The Promised Neverland Season 2

Episode 5

I may still feel very uneasy about how much material the series jettisoned in order to get us to this point, but I have to give “Episode 4” credit for provoking a strong reaction, at the very least. This week, “Episode 5” continues the second season's worrying tradition of taking the tense cliffhanger that previous episodes ended on and falling short on the follow-through. Last time, the show teased the spooky “Help” room of the bunker only to completely abandon that entire plotline. This week, the show ditches all of the tension and excitement that came from the bunker's invasion and slows things even more, to the point where not even the major changes to the story's events and timeline have me feeling much of anything, one way or the other. That might be the most worrying development of all.

Things feel off immediately when the episode starts with a scene that I vividly remember from the manga, where we arrive at a destitute demon village and follow a group of diminutive, cloaked figures, only to discover that it is Emma and Co. in demon-disguise. We also discover through a scant couple lines of dialogue that there has indeed been a jump forward in time since last we saw the Grace Field kiddos – around a year, according to the gossiping of a pair of hungry demons that we will return to later in the episode. In that time, the kids have been roaming the land, scrounging for sustenance, and keeping out of sight of the demons, all while presumably searching for those coordinates that the Minerva/Ratri message pointed them towards last week.

Now, if you're an anime-only viewer, this jump forward probably already came across as jarring and maybe even a little rushed; I was expecting the time skip to show up eventually, and I still had to go back and check the fourth episode to make sure I didn't miss a scene at the end or after the credits that might have pointed towards this transition. Nope, it turns out that we really do just pick up in a completely different setting, with a full year having passed with seemingly nothing significant enough for the series to show us. To be fair, the manga also had a time skip that got us to around this point, and it also felt kind of clunky there, too. Not to get too hung up on the Goldy Pond arc that got left on the cutting room floor, either, but I will continue to argue that, if nothing else, all of that extended action added an even greater sense of weight and consequence to the story, so that when it went and jumped ahead so suddenly in the manga, there was still a feeling like the kids had just come out of a major test of their character and strength.

In this version of the story, though, the bunker was not a home that Emma and the others spent years living in and defending – it was a brief stop-off in their already rushed journey, and its literal and symbolic function as the center of their new life in the world beyond Grace Field simply doesn't hold the same power as it might have. There's no tangible feeling of loss coming out of “Episode 4” and in to “Episode 5”, which is a shame, since the anime-only direction the series has taken has given CloverWorks the opportunity to do literally anything with the story. We could have nixed the time-skip altogether, or seen some of the untold chapters of the kids' lives on the run, or gotten some insight into the scope and shape of the demon world (which honestly feels quite small, consisting only of a forest, a bunker, and this one village that we've seen). Also, last week made a huge to-do about Isabella being sent on a mission to hunt the children down, and we're supposed to believe she's made no progress in a whole year, or at least none that was interesting enough to show us?

I want to be clear in that the story we get in “Episode 5” isn't bad, and it works better in isolation than as another link in The Promised Neverland's great chain. The scenes with Emma fretting over her failure to secure her family's safety brought back some of the strong character writing that I think TPN has been missing the past couple of episodes. Even more successful is the sequence where the kids are almost discovered by the old blind demon who comes to worship at Evil-Blooded Temple (and what a goddamn ringer of a name, there, eh?). As the old one prays, the kids become aware of the hardships that the poor and disenfranchised of the demon population suffer, as they want equally for food and protection of the elements. When Emma risks everything to get close to the demon and help pick up some fallen apples, her explanation is simple and right: “Demons have families too.” Here, as she struggles to keep her family safe from the countless gnashing teeth that would destroy them, Emma still makes a point to have empathy for their enemies. There is no use for cruelty.

It's a great scene, sporting the expert direction that TPN has always flaunted in its best moments, with some unique visual flourishes to boot. I loved how Emma and the demon's interaction evoked classical shadow puppetry with its focus on their pitch-black silhouettes, and how the scene ended with the demon sinking back into inky shadow. The anime's art style has often had difficulty capturing the demons' eerie and monstrous features, but this scene did a great job of evoking the feeling of otherworldliness, while ironically going a long way to further humanize the demons.

Does one great scene redeem an episode that largely left me cold, though? I'm not sure. There are too many strange loose ends and flat payoffs for me to feel completely satisfied with “Episode 5”. Like with how Thoma and Lannion get all this screen time that establish how they want to contribute more to helping their family – beyond catching more of those damned fish bugs, that is – only to have their first mission out as demons-in-disguise to end in failure almost immediately. Speaking of which, the two demons that end up sniffing out the Grace Fielders' identities have this side-plot that shows how they're struggling to feed their own little siblings, which kind of works to keep that throughline of empathy going…except the episode ends with them being brutally murdered by the kids' rescuers. I'm sure this is all in service of reminding us of how sometimes cruelty is necessary in order to survive in this world, but the execution of this digression still leaves a lot to be desired.

Of course, we have the episode's biggest reveal: Norman is alive, and he's the one who saves Emma and the others from being found out. I honestly don't know how to approach this ending, because I already knew that Norman was going to be making his return soon, so I was never going to be truly surprised by his being alive and well. I was curious how this new, streamlined take on TPN's plot would handle his reintroduction, and that's where I continue to feel like the show isn't even taking advantage of its new direction, for all of its untapped potential.

I just don't feel like Norman's arrival landed with the big oomph it was obviously aiming for, and this is supposed to be a huge moment, for both the characters and the audience. Maybe that's simply me being unable to frame the show from the POV of an anime-only viewer, so I'll be very interested to see how those viewers reacted. With the story's mad dash to catch up its own final act nearly complete, I'm just hoping that The Promised Neverland can find its footing again and recapture some of the magic that has been missing from the last couple of episodes, regardless of what form its new twists and turns take in the end.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• Next week is a clip-show, unfortunately, but the good news is that it isn't being considered a part of the episode order, so we still have six full weeks left for TPN to (hopefully) wrap up this tale properly.

The Promised Neverland Season 2 is currently streaming on FUNimation Entertainment and Hulu.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.