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Big Order
Episode 3

by James Beckett,

How would you rate episode 3 of
Big Order ?
Community score: 2.6

So what exactly is Eiji's power?

It's a weird question to have to ask, given that the show's entire premise is based around his Domination Order. So far, the other Orders in the Group of Ten have easily identifiable abilities. We have Fran, who can stop time up to thrice each day, which is simple enough. There's Fuwa, who has the power to immediately halt aggressive actions, which is kind of oddly specific but still makes sense in context. Iyo, the seer we meet this week, can accurately predict the future, and Rin cannot die. (She can also heal people and mend broken objects, which all folds into an umbrella of “Regeneration”.) So it strikes me as really weird that a show centered around all of these people would leave its protagonist's abilities so frustratingly vague.

At first, it seemed like Eiji's power meant that he could Dominate human will, which works just fine. But then you factor in his ability to stop bullets and telekinetically move giant piles of rubble. Extending Domination to “Reality Manipulation” is a bit of a stretch, but I'm willing to go along with it. It's when Eiji's powers randomly seem to fail that I start to lose perspective on things. Why does his power allow him to move faster than bullets, but not completely stop rubble from falling? How come he can control Rin's mind (to an admittedly ambiguous degree), but not control the others in the Group of Ten? I'm okay with a little ambiguity, but Big Order is less about being ambiguous and more about altering the strength of Eiji's powers to suit whatever the story decides they need to be.

It's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it's emblematic of the larger storytelling problems plaguing this show. One minute it's an edgy action-thriller, the next it's a borderline slapsticky shonen action series. In one scene, family members of the Group of Ten are being systematically executed, and it's played absolutely straight. The sense of dread and suspense is actually fairly well done. Then thirty seconds later, the show decides to shoot Rin in the head for a cheap laugh, and then spends the rest of the episode completely ignoring that the government just brutally executed the Group of Ten's family members on live television. The drama of the execution scene is completely undercut by this mood whiplash, even making it come across as cheap and vulgar in hindsight. The show can't stick with a single tone or train of thought for more than a few minutes, and it's making the already fragile façade of its plot come apart at the seams.

Maybe things can level out later, but right now Big Order is a mess. The comedy doesn't work well enough to justify calling the show a black comedy, and the show's misanthropic edge is so juvenile and slapdash that you can't call it a gritty action drama either. It's just a collection of scenes stitched together with no sense of purpose or vision. Sometimes it's violent and gritty, other times it's absurd and lighthearted. There are individual pieces here that might be salvageable, but when combined, it all adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

And I haven't even gotten to the ending.

When Iyo proclaimed that her hair ribbon/bunny ears couldn't ever be touched by a man, lest she be impregnated and become impure, I thought the show was giving her some kind of strange personality quirk. When Eiji actually grabbed her ears, and Iyo's belly immediately swelled up in size, I had to pause for a moment, figuring it must be some kind of absurd sight gag. When Iyo then declared she was going into labor before cutting to black and rolling the credits, I had to pause for another moment. It slowly dawned on me that the show might actually be serious. Eiji might have impregnated a woman by touching her hair-ribbons, and that woman might have actually gone through a full term of pregnancy in about five minutes. Now I haven't read the manga, so maybe this is all some kind of weird fake out, but if Iyo really is giving birth, then that would propel Big Order into a level of badness that might make the whole show recommendable as an irony-watch alone.

As it stands, Big Order is just the boring kind of bad. Aside from its incredibly bizarre ending, this episode was more of last week's problems, but worse. Eiji remains an unengaging cipher, Rin has been reduced to a literal running gag, and the plot can't yet hold all of the show's disparate parts together. It wants to do comedy and gritty darkness at the same time, but it has neither the comedic nor the dramatic chops to pull it off. The few action beats we've gotten over three episodes have all been bland and unmemorable, so it can't even write itself off as popcorn-action fare. At this point, I kind of hope this show goes off the deep end; I would actually be pretty excited to see an anime equivalent to The Room. Being hilariously bad would at least be more entertaining than what Big Order has to offer right now.

Rating: D-

Big Order is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter.


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