GINTAMA - Mr. Ginpachi's Zany Class

Episode 12

Given that last week's episode put a pretty abrupt end to the delinquent gang war subplot that had been building up over the season, my main thought going into the finale was trying to figure out what kind of note the show could end on. In hindsight, the answer should have been obvious. Since this show is cycling through various school-related scenarios, it only makes sense to conclude it with a big class reunion, where we see what the characters have made of their lives after graduation. It's a pretty funny set-up for a grand finale, but as has generally been the case with this show, the results don't land nearly as well as I was hoping they would, and I walked away from this finale feeling largely underwhelmed.

I did like that this episode started with a bit of a callback to the first episode of Gintama with Shinpachi working at an abusive service job (though I certainly could have done without some of his “foreign customers” being exaggerated black caricatures), but instead of Gintoki appearing to upend his life, Shinpachi instead ends up at a class reunion where we see what everyone has been up to since graduation. With how varied all of their respective gimmicks are, I was expecting the characters to all have wildly different careers, and while there is some variety like with Kondo entering into construction or Ayame saying she got into accounting when she really became a hitwoman, nearly every one of these bits circles back around to a recycling ad. It didn't really click with me the first time, and I was pretty sick of it by the fourth. Beyond that, the jokes about everyone's future careers mostly just end up being anime and video game references, some of which are funnier than others and most of which didn't really land for me (and similar to the bit with the black caricatures, a throwaway gag about Katsura going through a sex change alongside changing Dragon Quest classes feels a bit lowbrow even for Gintama at its most crass).

Much like me by this point in the episode, Shinpachi gets fed up with all the jokes and wants a do-over of this whole affair. In typical Gintama fashion, this means literally starting over from the first episode, and manages to commit to the bit for several minutes before Shinpachi loses it again. Normally, I'm all for fourth wall breaks, but coming off of how repetitive the class reunion segment felt, it reminded me how much funnier the premiere was compared to the rest of the episode. With how the formula usually tends to go, I was expecting the show to wrap up with a twinge of sincerity, and for a few moments, it almost looked that way when the characters did another reunion. However, it just ends up being a setup for the comedy to go even more off the rails as everyone starts doing parodies left and right until it's ultimately revealed that this entire setup was itself a video ad, and one that's apparently meant to be a pitch to executives for another season. It's a clever punchline, and I really respect the sheer shamelessness of it, but the jokes leading up to it felt so all over the place that even this didn't get an actual laugh out of me.

This was honestly a bit of a strange episode to end on, but in a lot of ways, it does highlight some of my issues with this spin-off when it comes to the jokes feeling a lot less measured than in Gintama proper, and heavy reliance on character gimmicks. I wouldn't say I had a bad time with this spin-off, and there were a couple of episodes that I did find genuinely hilarious, but like I said last week, I think Takasugi had a point when he complained about if any of this was worth bringing Gintama back from the dead for. I wouldn't be vehemently opposed to another season, and it's possible it could even end up being an improvement, but there's also something to be said for letting a beloved series die rather than to keep trying to draw blood from a stone, and I'd be just as happy to let Gintama be put to rest.

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GINTAMA - Mr. Ginpachi's Zany Class is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.