Heaven's Design Team

Episode 4

And here I was mildly annoyed that the Log Horizon subtitles used different spellings than the first two seasons and the novels. This week's episode of Heaven's Design Team has all of a sudden decided to change the names of the designers to match the Roman name scheme used in the English version of the manga, and I imagine that if you've never read the manga, it must feel very, very random. It still is, really, but that's mostly because we've had three weeks to be used to thinking of the characters by their Japanese names, and while in the long run it's probably a good thing to have the subs match the manga (see: Log Horizon and the whole Ais/Aiz debacle in DanMachi), it definitely threw me off.

That's a shame, because there are a lot of things that really work this week, and I'm not just saying that because I spent a week obsessed with watching videos of rescued fruit bats eating bananas on YouTube at one point during the pandemic. (They're really cute, I promise.) God is really doubling down on his reputation as a terrible client in a way that's very familiar if you've ever spent time with a graphic designer or illustrator grappling with vague directions – all of a sudden he wants “something that runs without legs” or “stripey animals,” and he's definitely jumped on the flying horse bandwagon as long as Venus is the one who creates them. It's that last one that ends up leading to bats, which do have more in common (in the strictly scientific sense) with horses than birds, but the creation of the bat is somehow less interesting than watching Venus tear her hair out trying to come up with a flying horse that isn't terrifyingly edgy, sweet and delicate, or just a flying poop machine. (Is this a good time to mention that during my fruit bat phase I also discovered that there's an entire subgenre of YouTube videos dedicated to horses farting?) Even better is watching Pluto in the background – she's freaking out because she hasn't heard back from the client for three days about a design, and every time Venus gets feedback within seconds, she starts to look just a little more angry and desperate. But at least she's sleeping; it isn't hard to think that Neptune came up with the mildly alarming heart urchin – a kind of sea urchin that looks like it runs on its spines (which aren't legs!) – while operating on exactly zero sleep.

This is one of those episodes that basically escalates as it goes on. Venus coming up with the horseshoe bat is great, and the hummingbird and ostrich segment is interesting (especially since there's no mention of how loud hummingbirds are when you're up close), but the stripey animal bit is full-on absurdity of the best kind. Apparently taking a page from the idea of a tiger's stripes as camouflage, Saturn is desperately trying to make new horses with stripes, which you may recognize as the zebra. But oddly enough, sticking a black-and-white animal on the savannah doesn't actually do much to keep it hidden from predators, and he's got everyone wearing prison stripes to try to prove that he can do it. That leads to Neptune's exhausted brain to come up with the giant panda, but he's so tired that he accidentally gets the starfish design stuck to it, not only invalidating the order for “an herbivore that looks like a carnivore,” but also creating the world's scariest result when every piece of fur shed by the panda generates a brand-new panda. Everyone just seems to be getting more and more hysterical as the episode goes on, coming up with newer and weirder ways of taking care of the various problems until it all comes to a head with angel Ueda getting sent to Hell. Oops.

From an animal perspective, this maybe isn't one of the best episodes. But in terms of absurd comedy, it really is a winner. And just think – now that Ueda's in Hell, maybe she can start supervising some even worse designs. I mean, hornets have to come from somewhere, right?

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Heaven's Design Team is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.