My Hero Academia

Episode 58

So I wasn't aware that My Hero Academia was going be participating in a 24-hour Japanese charity program this week and would be detouring from the main story as a result. I suppose the alternative would be for the show to just take a week off entirely, but instead we're getting a bonus filler episode where the students of 1-A are tasked to solve a jewelry heist murder mystery orchestrated by their teachers.

This is not a bad episode by any means, but it's a little frustrating to take a break from a low-key exam arc about role-playing heroism for an even more low-key filler episode about role-playing heroism. Arbitrarily, the teachers pick out six students to participate in a special class, and the six kids just so happen to be the most popular and recognizable characters from 1-A. The most delightful spin on this scenario is that All Might is actually playing the the villain, going so far as to dress the part and look unrecognizable. (But really, who could mistake those boulder cutters he calls shoulders?) As the scenario goes on, the villain is struck by a knife, and the kids must determine who the murderer was among the hostages.

Somehow Midoriya is able to make the leap to deduce that the hostage played by Midnight was actually in love with the villain, and not wanting to let his misdeeds stain her reputation, the villain stabbed himself and committed suicide. The joke is that it's all make-believe, but the teachers have to play along like it's completely legit. Bakugo seems to be the only one uninterested in humoring any of this. The final punchline turns out to be that the villain wasn't actually dead, something the kids would have been able to determine if they didn't just assume All Might was breaking character when Tsuyu tickled him with her hair. So All Might was pretending to be a villain who was pretending to be dead.

Even for a visually conservative episode, this is still nice to look at. MHA has yet to make any kind of outright bad filler, but I still think I'd recommend your average viewer skip this. It suffers mostly for being redundant to the arc that it's interrupting while also being an advertisement for the upcoming movie, with a few brief snippets outlining All Might's relationships with the movie-original characters. The episode ends with what I presume is the moment before Two Heroes's opening. This episode is enjoyable enough for filler, but it's nothing special.

Rating: B-

My Hero Academia is currently streaming on Funimation and Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw