Platinum End

Episode 15

Alright everybody, we've reached a new story arc in Platinum End, which means it's time to regroup, and prepare for the final haul. We don't get a totally new OP, but we do get the old one revamped with new characters and a new edit of BAND-MAID's “Sense” to let us know we're in uncharted territory. And the big question staring down the show moving into this second half is simple: what the hell is there left to do? The answer, to PE's credit, at least has the chance to be interesting.

It's easy to forget, since we jumped into the killing so quickly, but there's not actually anything in the God Candidate rulebook that says they have to ice eachother to become God. It's implied, what with some of them getting arrows that can only kill, but if the six remaining Candidates decide they don't want to go full Battle Royale, there's nothing stopping them from figuring out a different way to decide who wins. So having Susumu, the kid who turned out to have been pulling Metropoliman's strings during the last fight, reveal this whole deity election to the world, has a lot of potential for interesting stories.

How will the world at large react to these kinds of supernatural powers being revealed? Or how about the seeming confirmation that some kind of monolithic God really exists? Will the other candidates try to hide and flee, or will they follow Susumu's lead and reveal themselves to the masses? If they all end up out in the open, how exactly will they end up picking who becomes God? There's no guarantee these questions will get satisfying answers – and I certainly don't have much faith on that front – but there's at least more room for something unique to happen here, compared to the rote and underwritten death game shenanigans of the first half.

Granted, this is still Platinum End so the way we reach that point is riddled with awkward-to-infuriating writing decisions. We start off with Mirai losing what bare goodwill he got from me last episode, when he starts trying to argue that it was wrong for Mukaido to kill because gosh, what would his family think if they knew? I know complaining about Mirai is beating a dead horse, but I just can't take “wouldn't his wife be sad to know he killed a genocidal incestuous pedophile?” seriously in any capacity. Anyway this is all just empty platitudes to get us to an incredibly lifeless bit of romance between Mirai and Saki, which solidifies that even after all these climactic fights and deaths, our central pair have all the romantic chemistry of dried asphalt.

With that out of the way we get a perfunctory meeting with the remaining angels, which you'd think would be a chance to shed light on how these heavenly beings feel about anything that's happened so far. Instead, all the scene establishes is that none of the 3 remaining mystery candidates wants to start another fight, and that one of them is a woman who's using her powers to go on a free tropical vacation and spam her Instagram feed. I think that's meant to paint her as shallow, but it's by far the most human thing anybody in this show has done in months, so I consider her my new favorite character until proven otherwise. Which will probably happen in like 3 weeks when it's revealed she's an unrepentant racist with an Electra Complex or something, knowing this show.

Then there's Susumu himself, who has to basically cram his entire character backstory into a couple minutes in order to fit it in around all this. He marks our second suicidal grade-schooler, and since he's not going to get killed by Metropoliman he can actually develop as a character, but there's not much to him at face value. If his story's to be believed, he was just a sort of lonely kid who had an intrusive thought about eating a pack of sleeping pills, and that opened up just enough of a window for his angel to draft him into God Wars. The only major hint there might be more to this kid is his excitement at seeing Mirai fight Metropoliman, and that offers him a potential angle as a foil for our reluctant hero. Imagine seeing Mira's juvenile aversion to killing going up against an impulsive kid who sees life and death as Saturday morning cartoons. There's a lot you could do there!

But like I said, I don't exactly have faith any of this will turn out very well. I've seen enough of Platinum End to know it can smother an interesting idea with fierce efficiency. Still, if we're in this for the long haul we should at least try to find the good where we can take it.

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Platinum End is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.