Caligula

Episode 9

It's always unfortunate to see an anime's plot fall apart right in front of your eyes, but that's exactly what happened to Caligula in this ninth episode. To be fair, this show has always been built on shaky foundations; its method of adapting its source RPG seems to have been “take random events and string them together with hectic abandon.” Caligula's plot has never made much sense, and it's characters are no more developed than the cardboard cutout versions of them you might find in an anime store. Still, even considering the show's many failings, this episode is an easy contender for its lowest point, as its already weak writing collides with awful directing and animation to make for a singularly unpleasant viewing experience.

This is a shame, since the plot of episode 9 carries some promise. Aria, having regained enough of her powers, leads the Go-Home Club to Landmark Tower, where the Ostinato Musicians are supposed to reside. This development admittedly arrives with almost no setup, but given that it means something might happen in Caligula's plot, I was prepared to handwave the sloppy storytelling so that we might finally see some action. Unfortunately, things begin to devolve as soon as the masked Musician known as Shadow Knife makes his presence known, and the Go-Home Club start finding multiple victims of his sadistic bullying stranded throughout the tower. When Kotaro runs off blindly to help them, it becomes clear that this episode is just going to be another Musician showcase, and while I appreciate the series' desire to give its villains time in the spotlight, it feels awfully late in the game for Caligula to still be throwing out more underdeveloped villains in lieu of making any of its protagonists interesting.

When Kotaro eventually discovers that Shadow Knife has modeled himself after the heroic figure of a popular anime, the plot's main twist becomes easy to predict. All of Shadow Knife's victims were themselves bullies in the real world, and Shadow Knife is taking what he believes to be heroic revenge. Since the rest of the Club has nothing to do but aimlessly wander around for most of the episode, the bulk of this tedious plot is taken up by Kotaro catching up on information the audience can easily guess, while occasionally getting involved in some poorly-executed fight sequences. There are more pressing issues this week than the sparse and ugly action sequences, but it is sad that Caligula has only delivered one decent fight scene two-thirds of the way through its run.

Also tossed into this meaningless plot stew are Thorn and Wicked, who have made so little impact throughout this story that I just plain forgot who they were; I needed to double-check both my own reviews and the show's wiki page to make sure they'd even been introduced before. Wicked is only here to blow up a bomb and cause Shadow Knife to fall to his comically untragic death, but Thorn has some previous relationship with Shogo, which might be intriguing if either character had been given more than five lines of dialogue over the past nine weeks. Perhaps in the original game, this dynamic added something to the overall story, but almost every character we've met in this anime is completely devoid of personality, so it's incredibly difficult to care when some secret history between two of them is suddenly revealed.

Thorn and Wicked's inclusion in this storyline only served two purposes. The first is to drop the bomb on the cast that dying in Mobius means dying in real life, which is such a staple of the “trapped in a VR world” genre that I'm honestly shocked that Caligula waited so long to bring it up, let alone treat it as such an earth-shattering revelation that threatens to split up the group. Thorn's involvement also gives us this awful reaction shot from Shogo, which has to be one of the most unintentionally hilarious frames I've seen in quite some time. When the primary joy I'm getting from Caligula is derisive laughter, something has gone terribly awry.

Also, it looks like Ritsu might be evil, or at least he's hiding some nefarious secrets from his friends as he fiddles with an ominous-looking artifact after disappearing from Landmark Tower without a word. Honestly, it's almost impossible to muster any interest in this reveal since Ritsu is a cipher among ciphers. Caligula has always been a boring and haphazard series, but this week was so poorly executed that it just became frustrating to watch. At this point, I can only hope the final few episodes of the season aren't this much of a chore to get through.

Rating: D

Caligula 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 and his blog.