Platinum End

Episode 24

Y'know, in hindsight, maybe electing a suicidal 12-year-old to become God was a bad idea.

I've been struggling with how to cover this finale for a bit, because there are two distinct parts to it, but absolutely nobody gives a single, solitary shit about one of them. So I could waste everyone's time by discussing the worthless excuse for denouement this finale offers for Mirai and Saki, but what is there really left to say about that fetid carcass of a romance? Do you really need me to harp on how heatless their relationship is? Or how the show is incapable of selling any of the happiness they claim to have found with each other? Like they even give Mirai a line saying he's happiest when he sees Saki smile, then never draw either of them smiling in the entire rest of the episode – not even at their wedding!

But that's not what any of you are here for, so let's not pretend. The only thing anybody who hadn't read the manga knew going into this anime, was that the series had an infamously batshit ending. I fully believe that reputation is the only reason anyone voted for this show to continue getting episode reviews. And while this adaptation has cut a lot of the most embarrassing scenes from the manga's back-half, there was no way it could get around this one. And I'm glad it didn't. With a more conventional, happily-ever-after ending, this show would have gone down as little more than a footnote; something brought up in passing like “Hey, did ya know the Death Note guys made a crummy ripoff of The Future Diary one time?” Yet with this ending, Platinum End at last becomes the train wreck it always promised it could be.

So let's get started.

First off, is anyone here a fan of Futurama? If so, you may remember that episode where Bender gets lost in the vacuum of space and becomes host to a super tiny race of aliens who start worshiping him as a God. Predictably he screws it up and they all end up killing each other, before he happens upon the real God in the depths of space, and gets a bit of sardonic wisdom for how to play the all-knowing ruler of a planet: “You have to use a light touch, like a safe cracker or pickpocket. When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.” Platinum End's creators apparently watched that episode, took its jokey non-moral on the nature of godhood at face value, and decided to construct their story's whole universe around it.

Because that's the lesson Shuji learns upon becoming God and observing the entirety of human life and suffering. He gains access to the full gestalt of life on Earth; global inequality, hunger, greed, suffering, love, faith, and all experiences in-between. And the lesson he learns from the voice of God inside his head is that this is just how it's supposed to work – God is just there to hold down the corners of human existence and not break anything until he gets bored and decides to find a successor to man the security monitors. The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn, God's got his thumb up his ass, and all's right in heaven. That is a bleak, nihilist view of metaphysics – that there is an all-knowing, all-powerful being that could change the world in any number of ways, and chooses not to for no particular reason. Which isn't necessarily a complaint! You could do a lot with that, especially after an entire season of everyone arguing about the purpose of God's existence. But this is Platinum End, which means there was never a chance in hell of that happening. Instead, we get the dumbest way to accidentally create a new theology ever conceived.

Shuji, despite being an edgelord teen who read and worshiped Super Atheist Yoneda and his mad cool Facts and Logic, never ran into that old canard about omnipotence. You know the one: “If God can do anything, can God make a rock so heavy even he can't lift it?” Instead, after mulling over the entire spectrum of human experience on a cosmic scale, he comes up with “If God is real, he should kill himself to prove it.” And without a second thought just goes for it. Giving us the amazing line you see up in the review image.

Yes, that's right, God commits suicide in order to see what will happen, and wouldn't you know it, turns out he was a load-bearing pillar of all Earthly life! D'oh! Thus every single living thing on the planet vanishes from existence. In their final moments, Saki and Mirai decide that they had a pretty good run and are happy to die at the whims of the teenager they forced to become God. Yoneda, meanwhile, decides he was right all along and that God and his angels were actually an extinction-level weapon created by human imagination to achieve Armageddon. I guess even in the face of imminent non-existence, dude just has to have the last word. Then, as we zoom out from the dead husk of Earth, in one final stupid twist, it turns out both humans and God were put there by some nameless race of immortal cosmic beings, seemingly as a failed simulation to find a way to kill themselves. It's like if somebody got really drunk and tried to explain the ending to Devilman, but it took six months to tell.

And that's how Platinum End calls it a career. I could sit here and attempt to pontificate over what any of this means, of how the creators came to this as the ending, but let's all be real here. This was never planned. The implications or morals or logistics of this entire ending were never thought through. What this finale was is a desperate Hail Mary pass to get somebody, anybody to remember this story for anything besides being an unremarkable failure. And to an extent it succeeded – I'm writing about it right now, after all. So I guess I have to hand it to them.

Ultimately, that's the legacy of this story. It came in with enough of a pedigree to at least have some expectations, immediately squandered them, and proceeded to flail frantically for any sense of identity or purpose. It never found them, and so all it could hope for was that its violent death throes could make it the type of bad story people will at least dunk on across the internet, and just barely managed it through sheer desperation. After 23 episodes of throwing every stupid, bad idea they could at the wall, they finally got a turd to stick at the 11th hour. Congratulations.

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Platinum End is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.