Can you believe that the genius Alice did not realise that Ayaka’s handphone was missing when they found her?
Episode 12 (Final)
What an unbelievable episode (and I don’t mean it in a good sense).
I was hoping for the last case to at least bring back some of the glory the first case had introduced, but in the end, it all came crashing down on itself.
Summary
So the team gathers at Alice house and they use a GPS to track the location of Ayaka’s phone. That lead them to the Fourth’s club. They obtain the drug and Narumi stumbles upon the fact that there is a wing impression on the individual tablet packets and they decide that the only way to find the drug lord would be to follow the wings by taking the drug.
Narumi volunteers himself and takes the drug which caused him to envision a Ayaka with wings who then leads him to a dealer.
They stalk the dealer to their base and after calling the Fourth and his group people, they raided the base only to realise that everyone was high, including their boss.
Narumi then goes ahead and bashes the crap out of Toshi for what he has done to Ayaka.
The series concludes with Alice talking in a philosophical manenr to Narumi about NEETs on-top of a building.
Review
So the 2 biggest issues that I have with this episode is the way the case concluded and the animation.
(There are many other problems with it but I don’t really feel like going into too much detail since I have lost motivation for this series.)
Lets start with the case first
What were they thinking when they made Narumi take the drug? How stupid is that for a genius like Alice?
If that was the best idea that they could come up with, I have no hope for that club. Also, after revealing the wings that was on the package of the drug, they came up with an unbelievable connection of that discovery leading them to realise that people were going to the drug dealers instead of the other way around. I mean, why would the drug dealers even bother hiding that symbol in such a cryptic manner when people who take the drug will automatically realise the fact. The only good thing that really came out of it was the fact that it sort of proved Narumi to be smarter than Alice. Perhaps this is their way of showing that Narumi has finally surpassed his teacher? =_=” Whatever it was, it was bad.
Then we get onto the part of the drug itself. The drug delivery system did not make sense.
I understand that this is all meant to be some new-age and revolutionary drug, but the idea that they came up with was stupid. The drug is meant to turn you into some drug-dealer GPS when you take it? I have a hard time believing this. Although you are not meant to actually believe it is real, this show does not set itself up to allow anything unrealistic to happen. The style of this show thus far has been one where everything remained within the realm of reality and believability. I felt that that was one of the few consistent things about the show, and yet the writers had to destroy the whole series by making the last episode ridiculous and unbelievable.
Then we have the everyone-is-high-and-stupid drug lord’s base….
Hakamizaka is meant to be smart but he ends up turning into an idiot in this episode. What is the moral of the story kids? Drugs makes you dumb and destroys your brain.
What sort of drug base would not have security and have EVERYONE high and zoned out?! Seriously! I don’t know how real this is and have never seen this sort of thing in real life but I highly doubt that that would be the case if not police would have a field day infiltrating every building without any risk. At the very least, you would expect the head of the operations to be lucid when everyone else is not.
Oh, and I should not forget Ayaka’s brother who had pleaded for help yet did not seem to want any help. There was no conclusion to that relationship at all and Toshi’s character amounted to essentially nothing except trash on the floor by the end of the case. I was really hoping for some explanation between the sibling misunderstanding and how they ended up in their current situation.
Essentially, this whole case felt like it had gotten out of the writer’s hands.
To me, it honestly felt like they got caught up in writing an interesting plot and continued to develop it but when it came time to conclude it, they had no idea what to do. I simply hoped for more than what I should have, and got what I should have expected after watching the whole series which was dissapointment.
So onto my second problem with this episode, the animation.
You could tell that they had place some sort of effort in making the animation better than the rest of the episodes seeing as to how this was the last episode, so why am I still complaining?
The music. This series has a fatal flaw of not building up an atmosphere to its full potential by having loooooong moments of silence in the background thus rendering the scene not as effective. When was the last time you heard absolute silence in your life?
One of the few moments where I can accept the silence since it is a hospital. But I doubt that the animators were that deep in their thinking since other background atmosphere music could have been used to play up the emotions in that scene.
There were simply too many moments of nice animation but no background sounds to back it up. It was painful and frustrating for me. It seems that this show has a death wish or something.
Everything else
Sadly, we don’t really get much of a conclusion with regards to the rest of the cast except for Alice imparting a few words of wisdom at the top of a building (Which apparently is once again filled with absolute silence. This has got to be the more peaceful Japan ever. *pulls hair out* If I go bald, you know why). Thankfully Alice is not frustrating in this episode and apart for her few short moments of “imparting wisdom onto others/self-righteous rant” she was pretty much tolerable and normal.
For a moment there though, I had thought that Alice was serious about having seen God’s Memo Pad and is some sort of angel (demon in my mind) and what not. (Come on! You can’t blame me for believing that. Take a look at the whole GPS drug thing) Although that would have been a spastic and ridiculous idea, at least that would have address the reason of what God’s Memo Pad is meant to be. Until now, I don’t believe that we have actually gotten an outright answer to the name of the show, which is kind of ridiculous if you were to ask me.
Episode Rating: 5/10
Series Rating: 6/10 (am tempted to rate it a 5.5 but it is not as bad as some other shows)
Overall
So whilst I would like to say that the show had redeemed itself with the last episode, it definitely has not. This last case may be the second best case when of the series, but it still falls behind the first case by a mile. I am just glad that this series is over and hope that J.C Staff has better luck with their new series Kimi to Boku coming out next month.
-ra out!
