A Certain Magical Index III

Episode 25

This penultimate episode of the season made so little sense to me at first that I thought I might have simply been too tired to follow it, so I tried watching it again the next day. Unfortunately, my renewed alertness didn't help much either.

The part that does make the most sense is also the part that's hardest to take seriously. The episode opens with a focus on Shiage still having to deal with the temperamental Mugino until a new threat from body-suited academy goons emerges. He proves amazingly proficient at taking them down, and he certainly isn't shy about pulling the trigger to finish off a downed enemy. I suppose it's possible that we'll find out next week that he didn't actually kill the guy, but he is certainly starting to look more ruthless. It should also be interesting to see if the ideals he continues to spout about ITEM will be enough to bring Mugino around to a reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Accelerator's part in this episode is just spouting gobbledygook about how he can fix Last Order, before singing and having heavenly visions. I guess him specifically saying that he no longer needs to be a villain is important too, but all anyone is going to remember from his scene is the singing. Accelerator's seiyuu, Nobuhiko Okamoto, has done some anime songs before, and he's hiding some amazingly powerful vocal ability behind his character's usual raspy delivery. The visual presentation and backing track for that scene are also high points, making this the one worthwhile scene in the whole episode.

Touma's part involves the Grand Picture, where he deals with Fiamma directly. Their showdown is still mostly a philosophical battle occasionally interrupted by attacks, but it's nowhere near as thought-provoking as that sounds. Touma is basically pitching the argument that Fiamma's plan won't work because everyone isn't as full of hate as he thinks; indeed, both religious and non-religious opposing forces seem to be coming together to try to stop him and all those gigantic arms that keep popping up. (Any explanation for those things would be appreciated, given the total lack of context clues.) This whole thing seems to boil down to a needlessly-complicated version of “I'll kill everyone off if I can't reshape the world in the way that I want.” But that's fine because Touma is at his best when combating childish logic.

Thankfully this series only has one more episode to go, because I'm not sure how much more of this ridiculousness I can take; this series was finally starting to make sense for a moment there, but now it has regressed again. Let's wrap up this whole affair in a neat little box, get Index back to normal, and relax while waiting for hopefully-better installments in the future.

Rating: C

A Certain Magical Index III is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.