Remember the first few seasons of this show? How fun and optimistic it was? Yeah, we ain’t doin’ that no more.
Deku and Bakugo join the battle against Shigurake. Meanwhile, Gigantomachia and the rest of the League set out to join their leader. When the heroes go down down, including one of UA’s best teachers, it’s up to Yaoyorozu and the rest of the students to take the unstoppable monster down. Everything is rapidly spiraling out of control for both sides; will our heroes be able to salvage the situation and save the day?
While overall I think the writing in this episode was pretty weak, it definitely had some highlights. Deku and Bakugo leaping into action was a fairly well-done moment and Yaoyorozu taking charge of the students was a great character scene. Midnight’s final words are powerful and the implication of her demise is fairly effective.
But in the face of its many issues, it can be a little difficult to appreciate those scenes.
A lot of this episode feels like a broken record. A solid chunk of the dialogue is that classic ‘repeat what someone just said, only slower and more dramatic’ shounen crap. That, or characters repeating their current objective/character-defining objective to themselves over and over. Eventually, you can’t help but start to roll your eyes.
This episode is flashback central. A good thirty percent is just repeated footage of previous scenes and seasons. Some of them are pretty effective at helping communicate the characters’ feelings, like Deku and Bakugo’s memories of Aizawa. But others – which is to say pretty much all the rest – are a waste of time.
Animation-wise, this is a very up-and-down episode. Some shots are incredibly impressive and look fantastic; this episode has one of the best-looking action shots in the season so far. But most of the shots look really stiff and rough around the edges. That, or they’re repeats; they use the same shots of Lady and Gigantomachia three or four times in one scene. It’s inconsistent all around.
As a whole, I think this is one of the weaker episodes this season. Occasionally, it shines incredibly brightly. But when it isn’t doing that, it’s either repetitive or mediocre. Is it the worst episode of My Hero Academia’s entire run? By no means. But it didn’t hook me nearly as much as some of the last few have.
Thankfully, this season has been consistently good thus far, so I at least have hope that the next episode will be a good one.
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