10.05
I hope a passing bus slams into her in mid-air.
Last June, Gatchaman Crowds rolled onto our screens with a potentially interesting if… somewhat bizarre concept and execution. By September it had rolled off my screen leaving me so bloody angry and frustrated with one of the most choppy, inept finales since Flowers of Evil. In between there were several ups and downs. Some episodes were pretty good, others were utter shite. So for this final (and I mean final) edition of Crowds-Sourcing, I’ll be looking at what the show did well (which wasn’t much), and what it didn’t do.
PRO: The action…what little there was. Its no surprise that the two episodes I rated the highest had the most Gatchamaning of the bunch. Episode 7, in particular, was really notable for how dark it got with Rui almost slaughtered by Katze and Jo getting mindraped. When there was action, the show really picked up. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t that much to go around.
CON: Wasting time. Now this is sort of a catch-22 as some scenes I felt were extraneous and just dragged on eventually did amount to something towards the end. Namely Rui’s lengthy conversation with Ueda, and Gatchaman’s visit to the kindergarten. That being said, there was still quite a bit of obvious filler in a show which didn’t have the episode count to sustain it. The critical example of this being the entire first half of episode 11 that was dedicated to a recap… really? This far out in the series?
PRO: Berg Katze. No really, Miyano’s insane overacting was actually the sole thing keeping me from dropping this show. Its really a tour-de-force and rivals his performance as Okabe in Steins;Gate for overall gravitas. The one problem I had was well the way he was defeated, in that he just kinda… left…. then got turned into a handkerchief. Yeah I really hated the ending of this show.
CON: Hajime Ichinose. Can you say “WORST PROTAGONIST OF ALL TIME?!?” Hajime, on top of being the equivalent of fingers on a chalkboard, was suddenly turned into some sort of super savant and was the only member of Gatchaman to have any clue how to fight Katze… even though she’s on the long end of a very short bus. Even the series seems to lose interest in her in the end as she is given absolutely NOTHING to do in the final episode. Nothing! She does nothing! Yeah the final episode really sucked.
PRO: The music. GAT-CHA-MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! ‘Nuff said.
CON: The character designs. They were ugly when this show started. They were ugly when it ended. So what could have made them worse? Oh yeah, Utsusu’s fucking suit!
IN CONCLUSION. Gatchaman Crowds blowed. While I wouldn’t go as far as saying its a terrible series do to some strong installments, it never did quite click for me. With that in mind…
FINAL SERIES AVERAGE: 4.3/10 (based off all scores received during Crowds-Sourcing plus my original entry for the Summer 2013 Clusterfuck). Median: 4.5 Mode: 5
Now if you excuse me, I have to get back to watching some crappy show about emo space vampire raping fallen teen idols or something.