Suppose a Kid From the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town

Episode 7

I had already compared LasDan and its farcical functionality to Fawlty Towers, and that was before it moved its action to an actual hotel starting with this episode! Leaving behind the academy setting almost makes it feel like an entirely different show from this point, though much of the plot's propulsion is still based around Lloyd's incredible abilities, and most of the main characters are still involved as well. And part of me almost wants to be impressed at the show being so committed to setting up its silly situations that it's willing to go whole-hog on a shift like this. But so far in this storyline, I come away nonplussed, as LasDan really doesn't deliver, humor-wise, in spite of the myriad of moving parts it's working with here.

Maybe one problem is the sheer amount of time it takes before we really get an idea of where this latest plot is supposed to be going. The episode spends its early runtime setting us up on various details regarding Lloyd and his classmates having a vacation coming up, him getting a part-time job at the hotel, and the different details and conspiracies motivating the other characters there, not to mention the establishing scene at the beginning of the episode with Phyllo and Mena that indicates the kind of mystery plot we'll be pursuing next. In other words, LasDan gives us a lot of information throughout this episode before it becomes clear what it's going to be doing with all of it. And while there are some funny asides, too much of it just comes off like disjointed details that aren't yet clearly connected.

Take the most prominent piece of background information we're given going into this episode: The subject of the treants supposedly populating the forest around the hotel, and how they may be causing people to turn up unconscious. It's oddly-delivered, since despite it being a reiterated point driving the schemes of several parties here, we haven't actually even seen a treant yet! As a motivating factor, it's more abstract than it should be, which makes it difficult to get too engrossed as new cast addition Threonine laboriously details a plot involving illegal cultivation of the treants. It also feels disconnected in the sense that our actual main characters, Lloyd and the other cadets, are still wholly unaware of its relevance. So it's just this vague element of setup we have to keep in mind while we watch everything else bounce into place for whatever the eventual payoff is going to be.

Said bouncing should be where the actual entertainment value of the episode lies, then. And I can appreciate some of the base elements on display here, like the general nice scenery of the hotel or how cute Lloyd looks in his little bellhop uniform. But for stretches of this it feels like there are hardly any decent jokes. I had previously thought that Lloyd's whole schtick was still working pretty well for mining laughs, but even with the new locale and characters, this episode keeps recycling the same basic sequence of “Lloyd does something incredible and someone else acts freaked out by it”. I thought it might at least lead to a more enduring comedy of errors with the introduction of the concept of a ‘Demon Sapling’ that the folks investigating the treant conspiracy initially ascribed Lloyd's abilities to. But then that fell by the wayside after a single indulgence, seemingly just to result in one new character revealing her duplicitous nature to another new character, then jump out a window. I know I'm not supposed to take LasDan seriously, but I also feel like I shouldn't be questioning what it's even doing every few minutes.

Even as I find its elements more confounding than amusing, the setup in this episode of LasDan does succeed in bringing the actual main characters together. Those seemingly throw-away details from the beginning of the episode reconvene in densely surprising ways, and also make economical use of meeting several of these characters' parents for the first time. There is some fun in the dawning realization that Threonine is Allan's father, and the arranged marriage meeting they're having is with Selen. Lloyd's surprising appearance in Allan's place therefore makes for a solidly funny moment that is played up by Selen's reaction, even if it then necessitates the odd mechanic of flashing back to explain how the whole farce came about after the fact. It's another reminder that LasDan works best when it's simply embracing this kind of situational comedy, rather than putting any time into getting us to care about its various background fantasy elements. Lloyd, Selen, and Riho deciding they're actually going to investigate that stuff by the end of this episode thus doesn't bode well for how those parts might mix.

I feel like I'm flailing a bit in an effort to explain why so much of what this episode did simply did not engage me. But for all the issues with the oddly doled-out setups and conspiracies, I think it just boils down to the fact that there was too much going on with not enough humor coming about as a result. It makes me think this may all be more involved than a show with ambitions like this one is equipped to handle. As a result, its efforts to draw me in just result in it kind of losing me instead.

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Suppose a Kid From the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town is currently streaming on FUNimation Entertainment.