Dusk Beyond the End of the World

Episode 8

Just as quickly as Dusk finally seemed to be picking up some real speed, it's back into old habits. Namely, it's the formula we've been seeing the series go for up until now: Introducing some new side characters, and side questing with them for a bit. But as usual for the series, I'm just not interested in these side characters. I don't care about their… marital? Ehlsea-ital? …Whatever, their relationship issues. Especially when they don't even seem terribly well explained (so, the man cheated, but it was like, a decade ago? Is the woman just now finding out, or is this like, something that's just been rehashed a lot? Doesn't seem to be clear as of yet).

This episodic-ish format would work a lot better for Dusk if its character writing were stronger in general—but alas, despite its efforts, I think it's a lot worse than simply not being a strength of the series, because we're this far in and my low opinion of our protagonists still hasn't budged. And this odd couple we meet this week are just further proof of that. As always, I'm way more interested in what's happening in the background of the main story—the worldbuilding, and the history it's been very intentionally only drip-feeding us—than in the main story itself.

Speaking of, I guess we've had it too good the last few weeks. This week, the only concrete thing we learned is that the other androids have been looking for Yuugure in part to find out about the whereabouts of Towasa. Pretty substantial thing to drop at the very end of the episode, but hopefully next week we'll learn more—unless the series once again decides to insist upon instead focusing on whatever nonsense our side characters du jour are up to.

That being said, that this episode barely did anything to progress the more overarching plot of Akira looking for Towasa highlights something worth bringing up: At eight episodes in now, I'm starting to get real curious how this series intends on tying up its several loose ends with only four episodes left, and still more than plenty that we don't know yet. For that matter, I wonder if it's even going to try tying up those loose ends at all. Either way, I'm starting to think that especially if Dusk keeps taking its leisurely time the way it has been, we could be in for an extremely rushed, messy ending. The best case scenario would be some pretty hefty info dumps, which I guess isn't totally impossible, but I pretty strongly doubt it given the speed of slow things have been revealed previously, and this series' general proclivity for going off on tangents with its side characters.

Dusk comes off as the type of series that would've been a lot more comfortable with twenty-four episodes, rather than twelve. It's obviously been drawing the curtain up on its mysteries as slowly as possible. Combined with an obvious love for the episodic, and a twelve episode run just doesn't feel like it's going to be enough for this series to do what it wants to do, at the pace it wants to do it at. And as time goes on, I'm getting increasingly nervous that this series has no plans of trying to reconcile its episode count with its pacing, and that it's going to end in a way that's totally unsatisfying. I'd love to be proven wrong—and it's still not too late, obviously—but at this point, there's only somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 minutes standing between us and this series' end, and it's harder and harder to think that's going to be enough.

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Dusk Beyond the End of the World is currently streaming on HIDIVE.