Sentenced to Be a Hero

Episode 11

This is the big bombastic victory that we've been building up to for some time now. There's almost a non-stop cavalcade of feel-good moments and great interactions between the cast. We see villains get their comeuppance from one side of the battlefield to the other, all the while Xylo and Teoritta flit about at faster-than-light speeds. Faeries explode, dark plans are ended, and all in all, everything comes up looking pretty peachy for humanity when the credits finally roll.

It's hard not to get swept up in the excited pageantry of it all. After weeks of being on the back foot, the heroes get a chance to show the monsters what for. This is one of those nights where the party is rolling nothing but 20s and rolling big handfuls of damage dice on the big bad. We jump from scene to scene where the cast share kind words, talk a big game, and watch the villains explode in fiery balls of justice. Xylo and Teoritta are talking about having lots of butter on a big, delicious breakfast, not about their own dark pasts or what tortured fate humanity has in store.

And everything looks terrific, too. The animation has been stellar all season, and that's true this week as well. I appreciated the slow-motion deaths that the metal arm villain lady and evil artillery armor guy got, both involving them being tossed in the air and put in high-fantasy air fryers. The shots of Xylo reflecting on his past life spliced in with the current moment were well done, adding a bittersweet note to an otherwise boisterous victory march. Catharsis is the special word of the day for sure.

The only real criticisms that I have are that it is so joyful it almost feels tonally out of step with the rest of the series. For example, Boojum doesn't even fight in his normal form, showing up instead to fight in a giant suit of purple faerie blood power armor. It looks cool, don't get me wrong, but the fact that he transformed off-screen and shows up looking completely different sort of underscores the tonal shift this episode represents. A grim, dour series about outnumbered and outgunned heroes entered the smoke, and a big high fantasy superhero show emerged on the other side, and we didn't even get to see the transition. Xylo isn't counting throwing daggers or looking for a way out of the tight confines of back-alley knife fights this week; he's wielding The Holy Sword and blowing up purple tornado kaijin.

It's still really good, but I did a double-take more than once while watching.

Rating:

Sentenced to Be a Hero is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.