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Assassination Classroom season 2
Episode 13

by Paul Jensen,

How would you rate episode 13 of
Assassination Classroom (TV 2) ?
Community score: 4.1

Well, this feels suspiciously familiar. Just like last week, Assassination Classroom splits this latest episode into two distinct halves. The first part continues the battle between Koro Sensei and the principal, with the majority of the explosive textbook traps yet to be dealt with. After taking a grenade to the face with the first book, Koro Sensei is able to solve the rest of the questions thanks to his excellent memory. This leaves the principal with the impossible task of opening and solving the final book, and a moment of despair leads him to recall his first few years of teaching. He ultimately faces the music and opens the book, but Koro Sensei shields him from the blast. With the two teachers seemingly able to reach some kind of truce, it's back to business as usual in the episode's second half. Class E takes some creative liberties with the Momotaro folktale as part of a school drama festival, and the principal ponders the consequences of an upcoming assassination attempt.

The premise of the rigged textbooks didn't exactly blow me away when it was introduced last week, but the story takes an interesting turn with it. Rather than focusing on the contest and trying to create tension by putting Koro Sensei in harm's way, the series uses the situation to develop the principal as a character. Of the two options, this is the better choice. It's fairly obvious that Koro Sensei won't be in any mortal danger until the end of the series, so trying to dupe the audience into worrying about his safety would probably have been an exercise in futility. The character development route is the easier of the two to pull off, and it's also more in line with the show's theme of finding the good sides of seemingly irredeemable people.

Filling in the principal's backstory also allays some of my fears that Assassination Classroom was going let one of its better villains go out on an unimpressive revenge plot. Instead, we get a reasonably competent story about a well-intentioned teacher who tried to prepare his students to succeed by any means necessary. It finally offers an explanation for the school's ruthless approach to education, and connecting the principal to Class E's run-down building is a clever touch. The flashback's weakness is that it doesn't give the viewer much time to develop an emotional attachment to the three former students, which leaves the big twist a little light on dramatic impact. You could also argue that the show ultimately lets the principal off the hook too easy for his merciless teaching style. Overall, however, this is a pretty effective way of wrapping up his ongoing rivalry with Koro Sensei.

The episode's second half shifts gears from drama to comedy, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do after a relatively heavy story. The problem is that it's just not all that funny. Other shows have used the story of Momotaro to varying degrees of success over the years, and Assassination Classroom follows the usual pattern of letting the characters take the old folktale in an unpredictable direction. The results are just sort of underwhelming, and I can't help but feel like a decent premise went to waste. For one reason or another, the escalating chaos fails to deliver any truly good punch lines. The sequence stops short of being a total bust, but bland and forgettable are not descriptions that a series as entertaining as Assassination Classroom should settle for.

Once again, we have a divided episode where one half clearly outshines the other. The exploding textbooks deliver a solid flashback and a satisfying moment of reconciliation, while the one-off comedy segment fails to make much of an impression. The best thing Assassination Classroom can do now is move right along and start something new in the next episode.

Rating: B-

Assassination Classroom is currently streaming on Funimation.

Paul Jensen is a freelance writer and editor. You can follow more of his anime-related ramblings on Twitter.


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