New PANTY & STOCKING with GARTERBELT

Episode 11

I know that moving at mach speed is one of its main virtues, but New Panty & Stocking has felt too short. With the news that Trigger's tremendous topping of the original will be wrapping next week with a two-for-one special, this week's episode is here to provide one more burst of one-off shorts before the season finishes. I presume it'll be doing so with another irreverent troll job. With that context, this episode of New Panty & Stocking feels the most aggressively "fine" the show has been since its third week or so.

"Fine" is still fun for this anime, of course. You gotta appreciate, at least a little, any anime that initiates by shouting out Being John Malkovich before dropping Chuck and Brief down a hole to hang out for a few minutes. Between the season's opening adventure and their road trip with Garterbelt a few weeks back, the New anime has had a bit of time for bonding between Chuck and Brief. Presumably, the writing of Rino Yamazaki believes that this is the kind of positive male connection these boys need. It stands in contrast to the sort of repressive toxicity highlighted in the next segment. It also involves time-travel and timelines being erased, just for synergy with the third segment as well. There's some cute pixel art here too, but as far as Chuck-adjacent shorts, I don't know how well I can appreciate it for not getting as deliriously avant-garde as the original show's Chuck To The Future trilogy. Or Being John Malkovich, for that matter.

There's a similar sense of the straightforward in the center segment anchoring this episode, but in this case, it works on the same level of action and antics that Trigger has damn-near perfected for Panty & Stocking at this point. Just for one part, I'm going to be thinking about the Anarchy sisters cosplaying two separate Lara Crofts for a minute now. And look at the Demons' smart little scout uniforms! There's a sense of the integration of the artistic elements in this adventure, as Shūhei Handa is all up in on writing the story, storyboarding it, and doing animation direction. But there are a lot of names around him too, and at the best of times, it really feels like the crew of the short is creating it simply through trying to one-up each other in terms of writing and illustrating the most hilariously blunt dick jokes put to screen.

They're creators after my own heart, I'll admit. No sooner had I made my crack about Brief being a real dickhead after the shaped-exactly-like-you'd-expect stone slammed on his head, did the script come in and have Panty make the same literal observation. It's all visual gags of Panty and Scanty ignobly jointly jacking off this crude cock rock surrounded by bits about 1,000 years of no-fap edging (their words, not mine—who is teaching the team at Trigger about these things?) before a chase ultimately leads to the team being dropped into an ancient scorpion-filled goon cave. It's entertaining in the primary Panty & Stocking way, if not uproariously surprising. This is genuinely the main thing the show has always devoted itself to well.

That's the sense of holding back before the finale I talked about, alongside the setup for this segment being a little low-key with a load of infodumping up-front. That's to say nothing of its not going especially far in terms of characterization or commentary. There's something to be said that maybe Brief has been a little put-upon by Panty and all the others for all his trouble between seasons. To say nothing of how the anti-female toxic manosphere talking points of the pent-up Ghost could intersect in courting Brief's issues and rubbing up against the unabated bitchiness of what the girls in this series get up to. Not that I expect Panty & Stocking to swing for earnest sociopolitical commentary, God no, but the series has at least brushed up against these sorts of ideas plenty of times before. Here, the Ghost's impotent whinging feels like one more bit alongside all the other cooks in this cock kitchen trying to top and one-up their previous bits. It's creative energy that at least looks cool enough once it all gets going, but can't even muster the invested emotions of that previous Chuck/Brief one-off, nor the more creative chaos of what comes after.

I don't know if there's more going on in this last Stocking-focused segment, but it certainly feels like there is due to its compressed, accelerated length. There's barely time to register gags like the appearance of "Tom Croose Jr." (suffix affixed because they already used the name once in the first season) or parodizing of at least four different time-travel movies. They even got Not Tom Cruise himself, Evan Ferrante, to play this take-off on the Top Son. It's Airplane! rules for jokes writ large and concentrated: don't worry if one joke didn't work for you, because twenty more are coming up after and they're accompanied by frenetic animation of the guy from Mission: Impossible in a shootout with a plushie cat Terminator. It's Stocking's own take on the Ghost of Christmas WAY Future, and it's glorious. There are also a whole lot of screencaps about posting online that people'll probably get some good out-of-context usage out of.

All that and everyone's favorite Gunsmith Bitch is back to take Stocking back for a glimmer of that sentimentality that has given New Panty & Stocking its edge. I'll admit that I'm a little disappointed the show didn't give viewers a proper glimpse at the implied baby Panty and Stocking staying with young Garterbelt, but it's still nice to get an invocation of how the priest's care for someone like Stocking has influenced both of them—for better, for worse, across the time-stream. It's that sense of striving for just a little bit more from the Panty & Stocking team this season, feverishly brought to life here by Shūjirō Hamakawa and a small army of other animators. And not for nothing, this piece also ends on an incomprehensible time-paradox troll job of a "Not To Be Continued" finish. I wish all the parts of this episode could have been as wildly, indulgently entertaining as this entry. But for the most part, New Panty & Stocking has been so consistently worth watching one way or the other that I'll faithfully presume that holding back like this was them saving the best for next week's last. Lord knows I'll miss this show when it's gone again.

Rating:

New PANTY & STOCKING with GARTERBELT is currently streaming on Prime Video.

Chris has to slay a bunch of anime reviews to earn his own Heaven and Hell coins, and he hopes his editors won't deduct too much for occasional potty mouth here, given the context. He's probably reskeeting fanart of Panty and/or Stocking on his BlueSky right now, and you can also check out his own back catalog over on his blog.

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