08.03
I knew he was a glutton for punishment!
Gatchaman Crowds ends its first four episode chunk with actual plot and a surprisingly large amount of nihilism.
Oh wow... Actual Gatchamaning. Shame it only lasts 30 seconds...
After nothing happened last week, a shit-ton happened this time. The Crowds successfully rescue the skytram but since Rui activated their amnesia effect, everybody thinks Galax and emergency personal did it. Meanwhile, Jo gets his ass royally handed to him by Berg Katze who has his own NOTE and the ability to vanish into thin-air. The news that Katze is back in town hits Paiman and OD hard suggesting that they have had a previous encounter with him.
We're talking about the same Berg Katze as before right?!?
Itsu-tsun and Hajime have a brief scene where its revealed that Itsu-tsun has both the ability to clone herself as well as the inability to come in physical contact with other people (so bascially she’s Multiple Man AND Rogue). Rui turns out to be Gel Sadra to Berg Katze’s…. uh… Berg Katze? And multiple people are killed via roadside homicide to the sounds of dubstep. Ultimately everybody’s left a bit in the dumps except Berg Katze because he’s an asshole, and Jo because he’s just pissed off at everyone else (also from the looks of it, he hasn’t long for this world).
Don't ask... No seriously...
Boy did this show turn dark real fast. Not as dark as say… Madoka (which is the show Crowds still desperately wants to be)… but the definite muted tone this episode took after the horrible episode with the tainted milk last week was a plus. Katze’s gone from a grinning moronic idiot to a pure diabolical force that’s using both Rui and Gatchaman, possibly, as his little puppets. I’m actually a lot more interested in what he’s trying to do than the rest of these morons at this point.
Yeah make your own conclusions here.
Its still far from perfect though. The pacing remains haphazard and the fact that a sudden tone shift like this occurred without much of a buildup seems like Nakamura was forced into it at the last minute. Furthermore, he seems to growing more and more disinterested in his own Gatchaman team as the show progresses. For what was supposed to be a spotlight episode on Jo, he hardly has anything to do and everyone else has just be reduced to giving us info dumps on things that we either don’t care about, or should but its delivered in such a bland matter of fact fashion that we ultimately don’t care anyway. I wouldn’t call this a troll move yet (especially in light of the fact that the other “title characters” are actually the villains) but it is getting there.
It hits the fan.
We’ll see how this goes as we enter into Crowds second third. While this episode was a noticeable improvement, it’ll take a lot more to over come how badly the show started and make it to something more than a bizarre experiment.
Hey ladies... you better dump that zero...
EPISODE 3 SCORE: 6/10. OVERALL SCORE TO DATE (averaged): 2.75/10