the independent Dalek faction and the faction loyal to Davros that was the focus of previous Dalek episodes, although there’s a pretty nice twist on it involving a creepy little girl that caught me by surprise. The real focus of the episode is the fascist human working with the Daleks who thinks he can use them to racially cleanse Britain, and companion Ace’s budding romance with someone she finds out has been feeding classified information to the Daleks. The moment when her reverie about her newfound romance is shattered by discovering his mother has a “Whites Only” sign up in her boarding house is the sort of historical moment Who often (not always, but often) elides in favor of the alien plot, and felt real and human in a way that I think should have tipped her off that this guy wasn’t worth her time before he was found out as a spy. Still, a fun Dalek adventure, and much more coherent than Colin Baker’s Revelation of the Daleks, which I know isn’t a high bar but here we are.

Critiques of fascism were the main theme this season, and the second storyline, The Happiness Patrol, is the most obvious and incisive one. Set on a colony world that has banned sadness, the titular patrol is the secret police force that sets about eliminating anyone even thinking of attempting to express their emotions in a healthy manner. Saccharine circus music blares around the town as hordes of grinning harpies in hideous makeup search for a rogue blues musician. Sure, it’s ridiculous, but this is Doctor Who. Considering the politics of the time, Happiness Patrol is somewhat disappointing as a critique of Thatcherism; compared to the previous season’s Paradise Towers, which had a laser-focus on public housing funding, gentrification, and broken-windows policing, Happiness Patrol tried to be a bit more obvious in its target, and as a result dipped a bit too much into misogynistic tropes for my taste: the controlling wife and her henpecked husband who gets her back in the end, the control freak trying to put on a brave, palatable face for the populace, it all seemed a bit tired. Also, the plotline about sending the police to kill protesting miners was a bit on the nose, even as it never truly intersected with the main plot (and what was with the rat people? Wikipedia says they are the natives the colonizing humans displaced, which I did not pick up on and was sort of beside the point of the story). Also, there’s a big monster called the Candyman who makes the candy they boil people alive in (that’s a total Joker move, dope) who exists only because they figured they needed a monster for Doctor Who, it feels like. He spends most of the time with his feet stuck to the floor because the Doctor threw La Croix at him. There’s almost something there about a single-purpose person being driven to extremes by his inability to express himself through anything other than violence, but that’s already being served by three other characters in the episode and I have the advantage over people from 1988 of having already seen Steven Universe do that better.

But I think all of that is a distraction from what The Happiness Patrol does RIGHT: something at its core, its way of understanding the fascist mindset, feels truly REAL as part of the world we exist in right now. Helen A, the dictator, gives a self-serving speech about how she really wanted to help, but when people complained about her policies she didn’t have the humility to listen and adjust, but blamed the citizens for complaining. Instead of adjusting what didn’t work, she doubled down and blamed everyone else for being sad—it’s not that SHE’S wrong, it’s that THEY have something wrong with them for expressing an honest opinion. The Happiness Patrol are so emotionally stunted, so angry, so sad, and they’re so afraid of anyone knowing it, they have to kill anyone who has the emotional honesty to admit their faults because they see a strength, or a weakness, or something in their victims in themselves, and they have to kill it in someone else because they can’t deal with their own emotions. There’s one character in the Happiness Patrol who keeps killing people, or threatening people, or arresting the wrong person; except, she always acts in a way that’s logically consistent with the ethos of the Happiness Patrol, it just undermines the leader’s goals, so she is scolded (for instance, one time the Doctor convinces her that her commanding officer is a “killjoy,” and the Doctor is laughing, so she arrests the person who is obviously angry—her boss!) and she can’t understand what she did wrong, because she can’t see how she’s been manipulated. She bought into the lie without seeing how it serves the person in power. I think there’s something there that speaks to the current moment. Just ignore the lollipop man.

Silver Nemesis was one I was digging as it went along but it never really came together. Throw the Doctor, a time travelling witch, an ancient Time Lord robot, a bunch of Neo Nazis, and the Cybermen into a blender and you get…well, way too much stuff for three half-hour episodes. Honestly, if there was any aspect they should have dropped, it should have been the Cybermen, who add nothing to the story and all get blown up at the end anyway. Nazis and a witch fighting over a killer super-robot hidden in a Renaissance crypt would have been enough. Instead, all these parties hustle back and forth between a few set pieces and juggle three different MacGuffins for three episodes and at the end a robot asks to die and the Doctor says “No.” It FELT right, and I really thought this would be my favorite, but there’s no depth like the other ones. Not a bad episode by any stretch, but sort of inconsequential—except that I think this was another one setting up a big reveal that never came.

After all that, the finale, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, is just straight horror. The Doctor and Ace see an ad for a circus on a remote planet, and they go despite Ace’s fear of clowns. Something is clearly wrong at the circus—people keep disappearing, and we the audience are treated to a scene of a man being tortured and woman being murdered that we don’t initially understand. The Doctor and Ace are trapped with a hodgepodge of stock characters: a biker straight out of Judge Dredd, an old pith hat-wearing adventurer type, a werewolf, and a huge nerd. The Circus lures people in to please a stereotypical 1950’s-looking family (the creepiest kind) in the audience who kill the performers they don’t like. It turns out they’re gods or something, none of that’s important; the emotional center of the episode are the Circus workers: the ones who don’t want to go along with the murders, who are tortured and broken by their work, their ART, being perverted for base survival at the expense of others. The ones who are okay with it, who are making due and just want to live another day. The ones who want it to end, but don’t have the guts to make a stand for themselves. And of course, the ones who draw more enjoyment from the killing than they did from their original job—the clown, naturally, portrayed with memorable panache by Ian Reddington. You’re torn between being sad to see him die and being so happy that he’s dead. Anyway, after all that, the reveal of the “Gods of Ragnarok” was a little disappointing, but it still had one of the all-time “cool dudes don’t look at explosions” moments as the Doctor strolled from the circus. A fun way to end it, but overall I still think the following season was better.

11. Devil May Cry: I’ve never played a Devil May Cry game, and I haven’t seen the previous cartoon, Devil May Cry: The Animated Series. I have played Bayonetta, which is another Hideki Kamiya game about angels and demons, so I think I have some idea how the ones he worked on must go. So, I didn’t have a reason to watch the new Devil May Cry cartoon being produced by Netflix, except that it was done by some of the same people who produced the Castlevania cartoons that I’ve enjoyed, and also they used “Rollin’” by Limp Bizkit as their theme song and that’s hilarious. It’s not a good song, but it is a great song.

What I HAVE done, however, is live through the post-9/11 era, and there was a certain way that time felt that I can only appreciate in retrospect—which may seem odd, as our rights have continued to erode (passive voice doing some heavy lifting, there) and wars have only gotten stranger, but other aspects of that era have gone away. And, just as I was astounded by Legend of the Galactic Heroes’ ability to bring me back to that era even though it was written in the 1980’s, I am impressed by how well the writers of Devil May Cry have captured things about that time I wouldn’t have linked together: the odd religious aspects of the war, the strange rumors and hyperbole that traded around as fact, and how terrified everyone was of Dick Cheney for some reason. Put that all in a blender and you get Netflix’s version of Devil May Cry, an unexpectedly strong adaptation that mixes action and tragedy into a compelling, if not terribly original eight episodes.

First of all, I’m never sure why animated adaptations of videogames don’t just hire the same people. Is it a union thing? Was Capcom using non-union actors? You know there’s a way to be in union productions and non-union ones if you want, right? Anyway, they recast Johnny Yong Bosch as Dante, which makes sense because he has extensive experience playing gunslingers in red trench coats already. Dante is a typical superpowered protagonist: cocky and not asking the right questions about his history until someone else figures it out for him. He’s just there to kick ass and something something prophecy whatever. He is in conflict with both Darkcom, the government anti-demon agency overseen by the vice president (strangely, one of the last roles of the late, great Kevin Conroy; someone else filled in for him on some lines they had to fix in ADR looping—and let me tell you, it’s REAL WEIRD to hear Batman talk about people being chosen by God to cleanse the world) and the White Rabbit, a demon liberationist who has fashioned himself on Alice and Wonderland. The Darkcom agent Dante works with/against the most is Mary Ann Arkham, who Dante just calls “Lady” because that’s in the video game. Mary and White Rabbit provide most of the character development in the series due to their tragic pasts, poignantly portrayed in the series’ sixth episode, “The First Circle,” which could almost stand on its own, a unique, mostly-silent episode that cuts between both characters’ origins with different animation styles, so if you walked in after the opening credits you wouldn’t know you were watching Devil May Cry until Dante’s grinning face showed up after the credits (or until it autoplayed the next episode, if you leave the service as Netflix WANTS you to use it).

The high-octane action is in keeping with a Kamiya-style game, and since there’s a lot less brooding than in Castlevania the voice direction didn’t fall into the trap of under-acting that bothered me through that series. Instead, Dante is jumping out of planes and shooting up diners, as political shenanigans and betrayals play out in the background for him to discover too late—yeah, that’s how Bayonetta rolls, too. But it’s that weird mixture of the political and the religious, using religion as justification for an unjust war, and the way children’s trauma is used to condition them to carry out monstrosities that really pulled me in, and back in time. Lady grows and gains a different perspective on her fight with demons, and sees how her own actions are just prolonging the war…and no one cares, it doesn’t change anything. Promises made by one member of the United States government with compassion mean nothing when the man up top has none. The tragedy of someone thinking that they can ever find justice; and that goes for the Rabbit, too. A character they dragged up out of an old DMC manga tie-in as the main villain of the first season? Well, it works, and the extremely predictable twist works, too. Because, of course, the demons aren’t demons—a character can be a stereotype, or they can be a person, depending on how you write them. These demons are people—undesirable ones, refugees. And they’re seeking help from the United States government.

Maybe we’re still in the post-9/11 era.

10. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Season 3): Season 3 of SNW had big shoes to fill after season 2, following up one of the best seasons of Star Trek ever couldn’t have been easy, and to be fair, they did not meet the same level of intensity and inventiveness that they did in the prior season, disappointingly. However, do not take that as me saying this was a bad season; by no means. Although, really, it should have been. There were far too many callbacks and references this season, things I wish they hadn’t done, but they keep doing stories that should be stupid and pulling them off. Like, an episode where Trelane shows up but nobody sees his face so it makes sense Spock wouldn’t recognize him later even though you’d like Spock would be like, “Oh hey I remember this one time a godlike being spent all day messing with me,” and also they play up the Q connection? That shouldn’t be good. That sounds like an episode of Enterprise. But you know, I laughed, and there were some nice character moments for Spock, Chapel, and La’an. It was, despite its best attempts, a good episode. Less good was Four-and-a-Half Vulcans, a very TNG-style “funny” episode that didn’t make a lot of sense and built its comedy around the audience’s perception of Vulcans rather than how a person, these characters, would act in a situation, with maybe one throw-away line of dialogue to explain why Captain Pike was suddenly acting like a Conehead just because he got an injection. It was corny, dumb, and played out too long…but I laughed. It did make me laugh. (Casting Patton Oswalt as a Vulcan who’s a hopeless weeb for Earth culture? Perfect. STUPID, but perfect.) However, I never felt that this season cohered like the previous one did; there was nothing that came close to Ad Astra per Aspera, or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, or Under the Cloak of War. Which is not to say there weren’t great episodes; The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail is classic Star Trek all the way, full of difficult choices, desperate science, and a gut-wrenching twist ending that I did see coming but that doesn’t make it hurt less—and a great showcase for Paul Wesley as James Kirk, who has only been a recurring, supporting role until now, but had a bigger spotlight on him this season. Also excellent, What is Starfleet? used a found-footage documentary style to build a compelling, claustrophobic and often conspiratorial exploration of the contradiction of Starfleet’s morality that gave everyone a great chance to be very serious directly into a camera (and an excuse to look directly into the camera from time to time, which I hope wasn’t difficult for them to turn off once filming was over), although I found the ending a bit too easy, too pat, as they fall back into the series status quo so no one has to question their position in the show. And let’s not forget the excellent holodeck episode (and yes, they do a little continuity patch about how they’re not supposed to have those yet) where La’an does the very classic Star Trek holodeck episode thing of playing out a murder mystery: specifically, solving the murder of the producer of the struggling science-fiction television series, STAR TREK! No, just kidding, it’s called The Last Frontier, although Paul Wesley gets to show off by doing hammed-up Shatner in the “episode” segment and then a more naturalistic, “casual” Shatner in the investigation; likewise, Anson Mount plays a weaselly stand-in for Gene Roddenberry (and, as before, I can’t say enough good things about Mount’s portrayal of Pike—the subtle hand gestures, facial expressions, the way he moves—he IS the definitive Pike, by far).

But…the season, more than the previous two, felt disjointed as it ping-ponged between comedy and horror. We started off well enough with Hegemony, part II, wrapping up the Gorn plotline with suitable action and high-stakes technobabble, while also plugging a little Gorn-shaped continuity hole setting up the classic episode, Arena (they even set up that the Gorn are going into hibernation, which I interpret as an explanation for why that one was so slow when it fought Captain Kirk). However, the next-to-last episode goes back to the Gorn well, when Erica Ortegas, a great character who has long deserved a spotlight episode, is trapped on a barren moon with a similarly trapped Gorn, and they make friends, Enemy Mine-style. What should have been a tense, ominous character piece as the two bitter enemies took each other’s measure and slowly earned their trust was dull, tensionless, and vastly overwritten, as Erica talked her way through everything as if the audience would run away if there was a second of dead air, and the Gorn offered only token resistance, offering her help and food even as she still considered betraying it. That episode’s set-up of Arena was FAR less satisfying than the first’s, by the way.

But the “main” storyline was the most disappointing, as Marie Batel, barely rescued from the Gorn cliffhanger we left her in last season, becomes slowly less human, somehow tied with an evil alien entity. The first episode to draw on Batel’s condition, Shuttle to Kenfori, was quite good—great little character moments for M’Benga following up on the previous season, and an absolutely wild plot where a mission to find rare medicine turns into a zombie movie ending in a Klingon knife fight. Hell yeah! However, the fifth and tenth episodes, Through the Lens of Time and New Life and New Civilizations, while not the worst episodes of the season, left me cold. They’re written with all the big-concept, deep-history ideas that seem like they’d be really cool and make you reconsider the universe, but the writers struggle to connect them to our characters, other than by putting people in danger. The concept of an alien species being the SOURCE of evil, locked away in magic time prisons, boogeymen who could get free and run rampant all over the galaxy if, say, some Starfleet cadet who didn’t pay attention in training accidentally picks up a live grenade and holds it near his face or something…it’s too much! It’s supposed to be scary, but it reads like a first draft. It’s not enough to hang a season on, certainly doesn’t hold a candle to the first season finale of SNW, which was a wonderful, humbling moment for Pike. In fact, my favorite part of the season finale WAS the humbling bit for Pike, where he and Batel have a little human moment in the midst of all this Star Wars, fate-of-the-galaxy nonsense. It’s saccharine and predictable and more than a little derivative of ANOTHER classic Star Trek episode (I’m thinking of a Next Generation episode—you’ll know the one I mean), but it meant something to the characters, it let Mount and, more importantly because she’s had less to do in the series, Melanie Scrofano do some acting in ways the big sci-fi plot didn’t. It was satisfying in its…unsaisfyingness? Which is where a good Star Trek should live. Well, one of the places. I wish we’d had more of that, and less of the Zelda temple full of bug ghosts. I hope they kept that in mind when they were filming the next two—last two—seasons…

9. The Amazing Digital Circus (this year’s episodes): Hm.

Digital Circus continues to ramp up, and I was really digging where this year was going. After the episode-by-episode introductions to deeper parts of each characters’ psyche, the hints at Ragatha’s background in episode five really got me excited to see more about her, especially since she’d been so gung-ho about being Pomni’s friend from jump. The different themes in episode five were a lot of fun, and certainly explain the delay in production as the team made all those new models, and the baseball scene with their evil doppelgangers was a riot. But of course, the real focus was delving a bit deeper into Jax’s backstory; he’s one of the most popular characters and has been since jump, but he’s also much more closed off than everyone else. The hints in episode five were masterfully expanded on in the wonderful episode six, “They All Get Guns,” which is self-explanatory. It's one of those things I don’t feel right talking about, because that gives it all away, you know? The shooting gags were funny, if you’re the kind of person who can laugh at the juxtaposition of horrible realistic violence with funny cartoon animals, but of course the real draw was the wonderful character interactions. Jax and Pomni’s…argument? Fight? At the end was the big moment, and of course I loved Ragatha and Kinger’s discussion in the penalty room, and I was looking forward to some big reveals in the final episode of the year. Certainly, the posts from cast and crew led me to believe something crazy would happen, possibly another abstraction, or something worse.

Well, I think I worked myself up too much to enjoy what we got, which is always the worst. Something crazy DID happen—Jax disassociating in his room is extremely worrying, and seriously don’t watch episode seven if you’re on shrooms, I don’t think you’ll have a good time. But the ending, while a downer for sure, didn’t provide the emotional release I wanted. It does give me a better idea of Caine’s personality, which I had a pretty good grasp on, but we have a better idea of how far he’ll go to ruin everyone’s day. But I was hoping for more information on the animosity between Ragatha and Jax, and I guess I’ll have to keep waiting for that. I also assumed we would SEE the talk Pomni and Ragatha talked about at the end of episode six, which I guess we don’t NEED to, but we’ve seen Pomni be everyone else’s unwilling therapist, so what the heck. Give me that sweet, sweet, emotional JUICE. Like, I felt everyone’s emotions at the end of episode seven…frustration. That’s not a complaint, frustration is the proper way to feel. But I guess…I was frustrated because of my own expectations as well, which I can’t hold against Gooseworx or the team. But it’s not like what I want to see isn’t coming, it just didn’t arrive in the order I assumed. Still, it’s odd to see a TADC episode and NOT think, “Wow, that was even better than the last one.” I suppose that wasn’t sustainable. I definitely hate how hard I’m being on the team, I don’t want to be hard on them, it’s still a great episode. But it didn’t resonate with me like the rest, and I’m struggling to understand why.

We’ll always have that mashup of clips from episode six with “They Both Reached for the Gun” from Chicago.

8. Daredevil: Born Again: Marvel, I have had some things to say about your recent films and television shows, and I’ll admit, most of the things I said weren’t all that good. So, with that in mind, I will start my critique of your revival of the Netflix Daredevil show with this thought:

NOW THAT’S MORE LIKE IT!

Now, according to Vincent D’Onofrio, that is by design. When I saw him at GalaxyCon this year, he spoke about how he and Charlie Cox were disappointed with the direction of the show when it originally started, and they were able to get it remade after the big creative strike in Hollywood two years ago. Honestly, the first episode had me worried. I would have preferred to save that big death until the end of the episode, build to it so it had real emotional weight; even already knowing these characters from three seasons of a TV show (and the source material, although that’s less important here) the initial scene of this season was rushed and unsatisfying, followed by a fast-forward through an unlikely political campaign, even in the midst of a world of unlikely political campaigns. But, once the second episode got rolling and the plot began in earnest, I could see that the characters were who they were supposed to be, and the team had crafted a detailed, twisting plot that played on the known faults and traits of the Kingpin, Daredevil, and their supporting cast; it was like we never left, and this was just the fourth season of the old Netflix show.

Well, perhaps not entirely; much like the movies, Daredevil: Born Again is much less afraid to dip its toes into the weird side of Marvel. We all had some fun with Charlie Cox getting up in front of a jury and asking why someone would attack a cop without the magic amulet that gave him super strength (and it is a testament to Charlie Cox’s skills as an actor that he delivers that line with conviction, without even a hint of irony or camp)—but that’s the world these characters live in, where the fantastic is accepted. Not only has Daredevil seen evil ninjas bring a dead woman back to life, statistically half the people in that courtroom were probably dead for five years. It makes sense for magic amulets to be normal. And I must say, this show dropped at a fortuitous time, as I had just read the original run of Sons of the Tiger, which introduced the Hector Ayala version of White Tiger, so I was very familiar with the character and immediately had his whole deal in my mind (I had previously read later comics where he showed up in Spectacular Spider-Man, so I just need to read the storyline adapted for this show to have read every appearance of Hector Ayala, I think).

The whole “superheroes as a metaphor for personal freedoms” thing has been done to death in comics, but it hasn’t come up that often in Marvel films, which tend to avoid making any but the most bland, basic statement they can get away with—see Captain America: Brave New World, which, despite being about government testing on black people, false imprisonment, and political coverups, manages to somehow ask us to go easy on a president who stomped all over the rights of American citizens to save his own ass because he eventually felt bad about it. And like Brave New World, a lot of people walked away from Born Again asking: is Kingpin Trump? I think there’s an easy answer to that: Kingpin kills a dude by crushing his head with his bare hands, and Trump would never have the guts to get his hands dirty personally. In fact, I’ve spoken elsewhere about how a comical fascist villain now seems more realistic than a scary one, because the harmlessness, the easy shots, the obvious falsehoods of the weak dictator now strike me as more true to life; once you convince someone of an obvious falsehood, once you give them enough that they’re willing to overlook your lies in the hope of getting what they want, they’re more likely to truly love and follow you, whereas someone who just follows because they’re scared or bullied into it will be looking to undermine you. So, while Kingpin is a poor analogy for Trump, I see a lot in his followers that reminds me of Trump’s rise. Daniel Blake, the Fisk fanboy, is the most obvious candidate. A recent college graduate with no political compass, no moral code, he idolizes Fisk based on…well, based on vibes, basically. The idea of the outsider coming in a “fixing” things connects with Blake in a way he doesn’t take the time to examine, he just feels this is a cool thing he wants to be involved with, and goes all in without understanding why, or why his friends don’t support him. As a result, he’s willing to do horrible things because he has sublimated himself to someone else. Sheila Rivera, the old-school bureaucrat who doesn’t like Fisk, is also familiar, as she repeatedly pushes back on Fisk’s illegal actions, but never takes a stand against him or goes to the press; she’s more concerned with keeping her job and safety than with what’s right, so all her posturing comes to nothing in the end as she becomes complicit in Fisk’s illegal actions—and yes, I know I said people who are afraid are less likely to truly follow the dictator, but some will. And, frankly, the way D’Onofrio plays Fisk, with his awkwardness, his long pauses, shifty eyes—he’s awkward! He talks in short bursts, he’s prone to fits of anger, his sense of humor is garbage; it’s easy to make fun of him. But you can’t. Because somehow…he wins. He finds the weaknesses, and he finds the people who are willing to overlook what he’s doing. Heck, I haven’t even mentioned how he gets the police on his side by doubling-down on corruption, rewarding the ones who will let his crimes slide or who were already working for him, because of course that’s a big part of the story, this is Daredevil, one of the all-time superhero vs. corrupt cops stories. Matt has to beat up someone.

Which is not to say this series was perfect; Kirsten McDuffie is one of my favorite Daredevil supporting characters, from the wonderful Mark Waid run, and she was completely underserved here. Heather Graham was an odd choice for Matt’s new love interest, and their breakup at the end of the season felt inevitable when I think it was supposed to be a betrayal (loved the showdown with Muse, though). The Punisher shows up and, because we want the Punisher to keep showing up, Daredevil can only muster a half-hearted, “Frank, please stop killing people” as Frank Castle unloads four bullets into a man’s head—Matt should be going after HIM, too—although, they are correct to do another “Punisher-worshipping cops don’t get it” story, please keep doing those until people do get it, which will be never. It’s starting to grow on me just how pathetic and unsympathetic Bernthal’s Punisher is; it’s very clear that this man is not well and not acting in a way that will help him recover, and that Matt is going down the same road. I wish we’d done more to set up the twist of Foggy’s death, but we could maybe chalk that up to the re-writes.

But most of all, I’m actually excited to see more, not just expecting it because the studio wants to train me to be excited for something that comes after the credits. They’ve set up a unique cliffhanger, and characters I want to see grow, evolve, rise, and fall. This is actually something like what the comics do every month, like how Marvel is supposed to make you feel, when everything’s firing just right, when they’re pushing to do a real story, not just something to tie into the new movie, the new toy Disney wants to sell you. This one has what the MCU has lost.

Now don’t screw it up.

7. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: It’s been a while since I watched a Spider-Man cartoon. After Greg Weisman’s now-legendary The Spectacular Spider-Man was unceremoniously cancelled as the rights for Spidey TV transferred from Sony back to Disney, and Disney replaced it with Ultimate Spider-Man, which was even worse than the Avengers cartoon they replaced the amazing, cancelled Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes with; I couldn’t get through two episodes. And there was another Spider-Man cartoon I didn’t even hear about until it was over, and they’ve been doing preschool cartoons about Spider-Man as well…but none of them interest me. I was happy enough to re-watch Spectacular and Spider-Man ’94, because, frankly, out of all the Spider-Man cartoons, those are the only ones that were any good. After all that, and the increasingly mediocre output of Marvel Studios over the past few years, I did not have much hope for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, even after the phenomenal X-Men ’97 from last year. What especially bothered me was the original announcement that this show would tie-in to the movies, presenting the early days of Spider-Man and his partnership with Iron Man that were only treated briefly or completely glossed over in the films.

Thankfully, they dropped that in development. We have, as I am perhaps willing to admit is no longer against the odds, a third good Spider-Man TV show.

Friendly Neighborhood does present a weirdo, alternate Spider-Man timeline, where the spider bite involves Doctor Strange, a big monster, and a mysterious portal, but other than that it sets up a typical Peter Parker in high school story—probably the best place to start a Spider-Man story, since that’s where Ditko and Lee started and where the exciting energy that has sustained Spider-Man ever since infused the character. It does fall into the same trap that many superhero shows have lately, where everyone wants to grab characters from the whole universe, as if cramming as many superheroes into something will automatically make children fans of them, instead of keeping a solid core cast and building to crossovers as something special. I will say, just like My Adventures With Superman before them, the Friendly Neighborhood team has deftly integrated such diverse characters as Niko Minoru, Bentley Whitman, and Finesse into their storyline, although I do think this is the most reprehensible version of Amadeus Cho I have yet encountered (that’s what you get when you don’t have a positive male role model like Hercules, I guess). The biggest surprise was the secondary arc given to Lonnie Lincoln of all characters, who has a wonderful little tragic arc from a solid dude in a bad situation to…well, don’t look up who Lonnie Lincoln is if you don’t want to know. The biggest change was the portrayal of Norman Osborne, who in a brilliant stroke they used as the replacement for Tony Stark as Peter’s mentor, as in the original plan. A friendly, helpful Norman is so odd to see…but he’s still Norman, he’s still out for himself, even as he promotes a superhero who wants to help people. Oh, and he’s still a dick to his son; I think this might be the most well-adjusted version of Harry we’ve ever seen, an Instagram influencer who knows just how much he didn’t earn his fame and how isolated he is from real friendship and affection, perhaps especially from his father. Well, there’s always room for him to turn on Pete, of course…

Also, they made the Osborns black, so their hair makes a bit more sense now.

The storyline is Spider-Man, the acting is Spider-Man, the difficult personal relationships are Spider-Man, and the animation is…fine. I am very disappointed in myself for not picking up, from the comic-style closing credits at least, that Chris Samnee was on the design team for the show, but I feel like if I hadn’t looked it up I would’ve picked up on it once Daredevil showed up (Samnee had a long a celebrated run on Daredevil…last…decade ow that hurts ow). His chin designs don’t really work in 3D, though; they’re that simplified art style where they look a little different from each angle, and they all look “right” to the human eye but when the heads on the computer models move, sometimes the back of their jaws jut out too much (especially noticeable on Aunt May, I think), and the rumples on Peter’s jacket arms just look…weird, the way they’re modeled. I didn’t see much of the stiffness of the What If models, or even some of the shots from X-Men, which was an accomplishment in itself, I guess—they put some THOUGHT into making the cartoony models move like they’re real, and I appreciate the effort.

I think this one is already greenlit for two more seasons, and they sure left us with enough cliffhangers for them. But now we have a great cartoons for Batman, Superman, X-Men, and Spider-Man all at the same time. How nostalgic.

6. Arcane: I was going to skip this one. I DID skip this one. I don’t care about League of Legends. I played it ONCE at Joe Hart’s house. My username was Lord Dark Wad. They’ve long since deleted my account. But so many people told me I had to watch Arcane, so I did.

I already knew I’d hate the music. I’d actually forgotten which band I don’t like did the theme song; I braced for Fall Out Boy and got blasted by Imagine Dragons. Well, that jazz song from episode two was pretty good, and Heimerdinger’s little Bob Dylan-lite song from late in the series was enjoyable, but while I NEVER skip theme songs, for this I made an exception. It did not stop the song from getting stuck in my head.

I knew Arcane would be aesthetically pleasing; well, okay, I didn’t because I judge CGI so much more harshly than hand-drawn animation, but they used a unique texture mapping to recreate the look of videogame concept art in motion, with brushstrokes and hand-drawn imperfections stretching as the model moves, along with a judicious use of fluid hand animation when justified, like with complex particle physics and explosions (look at a Toei Kamehameha and then look at that wispy bullshit from Dragon Ball Evolution and try to tell me CGI is better than traditional animation; you’ll see what I mean). But it takes some damn beautiful pictures to carry a narrative in place of characterization and plot, and Arcane’s art is good, but it’s not quite that good. How’s the story?

Look, those first two episodes did not instill confidence. I would go so far as to say the first two episodes of Arcane are downright BAD. Cliched, exposition-heavy dialogue, stereotypical plot, paint-by-numbers setting. They even do the bit where a character waits by a door just long enough to hear someone say something bad about them and then leaves before the statement ends and they turn it around into something positive. It’s rough going, but it reminds me of that old Chris Hastings bit, “I told you that story so I could tell you this one.” If Arcane has a problem, it’s that it has too much exposition hidden in the past, and it had to choose some place to start and some to portion out later, and it chose to start when Vi and Jinx started hating each other, since that’s, you know, the emotional core of the series and all. I didn’t really grasp HOW bad a time Powder/Jinx was having until the scene in episode three that I expected to be about her pouting in her room turned into a full-on paranoid delusional breakdown out of nowhere. Like, “Wow, this girl whose parents were murdered by the state for agitating for basic human rights is not alright.” You can’t take that for granted, right? It doesn’t usually go that hard in media. But it does set up that maybe the schizophrenia she exhibits for…well, for season one, didn’t come just from Silco and Vi. She isn’t getting help on multiple levels.

Speaking of levels, the main city of Piltover and the related slums known to its inhabitants as “Zaun” starting around halfway through are some sort of inherently uneven society. Three hundred years ago there was a war of some kind, afterwards the people who ended the war started a utopian idealist city to imagine new inventions and promote international cooperation, but it was built on the work of others, and over time the families of the founders became entrenched as a ruling class set apart from the people, corrupted by their power and uncaring about its populace, with only the long-lived Heimerdinger still operating by the lofty goals of the founding, but blind to the corruption around him. What is this city’s relation to the other nation-states from which it draws its rulers? Vague. Why did they think rule by nobility was wise? Unclear. Is any of this important? No. It’s all political backdrop for the real struggles between sisters, mentors, father figures, lovers, cops, criminals. That’s the meat.

Despite Jinx being the breakout star of the series, the first season focuses more on Vi, who has been out of the picture for so long she no longer knows the lay of the land. She wants revenge on Silco, she wants to save her sister, and she’s not quite ready to accept that these are contradictory goals. Jinx is straight-up the antagonist in this season, a woman driven mad by extremely poor decisions she made as a child, and encouraged not to deal with these issues by her extremely morally compromise surrogate father figure. I think there’s a lot of interesting ground that could have been covered with the character Silco that was left aside in the interests of time; this man considered himself a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, but when the chips were down, he chose to enrich himself with graft, corruption, and by selling drugs to his own people. His “nation of Zaun” is completely addicted to the Shimmer drug, shambling, half-dead addicts incapable of working, much less running an independent economy. This hypocrisy interested me, but was reduced to “Actually, Silco loves his adopted daughter he drove insane in his quest for a super weapon very much,” which is still complex and weird, but maybe a bit more typical. Heck, the first season was the SLOWER one, and it still felt like some important bits got sped past. Caitlyn and Vi make an alliance of convenience: Vi hates the cops for completely justified reasons, Caitlyn doesn’t trust anyone, except for the one guy no one should trust because he’s the one who has allowed corruption because he’s the chief of police, a job he got after being COMPLICIT IN THE MURDER OF THE PREVIOUS CHIEF OF POLICE, but I digress. Caitlyn and Vi run around the city, beat some people up, go to a brothel (Separately, without having sex with anyone) and at one point Vi tells Caitlyn she’s hot, and then when they get back to Piltover suddenly it’s all, “What about us?” Girl, who’s “us?” Did you forget she won’t go down on you in a jail cell until next season? I’m not saying I wasn’t rooting for them; again, Jinx is the poster girl but I think I liked Vi and Caitlyn the most, but their romance happened almost entirely offscreen. It’s no Catradora. Lumity. Bubbline. You know what I’m talking about. There’s none of that delicious will they/won’t they, enemies-to-lovers, tearful confession juiciness sickos like me crave. Also, if you have to ask yourself, “Am I betraying my parents by fucking a rich, landed gentry police officer,” girl the answer is yes, just move on.

I’ve talked about season one too long and I haven’t even mentioned Victor, Jayce, or Mel yet, but we got to move on because season two ramps this shit UP. I’ve complained about modern shows being too short to fit in all the little character episodes I liked, but when I say that I’m thinking of shows like Star Trek Deep Space Nine or Seinfeld or X-Files, I’m not thinking about stuff like, say, Heroes. Where those episodes sucked and the writers were bad at it. I’m insulting Arcane by even mentioning it in the same thought as Heroes, I know, but season two is a good example of the opposite solution: with too much to do and nine episodes to do it in, Arcane throws out all the chaff, and we’re left with the WHEAT, baby. Showing flashbacks or montages using still images is a common fallback for CGI television dating back to at least Transformers: Prime, but Arcane uses it to reinforce its aesthetic decisions, transmitting information quickly, informatively, and beautifully. In the third episode of season three, when Caitlyn goes through her parents’ archive, and we see the diagrams of how to gas the undercity…it’s beautifully done, and that’s before I mention her mother’s overdub talking about how the Kiramman family set up the ventilation system because “The citizens deserve to BREATHE,” like, what a perfectly self-important thing a rich person would say when they think they’re taking a moral stance. “People deserve to breathe,” uh yeah, that’s uh, true. Did you just figure that out? It’s a more succinct and chilling encapsulation of the disconnect that comes from an entrenched ruling class than anything in the first season, and if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it. The writing improved drastically.

The narrative also bent to focus around Jinx, often to the detriment of other characters, though never to the narrative. Ekko and Heimerdinger, set up as a revolutionary duo in season one, get taken off the board early and don’t come back until the end, but the underclass rebellion storyline doesn’t miss them. Due to the constant crackdowns to find Jinx, she becomes an icon of rebellion in spite of herself, instead living out a fantasy life in isolation, working through her trauma over her sister by adopting a nonverbal little girl off the streets (I have less charitably referred to this as “becoming a mom cures schizophrenia,” either interpretation is valid from the text, I think). Her struggle to live up to expectations, her reluctance to even do so, but also her ability to come to terms with unspoken emotions encapsulates the themes of forgiveness and, I don’t know, complicated entanglements? A lot of people are angry for a lot of reasons, and Jinx, as the person who started this whole thing by acting impulsively and not considering the feelings of others, suddenly finds herself in the position to say, “Hey, there is something we all want, and if we can just put things aside and work toward it, things might be alright.” She even gets Caitlyn to feel bad for her, and Jinx killed Caitlyn’s mom (bitch had it coming). Which makes it so disappointing that they went with a downer ending, where Jinx can’t forgive herself for her failures, even when everyone else can. She takes Caitlyn’s “we all have to pay for our crimes” line to heart, even though Jinx wasn’t around to hear that and Caitlyn and Vi get to go be lesbians on a boat somewhere (I was going to say no one pays for their crimes, but I guess all the other members of the ruling class did die, except maybe for that guy who was addicted to tattoo paint, we never saw what happened to him in the main timeline; he got brainwashed in that other timeline but his whole story with the cat lady disappeared halfway through season two).

And then there’s Ambessa. Ambessa is the anti-Jinx, the folly of the ruling class personified. She seems on the up-and-up, she talks a good game about making the hard decisions to protect her family and her state. It is, as usual, bullshit. She has the Putin problem, where she doesn’t distinguish between her state and herself, so anything that is a threat to her power, she covers up, she eradicates, until it’s a cancer eating away at the heart of her society. I never fully grasped what was up with the magic rose people who want to wrap their enemies up like Utena in Akio’s castle, but that’s not important. Ambessa will ruin her daughter’s life (twice), she will let her son die, she will tear civilization around her and export it to other dimensions, as long as she gets to feel safe—and she never feels safe. Everything she says drips with the tempting comfort of authoritarian militarism, corrupting young idealists into deadened soldiers. She’s scary, and it’s so satisfying when she gets her ass kicked. That whole final fight is satisfying; even as I enjoyed season two the most, I was still astonished to find myself physically cheering for every punch, saying, “Oh no, that character I don’t know the name of died? He seemed like a real one,” or, “Yeah, guy who’s name I don’t remember, get him!” It is a LITTLE convenient that Vi existing in a place was all it took for Caitlyn to go, “Wait, are we the baddies?” and end her alliance with Ambessa, and it’s VERY convenient that Caitlyn’s other girlfriend ended up being a traitor after she cheated on her with Vi, but it’s also a good emotional twist. We LIKED her, damn it. We liked seeing Mel twist reality to put her own bullet through her brain, too, but it’s still sad.

Alright, Jayce and Victor. Um. I don’t have anything to say about Jayce and Victor. Their story was pretty stereotypical, you know? Science gone too far, the only way to save people is to make them one mind, yeah I read the Expanse, I know who Ultron is, I’ve seen this. It was well done, and the boys are pretty if you’re into that (and a substantial portion of the fanbase is) but they were primarily plot elements to me. I like them, their plot is a well done example of the trope, but it’s tropey. We needed a monster to fight, a little bit of hubris for the politicians to manipulate. Another way for Piltover to fail Zaun.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time talking bad about a show I’m rating highly, huh? Fuck it, we like imperfections over here. They feel more real, they make the little victories feel better. Eighteen episodes in this show, and I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface, even though I dropped tons of spoilers. Once they cut off the fat and got the ball rolling, it definitely deserves its stellar reputation. Just maybe skip to episode three.

5. Peacemaker (Season 2): One of my great regrets since I started doing these reviews is that, in 2022, I FORGOT about Peacemaker season 1. For the first couple of years, I tried to do all my reviews at the end of the year, and Peacemaker was so early in that year I thought I’d already reviewed it in 2021 and it didn’t occur to me that I was wrong until after I’d posted everything. Because, while it wouldn’t have displaced the final season of Saul, that was a good eight episodes of television; John Cena acted his ass off, the whole cast was on fire (I’ve only seen Danielle Brooks in two things but she’s an amazing actress) and it definitely should have made the top ten.

So now it’s back, in a very changed landscape. Peacemaker’s first season was a little side project James Gunn made because he had fun working with Cena on The Suicide Squad and wanted to flesh out this broken, egotistical character and maybe make him grow a little. Take this monster and figure out why his moral code was so broken, how he could do such horrible things; get to the hypocritical core and push him a bit. Three years later, James Gunn is running the whole DC film slate. Peacemaker isn’t a sideshow, it’s a lynchpin of DC’s whole strategy. The character I first heard about on a blog making fun of his hat for looking like a toilet seat IS A MAJOR WELL-KNOWN SUPERHERO WHO IS IN MORTAL KOMBAT. Could the fun, heartfelt little show it was survive this?

Well, for an episode there, it looked like maybe not. The first episode had some cute moments with the “Justice Gang,” fleshing out their take on Maxwell Lord (more accurate than the Pedro Pascal version, and if we could get away from the guy who snapped Ted Kord’s neck and always looks like he just snorted a line, that would be great…yes, I know that version is currently carving an omega into his head in the excellent New Gods maxiseries, but I can play favorites in two different ways, okay?) and letting Nathan Fillion do some schtick, but the plot was stretched a bit too thin, and the orgy was unnecessary, falling back on the moralistic trope of mindless sex as indicative of depression without thinking through the logistics of if it made any sense for that to happen. I DID, however, enjoy their slight retcon of the season one finale to fit the new, post-Superman continuity; the most DC Comics-accurate way of handling things, honestly. I saw some people getting all up in arms about how “disrespectful” it was to just pretend the story happened the same way but a slightly different person was there, and I must conclude anyone pissed off by that is a fake fan. Like, tell me you’ve never read a DC Comic without telling me you’ve never read a DC Comic, you know? Do you even know what the Crisis on Infinite Earths was? Have you heard of Zero Hour? Tell me what you think Jason Todd’s origin is. What’s Hawkworld, you ignoramus? You ever hear of Superboy-Prime?

Anyway, after that uninspiring start, the season did something I’ve only really seen Adventure Time do well recently, and jumped into a multiverse story. However, they did not take the easy path (the path yours truly thought would be so cool when he thought about it in high school, until everyone started doing it for real and it was super boring) and use this to fit in a bunch of well-trod “teases” for the comics or bring out classic superhero actors for an easy paycheck. Instead, Gunn explored the “grass is greener” concept, giving Peacemaker an easy out: what if there was a world where all his problems, all the repercussions for the horrible things he did, just didn’t exist? Where everything was great? Where, most importantly, his alternate universe counterpart didn’t appreciate everything he had and was throwing it all away? Well, he could do that better. He’s a more centered, stable man. He could just disappear, and everyone who hated him, like the father of that guy he killed who is out for revenge, could be rid of him, and he gets something better. Wouldn’t that be nice? Doesn’t he deserve that?

Now, he did kill his alternate universe counterpart, but that was self-defense, and he wasn’t trying to kill him. But nobody needs to know about that!

Not to give too much away—and there is a slight comics connection to the alternate universe, sure, but it’s not spelled out—but the real meat of the series comes in the middle part, where there’s no cameos, nothing that ties to Superman, just our title character making bad decisions and his friends trying to help him lessen the consequences of same. Cena portrays a man who knows what he’s doing is wrong, but feels like he’s been pushed into making the least worst decision—not rationally, based completely on his own inability to fess up to his prior crimes, but out of an entitlement. “I’ve improved! I’m owed something! Why does it keep slipping away from me?” Barry Berkman, but he actually improved, instead of just spiraling deeper. I mean, he still spirals deeper, but that isn’t the only thing he does. Of course, Adam West always warned us of the lure of easy living. We, the audience, can see that there’s something sinister lurking behind the alternate universe—because we’re genre savvy. I am proud to say that I figured it out after episode three. Peacemaker is too blinded by getting everything he wanted, he doesn’t stop to question the little things until they’re pointed out to him. Who among us can’t say similar things haven’t happened? Worse, can we really say we’re aware of all the suffering propping up the structures of our own lives and success? Well, not to delve too deep into it, but I didn’t guess the whole twist; Robert Patrick had less to do this season than the last, mostly because he wasn’t the main villain this time, instead being a good father who cared about his son. But it was also a neat swerve to have him be so blinded by his love, by his own personal decisions, that he couldn’t see how much his own children bought into the negative ideologies that surrounded him until it was too late for him to do anything about it. I would have liked to see more of that, and more repercussions of this storyline, instead of the rather abrupt left turn the series took into “setting up the next thing” in its final episode. Sure, it followed logically from what came before, but switching back to Rick Flag Sr. and away from the other universe pulled the emphasis away from Peacemaker’s journey. Yes, Peacemaker still had an emotional epiphany at the end, yes, his friends made a momentous choice and stood by him instead of their corrupt employers, and yes, it all ended with them coming back together only for it to be derailed by a cliffhanger, but the cliffhanger was based around Rick Flag’s story instead of Peacemaker’s. I wanted to see a rematch of the fight in the seventh episode; instead, we got something that felt more like a behind-the-scenes peek of the next Superman movie. It wasn’t as abrupt and eye-rolling as the perfunctory teases Marvel Studios has been boring me with lately, but the Argus plot didn’t mesh with the Peacemaker’s emotional journey plot in a way that made the final episode of the season feel at home with the rest. That doesn’t detract from what the rest of the season accomplished, but it is a negative effect of the rebooted DC Universe, and I have to hope we won’t see TOO much of the same going forward.

I am surprised Tim Meadows got out of the season alive and on the side of the angels, I thought for sure he was going to get it once I figured out the twist. He and Michael Rooker were basically just there to make wild jokes as comic relief, but there were enough hints at a deeper, moral character for Agent Fleury that I’m happy to see more of him. And Rick Flag, Sr., certainly showed some of the moral flaws we saw in Creature Commandos (are you…hitting on your son’s ex, General?), but I have to wonder about how FAR he had fallen by the end. I was wondering if, perhaps, who we were seeing wasn’t Rick Flag at all, but that last cliffhanger was definitely a Flag move…Gunn has been talking like there won’t be a season three, like these characters will be used in other projects as needed, but come on. We’re going to need to spend some more time with Christopher Smith to get him out of THAT tight spot. Right?

4. Common Side Effects: If you’d asked me which Adult Swim show about a miracle drug that aired this year was the better one, I wouldn’t have picked the one written by the guy who worked on the Office.

Well, had you phrased it as “A number of the same group of people who worked on Scavengers Reign,” that might have gone over better. Although it’s not the SAME people. I would have still had questions.

But here we are.

Common Side Effects follows former high school lab partners Marshall Cuso, who has grown up to be a complete environmentalist nut living in the woods and arguing against pharmaceutical companies, and Frances Applewhite, who is working for one of those big pharmaceutical companies so she can afford to take care of her mother, who has dementia. Frances is dissatisfied with her job, which takes all of her energy and attention for a boss who doesn’t seem to care (and also is voiced by Mike Judge; there’s like three characters in this show that all sound like Hank Hill in different ways, and that’s because they are) and has a live-in boyfriend that she doesn’t seem to like very much but keeps around because he’s easy, but he keeps trying to push her into something more serious but is moving way too fast and weaponizes the language of acceptance and empowerment against her when she pushes back, and I’m not sure if he’s doing it on purpose or thinks he’s being supportive. I suppose it’s up to the viewer. And Marshall, well, he’s on the run from a secretive billionaire with tendrils all over the world that’s trying to kill him to wipe out the evidence of a powerful cure-all Marshall discovered in the wilderness in Peru; a mysterious blue mushroom that grows on the runoff from medicine factories and can even heal deadly wounds in seconds flat. Marshall wants to bring this to the world and make illness a thing of the past. Frances agrees, because it could solve her money problems. And so these two naïve idiots set the dominoes in motion without truly understanding the consequences.

Common Side Effects is a smart, funny, thoughtful show that somehow manages to even-handedly cover all sides of the “Big Pharma” debate (I admit, I was worried about a show promoting alternative medicine considering everything going on in the world right now, but Common Side Effects does a great job of showing the up and downsides of the medical industry and the alternative) while also exploring an amazingly original cast of oddballs you can’t help but love, in the style of Breaking Bad or Orange is the New Black. Even Rick, Frances’s boss, won me over by the end—I NEED a gif of Rick drinking vodka on the golf course, it will be very useful (Adult Swim has provided two separate gifs of this moment, but I need both parts together). Even Jonas Backstein, one of the two people seriously in the running for the title of “main antagonist,” has a reason—a justification, possible after the fact, but still a reason—for engaging in a worldwide conspiracy of murder and fraud, and a pretty defensible one, when it comes down to it. Each character is so masterfully crafted, so full of life, you can accept them as someone who exists in this world. I certainly didn’t expect Rusty to hang around for the whole season, but he sure did. And keep in mind, this isn’t like Scavengers Reign where everyone looked like normal people, but cartoons. These are cartoon characters; they all have big heads and eyes with tiny, tiny, mouths, like someone did a “realistic South Park” drawing and made a whole show of it. But they MOVE like real people; the big faces and eyes are a lesson learned from anime about expressiveness and emotion, but with a fluidity not seen outside of, like, Akira, and uniquely inventive expressions one associates with live-action. I throw around the words “gorgeous animation” a lot on here, but know that I mean it every time. There’s some master-grade work on here, both in the “real world” segments and the crazy mushroom trips everyone has when they come back from near death, and they deserve to be applauded for it.

Yeah, those crazy mushroom trips. Because of course! You’re doing a show about the DEA trying to shut down a guy selling mushrooms as unregulated medicine out of a trailer in the woods in North Carolina, of COURSE there have to be crazy mushroom trips! Those reek of “these guys worked on Scavengers Reign,” with the creeping shapes and the tiny little men, like the Tockles from Dragon Quest XI. They’re amusing and ominous and I don’t trust the mushroom and here’s the part where I start speculating wildly so maybe stop reading and watch the show first.

I do not trust this mushroom. I don’t trust the miracle drug. I don’t trust the people who took it, and I certainly don’t trust the people who haven’t taken it. I don’t trust Marshall. This guy says he’s nonviolent, and in the moment you think, “Well, yeah, I know Marshall, he's not violent, he’s looking to help people, people are chasing him.” But then Marshall is on the phone with his brother asking him to, “Just do this for ME, just this once.” And I’m like, dude, your brother has done nothing in this show BUT help you. I mean, okay, he sold you out to the DEA, but you don’t know that. All you know is he helped your turtle and got maybe forty bucks out of it. Why are you yelling him because he’s reluctant to break the law for you? And what do you mean, “Nonviolent,” you killed a pigeon to make a point? Did Jonas fake those internet posts, as everyone assumed?

Does Marshall even remember who he was before the mushroom?

These are questions season one does not answer. These are questions I will hold until season two arrives. Because for ONCE a show I’m excited about actually hasn’t been cancelled by the time I write this shit. And that’s it, that’s all I have to say, no more spoilers for you. Go watch it. See what you think.

I didn’t even talk about the DEA Agents, they’re great, you’ll love them. Instant breakout characters.

3. DanDaDan: I watched the first two episodes of this with friends last year, in one of those hangouts that just devolve into “Hey so…what’s…on streaming.” Haven’t had many of those since Johnny moved out, so that was nice. I wasn’t in the mood to start a new show at the time, and I’m generally wary of new anime in these trying, isekai times. Although, I suppose DanDaDan switches things up by having a title that explains nothing, instead of one that explains too much. I enjoyed the episodes despite myself, but I was nervous: clearly, Momo the cool “gyaru” girl was the focus and the most powerful and intelligent character, but Okarun (not his real name, remind me to come back to that if I forget) had the iconic transformation and superspeed powers geared towards fighting, and the first episode established a status quo where Momo had to hold those powers in check, so her abilities would be weakened by having to control his. I could see the same thing that happened to Bulma in Dragon Ball, Fuko in Flame of Recca, Misa in Macross, or any number of cool ladies in anime happening: the narrative would focus on Okarun growing as a person, and Momo, forced to be around him, would be in awe of his progression and fall inevitably in love, despite being more together and having a closer link to the fantastic elements of the plot. I settled in to watch the show in October, ready for mild disappointment.

I am extremely happy to say I was wrong.

Circling back to the premise, DanDaDan begins one day when highschool cool-but-not-popular girl Momo Ayase finally breaks up with her deadbeat boyfriend. She laments that there are no more men like her favorite actor, Ken Takakura (the first man to portray Golgo 13!). Pouting away from her unsympathetic friends, Momo happens to see a bunch of kids picking on some nerd, and she steps in to help him out. Said nerd proceeds to accost her with UFO conspiracy theories. This turns into an argument about whether aliens or ghosts are real, and they challenge each other to go to sites where aliens and ghosts are rumored to appear. So, she gets abducted by aliens and he gets his dick bit off by a ghost. Tale as old as time.

However, Momo comes from a long line of priestesses, so being captured by aliens activates her psychic powers, and of course, if you’re bitten by a creature of the night, you become one of them, so the nerd becomes a superfast ghost monster, who ends up helping her escape the aliens. The new friends unite and swear to get his dick back from the ghost. Oh, and also the nerd is named Ken Takakura, but the mental disconnect is so distressing for Momo that she nicknames him “Okarun” for her own sanity.

This is the point that troubled me, as mentioned before: Momo has to spend the first few episodes using all her power to hold Okarun’s ghost side in check, and I assumed that would be status quo for the entire series. Fortunately, creator Yukinobu Tatsu was smart enough to realize he couldn’t just have Okarun and Momo living together for who knows how long, so they quickly resolve the ghost dick problem, giving Okarun control over his transformations into “Turbo” mode (so named after the ghost, Turbo Granny, who is of course turned into a cute, obnoxious mascot for marketing purposes). However, before Okarun got his dick back, Turbo Granny hid his balls somewhere in Japan, and they are now imbued with her ghost energy and can give powers to other people. Heck, a search for magic balls? That’s as classic anime as you can get! Together, Momo and Okarun become a kind of superpowered, high school X-Files team and, contrary to my expectations, Momo is clearly in charge; Okarun saying, “Ayase-san, are you a genius?” and Momo replying, “I know I am!” becomes a common refrain. Okarun’s superpowers are useful for high-octane fight scenes, but like the best parts of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Momo’s quick thinking usually saves the day in the end—I think the only fight scenes where Momo doesn’t get the final strike are the minor training sequences she isn’t in, like when Okarun, Aira, and Turbo Granny fight the Beethoven ghost and his composer posse—but I get ahead of myself. Obviously, our heroes accumulate a group of little weirdos around them. I do worry that they’re accumulating this group TOO quickly; Momo and Okarun are great main characters, and they do need a few supporting characters around them for a true ensemble cast, but within the first season they already have Momo’s hot grandma Seiko, Turbo Granny stuck in a lucky cat statue, Aira the popular girl who’s really a giant bitch and gains powers from a ghost haunting her as well, Peeny-Weeny the mantis alien and his son Chiquitita, Taro and Hana the haunted anatomical models who are in love, and Momo’s elementary school crush Jiji, who didn’t have powers yet but come on, you knew it was coming. I considered that Momo/Okarun/Aira/Jiji might be the main, core group, forming a more complex simulacrum of the “stable square” pairing of Lum/Ataru/Shinobu/Mendo that drove the best plots in Urusei Yatsura, but within the next season they added Manjiro the priest, the Hayashi rock band (everyone’s headbanging animation is amazing), Kinta the giant robot nerd, and a green-haired alien babe (sorry, green-haired alien babe whose name I could look at on Wikipedia but don’t want to, I have two of those in my heart, and that’s not counting green-skinned anime babes either—or Samus Aran, if we’re talking Justin Bailey-style). Despite what I just said about Urusei Yatsura having a stable core of four characters, that series, and the other two Rumiko Takahashi series I’ve read, suffered from cramming in too many characters at the end, and I worry that DanDaDan might be speedrunning that mistake. Too many characters are sticking around with the main cast; sometimes, you just need someone to leave and never come back. Granted, very few of the people I mentioned are MAIN characters; most of them pop in and out as needed, and of course the villains are allowed to die. But I feel like introducing too many new characters may distract from the real standout feature of DanDaDan: for the first time I can remember in an ostensibly “shonen” action anime/manga, the main couple actually has ROMANTIC CHEMISTRY.

(Gurren Lagann doesn’t count)

I say this as someone who would not have watched this show if there weren’t ghosts and aliens in it: sometimes I get disappointed when the ghosts and aliens interrupt Momo and Okarun just hanging out around the school. I loved, loved, LOVED the sequence of missed chances and awkward moments in episode 5 (the wonderfully titled, "Like, Where Are Your Balls?!") that ends with our heroes absent-mindedly smacking into each other with such force they almost crack their teeth, and end up frantically yelling about how they weren’t kissing to Momo’s friends Muko and Miko (who respond, “Wow, they get along great,” and rightfully so). The scene in the car where Okarun accidentally puts his hand on Momo’s, and pulls away, only for her to tell him to put it back and tease him by playing with his hand while coyly looking out the window, only for them both to about jump out of their skin when Seiko talks to them. The scene after they kill the Loch Ness Monster actually let’s not talk about that one. In the nurse’s office, where their (weirdly dominatrix-coded???) school nurse asks them and Aira if they’re being bullied due to the odd aftermath of an alien fight and they all have to deny everything. Of course, I hated when Tatsu resorted to the old trope of the woman walking in on the man in a compromising situation with another woman and freaking out when Okarun fell on top of Aira, but I loved how they resolved it with Momo calmly giving Okarun a chance to explain, and Okarun having to admit he was embarrassed to be working out to try to impress her, and the two of them swearing to be honest with each other from then on. And I loved, loved, LOVED the sequence in the final storyline where Momo goes to Okarun’s class to give him new information that could lead to his last missing ball, and she is accosted by the class president. Said class president was in one shot of the closing credits all season (along with Kinta, who didn’t show up until right before the very same episode I’m talking about, but at least I could see from episode thumbnails that he was going to show up again later) and I was absolutely fascinated by her introduction, suddenly acting like she was “standing up” for Okarun and talking about Momo as if she was bullying him, and of course our Momo isn’t going to put up with THAT shit, and Okarun got embarrassed and faded into the background. I liked the follow-up when Okarun apologized for not standing up to the class president better, and Momo responded like, “No problem, I know we’re cool” or something, but after the intense sequence of the backstory of Aira’s ghost (OH MAN I almost forgot, yeah, the origin of “Acrobatic Silky” in episode seven is absolutely GUTTING, even as it relies on tropes I’ve seen elsewhere in Japanese fiction, it’s done masterfully and stands out as unusual compared to the rest of the content in the series, even compared to the origin of “Evil Eye,” the ghost possessing Jiji) I was looking forward to maybe a flashback to the class president having a crush on Okarun or something, but never having the nerve to talk to him, and then her jealousy causing her to misinterpret Okarun’s friendship with Momo as an unequal relationship—I could picture Okarun’s confrontation with her in my mind, something less violent but more emotionally devastating than him standing up to the other kids in his class when they repeated the rumor Aira spread about Momo in episode six. Instead, we get…another sequence where Momo sees Okarun in a compromising situation as the season-ending cliffhanger. Well, that’s a little disappointing. She did blow up that house while Aira was inside, so I can only assume Aira’s dead now.

I’m kidding, I know Aira’s not dead, but that chick crazy. I think Aira’s infatuation with Okarun reads a bit too much like harem anime “We don’t have to explain it, you just have to be horny” stuff, but that could just be because the relationship between Momo and Okarun is so much more developed and interesting; they have time. And I’ve heard some people complain about the depictions of sexual assault in this series, which I suppose is valid, but we’re playing with horror tropes. Momo is going to be probed by aliens because aliens be probin’. It’s less defensible in the season two opener when the creepy old men assault her in the bathhouse, but I would argue that is a common trope in small-town horror and therefore open for recontextualization in this pastiche. Heck, the whole point of that storyline was the terror of a self-righteous family accumulating power to themselves both to protect themselves and justify the horrifying actions (two centuries of human sacrifice) they’ve taken to themselves—the family frequently repeats that they alone have saved their fellow citizens from a volcano by feeding innocent families to a FUCKING SANDWORM THAT SHOOTS SUICIDE BEAMS, and of course there’s no other way, so their crimes are justified. In fact, more than justified. You should be thanking them! Thanking them by covering up their many crimes. That sort of realism-derived horror benefits from depicting the actual terrible things people DO in those kinds of situations, I think; but that’s a touchy subject and I won’t press it. What I will press—although I am perhaps not the best person to argue for this, as I’m as much a part of the problem as anyone—is that I think DanDaDan benefits from embracing sexual and sexualized content. Let me be clear, I’m not calling for a return to the days of “fanservice” where even kids cartoons like, I don’t know, Fighting Foodons would go out of their way to have sequences where, just off the top of my head, the big-titty ninja girl would fall into a trap in a compromising position, those can stay segregated away in the harem isekai horny jail forever, thank you. But we live in a world where the last James Bond film barely had a sex scene in it, and the hero spent most of the film angsting about how he shoulda’ been a FATHER or whatever. “Everyone’s beautiful and nobody’s horny,” as someone put it. Well, maybe I don’t need to see these cartoon teenagers in their underwear (or less) quite so often, but I appreciate that they’re willing to go there. And they’re doing it in a way that is, inconceivably, organic to the story, justified, and played straight—there’s no “Bo-o-oing” sound effects, no quick zooms, no screaming “KYaaaa!” as the boys ogle, no nosebleeds. The aftereffects of Go Nagai have no place in DanDaDan; this is the respectful sexual content, or something close to it, that people requested ten, fifteen years ago that was too complex for Hollywood to grasp so they just shut the whole thing down. Bravo, DanDaDan. Keep it up.

Like, seriously, keep it up; if this becomes the “everyone loves Okarun show because we need to stretch out him hooking up with Momo until the end,” I’m going to get bored. And don’t make the One-Punch Man mistake of stretching out the fight scenes forever. Look at Mob Psycho 100, if anything: a strong core cast surrounded by fun recurring characters who can hop in and out as needed. Let Okarun and Momo become an official couple! Honestly, they basically are already, there’s still plenty of drama potential there. But that humanity, that honest humanity, is already heads and shoulders beyond the personal relationships of so many other pieces of media. Just keep that, and DanDaDan will continue to be a winner.

2. Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake (Season 2): When I wrote my review of Fionna and Cake Season One, I assumed I was writing the finale on this series. TWO revivals of a cartoon show? And this one so obviously a comment on moving on, not getting hung up on the past and creating something new? Even though I think I knew they were picked up for season two at the time, everything hinted to me that the first season was planned to be the last. How do you follow that?

As usual for Adventure Time, they did it in a way I didn’t expect. I read some comments by showrunner Adam Muto where he talked about the dichotomy of Fionna and Cake, how they set up the mundane world of the “Fionnaverse” for lack of a better term, and that they really wanted to do a story about Fionna and her friends having a mundane adventure with low-level stakes, but they also assumed that wouldn’t get greenlit. So instead, they looked at the fan-favorite character of Huntress Wizard. I am a fan of Huntress Wizard, but I admit there’s very little to go on in the original series. She had been a background character for most of the show, and only became important and distinguished herself in seasons nine and ten, played by Jenny Slate. They were clearly building her up for something in her few spotlight episodes, hinting at a crush on Finn, but were cut short when the series was cancelled. Fionna season one kept this going by having Finn mention her by name, and having alternate universe counterparts of her help Fionna on her quest, including heavily implying that Farmworld Finn’s dead wife had been an alternate Huntress Wizard. I was excited to see more of her, and how her story would intersect with Fionna and Cake’s.

There were a few disappointments right off the bat: the problems the team had in season one getting actors back recurred: Kumail Nanjiani was able to work out whatever miscommunication happened with his agency and return as Prismo, although that character appears far less than in season one; but Huntress Wizard, Marshall Lee, and Gary Prince were all recast. Cosmic Owl was recast, too, but his traditional actor has the excuse of being dead. I was surprised they got Donald Glover back last season, but I was disappointed by the loss of Jenny Slate as Huntress; Ashly Burch is no slouch, but her voice for Huntress is more recognizable as other characters she played, and it took me a while to adjust to hearing it from this character. If I have a second complaint, it’s that the stories of Huntress Wizard and Fionna didn’t so much intertwine as repeatedly intersect. Whereas, in the first season, Fionna and Simon’s quests aligned, each pushing the other forward across multiple realities, searching for that one mythical place where they could feel “home” again, here Fionna has her thing she wants—to run a fundraiser so her friends could buy some property—and Huntress has hers—to make sure Finn doesn’t die from a wound he received in the first season. While both women’s thematic character arcs are very similar, they often act at cross-purposes; half of the problems Fionna faces in her quest come from Huntress disrupting her life in pursuit of her own goals. The other half come from Fionna just being a mess with unmedicated depression. This isn’t bad, per se, and both characters do some real in-your-feelings growing over the course of the ten episodes, but it does detract from the cohesion of the work. In a regular season of old-school Adventure Time, which focused on single-episode stories that, taken together, told an overarching story, that might be fine, but this is a modern streaming show with ten-episode plots built for bingeing, even though this show released weekly. Despite the high quality of the writing and art, it didn’t pull me in as much as the first season.

I wonder if that’s on me, more than the show itself. Looking back, I don’t think I understood quite HOW MUCH Adventure Time meant to me until it went away and came back. It provided quality television every week or so…then every month or so…then in special bursts whenever Cartoon Network felt like dumping some episodes for the fans. But it seemed like it would always be there, until it wasn’t. Perhaps, since I just rewatched the whole thing last year, and since I know more is coming, it feels less special now than it will later. I definitely can’t fault the artistry; each episode starts with a special aside, providing some backstory on Huntress Wizard, or supporting characters, or the cosmogony of the Adventure Time multiverse, each in a different style, like storybooks. The origin of the majestic and powerful Heart of the Forest, from which all Green Magic flows, is told with silly cartoon sketches making funny faces and narrated by Andy Merrill in his Brak voice. Or, we get a silent cartoon about Huntress’s tragic past, or a tale of two brothers that you don’t fully understand until the end. Or you get the final episode of the season, which started with Finn doing some Adventure Time stuff to help his mom. It’s all great, and shows the amazing versatility of the series.

I was also pleased to see the return of some good old fashioned Adventure Time dark humor. Huntress giving the Farmworld kid false hope and dashing it completely by accident in the final episode was ROUGH. Heck, we spent so much time in the more “realistic” (hey, “more” is relative) Fionnaverse that the very arch and cartoonish dialogue when Huntress begins her battle with Witch Wizard in the space between universes felt like coming home—at least, before they started cussing one another out (love that epic double-deuce from HW, of course). That episode, the next-to-last, “The Worm and his Orchard,” felt like the first point the narrative focused, which I do want to attribute to the return of Rebecca Sugar, but a lot of people work on these episodes and I don’t want to dismiss any of their efforts. Sugar definitely wrote that song, though. And the return of a classic character, well, I wasn’t expecting that but they handled it deftly. The final two episodes finally gave me the feeling I wanted all season, even as it maybe rushed through Fionna’s resolution too quickly, but that comes with the territory. It did feel like, despite whose name is in the title, Huntress Wizard and Finn got the satisfying resolution while Fionna had to rush through hers with a little breaking and entering. Speaking of, they tried to recreate the Simon/Marceline plot in the Fionnaverse, but barely dedicated any time to it; compare that to Princess Bubblegum’s subtle arc as she takes control of Finn’s recovery and makes medical decisions for everyone, dismissing any suggestion that came from anyone else out of hubris—which, honestly, reflects Fionna and Huntress’s arcs, even as they didn’t draw attention to it. Bubblegum has long been my favorite character (dethroning BMO after he got extra crazy) and seeing her not only fall back into bad habits but her breakdown when she REALIZES what she did touched me more than Marshall and Gary’s plots, even though they’re more main characters for this iteration and they had such a touching couple-episode plot last season. And then there’s Fennel, who I was worried about for a while but seems like she’s going to avoid her inspiration’s arc…for now. And Baby Finn just disappeared halfway through, but that’s probably in character for a Finn. Fionna is a bad guardian.

Like, it’s still Adventure Time, it’s still one of the best television programs ever made. It’s artistic and thoughtful and emotional and unique. But it didn’t resonate with me this year as much as it did in other years. Still more than most, and I may like it more as time goes on. But, with regret, I can’t talk myself into giving it the number one spot.

But always remember: everything looks bigger on TV. Especially the cast of Cheers.

Oh yeah, and how about that cliffhanger, huh? You get OUT OF HERE, mannnnnnnnnnnn

1. NEW Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt:

So.

Hm.

How did we get…here?

Going into this year, I was fairly certain: this would be the year my #1 would be an anime. It had to be Lazarus, right? A new Shinichiro Watanabe, when have I not loved those? I did worry that I was getting my expectations too high, of course, and it turned out that I…had. For a moment, I thought GQuuuuuuX might clinch it, but well…Common Side Effects was phenomenal, but this list has never truly been about the most technically or aesthetically superior series, and while I did grab me and leave me wanting more, Side Effects didn’t affect me emotionally to the level that the previous years’ winners (or, heck, the runners up) had, so while that show has room to grow and get me later, it felt like a compromise win. I re-watched She-Ra and Beast Wars and I love those shows to death, AND they affected me more than Side Effects; but rewatches are cheating, and I’ve always left them off after I didn’t have enough time to include them back when I was doing this whole project in a week back in 2020.

And so, with that in mind, shortly after the end of GQuuuuuuX, I sat down to watch a follow-up to an anime I had put off for over a decade, only watched because I respected the creator for other works, and had mildly enjoyed despite myself once I finally watched it two years ago.

New Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt picks up five minutes after we left off fifteen years ago and lifts off like a rocket from there. This is Trigger doing Trigger, immaculately crafted frames that either whip by or twist around the image, with consciously cheap sliding frames and computer tricks right next to the most gorgeous animation you’ve ever seen, all at breakneck pace. The cliffhanger is resolved through a number of sight gags I’m not sure you could even do on Japanese television, including an uncharacteristically subtle joke about “eating pussy” that is buried under five different completely unsubtle sight gags so it’ll take you a minute to catch up (and a Batman gag hidden on elevator doors, for those of us who pay attention). In the process, they also deconstruct some of my least favorite choices with how they ended the first season by kind of slut-shaming Panty, which they lampshade by giving Brief a crisis of conscience over whether his feelings for Panty were tied to her attitude or to the person underneath that sends him into a spiral of despair that visually evokes Rey’s personal journey into herself in Last Jedi. Also, they make the best decision they possibly could and immediately co-opt the Daemon sisters into allies against Ghosts, instead of being supporting villains. But don’t worry, this is Panty and Stocking: being friends doesn’t mean the Daemons and Anarchy sisters don’t still hate each other, now they’re just arguing in the same house, every day. This is a win! For the viewers, I mean.

The writing drastically improved from the first season; one of the major writers for the original doesn’t seem to have contributed as much to this one, but it could also just be creators Imaishi and Wakabayashi having grown in the fifteen-year hiatus. The jokes are still crude and sexual—it’s still Panty and Stocking, after all—but there’s less gross-out-just-to-gross-you-out humor and more focused, thematic humor; I think a good example would be the third segment of the third episode, “F*ck & Furious,” which is a straightforward Fast & Furious parody except it’s about sperm trying to get around Panty’s birth control devices. Or, one I enjoyed even more, episode five’s first segment, “Rolling Sisters,” where a sushi-making ghost causes a hurricane while Scanty and Kneesocks are using the bathroom, and they must solve the problem while struggling to keep their decency intact. And yes, I said three segments back there—usually there are three instead of the two segments of most episodes of the original show, so the episodes move faster, allowing jokes to hit one after another to keep you laughing without struggling to fill an eleven-minute block. Does this joke only deserve five minutes? It only gets five minutes, but we’ll need ten for our Mandalorian/Cobra-Kai parody (Nin Djarin is such a good pun). They really double down on pop culture parodies in this one, even more than the original, but the execution is more varied and subjects broader—right off the bat in the second segment of the second episode, “The Bodycard” is such a pitch-perfect Magic the Gathering/Yu-Gi-Oh! parody that I immediately showed the gag cards to all my friends. Even in episodes that aren’t directly movie parodies, they fit in wonderful gags wherever they can, like the gates of Heaven being guarded by Judge Dredd doppelgangers, and Hell by Judge Death.

But a truly successful parody must come from love of the subject matter, as well as derision; fortunately, New PS&G has us covered there, too. Episode 23 goes full Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as Garterbelt hosts parodies of eighties science fiction (“The Sex from Another World”) and old fantasy anime (“Lord of the Kokan the Great”), the latter of which goes the extra mile in recreating that “this is the only rip anyone has made of this anime” feel by being completely in a nonsense language, subtitled in a nonsense language, with all on-screen text in Viking runes—THAT is committing to a bit. I was also extremely impressed with the slasher-film parody in episode five, “Bitch Serial Killer!”, which features one of the most gruesome murders I have ever had the misfortunate of conceiving, and it’s all in a weird adult anime that looks like Kim Possible had a baby with Jet Set Radio. And there’s episode nine’s “Six Hundred Sixty-Six Candles,” a pitch-perfect John Hughes sendup about Kneesocks’s birthday that somehow manages to be completely wholesome while also including a giant undead turtle who eats people (and a reference to “Baby One More Time” for good measure). And speaking of wholesome, how about “Pet Cematary Hills” in episode four, a bittersweet animal episode that humanizes our beloved sex fiend Panty through her love for a ghost cat she names after a sex toy? And speaking of episode four…

Oh my God, the third segment, “Shoot for Yesterday!” Has there ever been an episode of anything more perfectly targeted directly at me? What starts as a sendup of the Hannah-Barbera Fantastic Four and the Marvel Super Hero Show from the sixties (with also a weird joke about an alligator for some reason—animator Brianne Drouhard guessed it might have to do with the Sanrio character Big Challenges, and the show’s fan wiki concurs) slowly morphs into an outright celebration of the career of Jack Kirby, with explosive imagination and a cosmic scope unparallelled in the series. No joke, ten minutes of this anime was a better ode to Jack Kirby than the Fantastic Four movie that came out the SAME MONTH; they go from mocking the corny Hannah-Barbera stock sound effects to that same sound sending chills down your spine at the end. Add in jokes about Mother Boxes, New-God-essification, a Silver Surfer parody called Baywatcher, a cowboy who looks like Serifan, shoutouts to Klaw, and a straight-up crib from the climax of “The Glory Boat!”…just, well done all around, my favorite single episode of anything this year by far.

I could go on—their pitch-perfect parody of those hackneyed musical episodes in "Fa Fa F*ck", which is somehow the SAME EPISODE as the throwbacks to Trigger’s early series Inferno Cop, “Break the Internet” and “The Silence of the Internets”…but what’s the actual plot? Oh ho, they have us there, too—if the Daemon sisters and demons aren’t the enemy anymore, who else could they fight but self-righteous, “moral” angels? Enter the “Poly-Poly Bros,” Polyester and Polyeurethane, those vile, gen-Z, brainrot-spouting, union member, TWINKS. Panty and Stocking’s cousins through their father’s brother Ramie, the Poly-Poly Bros don’t show up too often, but are usually manipulating things behind the scenes to shame the Anarchy sisters and enhance the brothers’ own reputation at the expense of others; although, their inherent disdain for anything demonic does undermine their attempts to gain information from Scanty and Kneesocks on more than one occasion. Don’t worry, though; the girls have their own new ally in the weapons manufacturer/film connoisseur Gunsmith Bitch, which is definitely an anime reference I didn’t expect but is nevertheless appreciated (although only her headquarters matches the appearance of the source material, Gunsmith Cats, a wonderful anime based on a fun but flawed manga). The series conclusion, as with the first show, comes on a bit fast, and requires some continuity massaging—what has up until now been portrayed as a distant heaven largely based on common American conceptions of God and the afterlife, with a smattering of specifically Catholic iconography, suddenly shifts to a more Greek-influenced polytheistic cosmogony where gods constantly jockey for power amongst themselves. It DOES make you better understand how Panty and Stocking got to be so…hedonistic, let’s say, as you can’t help but hold their parents in disdain for their hypocrisy, especially considering what God did to Panty in the aforementioned "Fa Fa F*ck", punishing her with a device that would cut off her tongue every time she cursed (except when she sang, you see). I’m willing to let it slide though, both because of how badass the finale was, and how topical (“Any cliffhangers,” you ask? Well, let’s just say I’m looking forward to laughing my ass off in 2040).

Because, look. New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt isn’t like the other shows that have made the top spot. It never left me on the verge of tears, I never found myself on the edge of my seat, none of the twists felt like physical pain, and it wasn’t even close to sending me into a three-week depressive spiral as a year’s worth of repressed emotions suddenly let loose. But it did make me laugh. Hard. Every week, for twelve weeks. Twelve weeks in the summer of 2025.

Radical church groups are pressuring credit card companies to withhold processing to websites which sell legal pornography, driving people who work in those industries back underground in the name of moral purity. Government agencies are working to control people’s sex lives in a way they haven’t since the 1960’s. Any deviation from the “norm,” from “family values,” is under the microscope, scrutinized to find what people still consider safe to be bigoted against, and exploited to take away your rights and gain power for those who spread the fear, under the pretense of “protecting” people from themselves.

Maybe what the world needs right now is a couple of Bitch Angels who will tell everybody to fuck off. I know I did.