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Taboo Tattoo
Episode 12

by James Beckett,

How would you rate episode 12 of
Taboo Tattoo ?
Community score: 2.1

And with that, Taboo Tattoo has finished its run. It's been a pretty crazy ride for everyone involved, and this episode pulls out all the stops in an attempt to deliver the slam-bang finale it's clearly been trying to build up. Does this final episode deliver? Does Taboo Tattoo hold its own as a successful example of action-packed anime entertainment?

Sadly, the answer is no. Not at all.

Taboo Tattoo started off with a moderate amount of promise. Its early episodes, while messy, were certainly capable of delivering some decent entertainment. Somewhere around its halfway point though, the show devolved into an incoherent and ugly mess. Any hopes that the show might recover in its final dash toward the finish line have been sadly extinguished, as it ends with an episode as sloppy and unsatisfying as anything released this season.

Picking up right where we left off, with Seigi impaled on a mound of spikes as Izzy and the others rush to join his fight against Arya, the show quickly devolved into more technobabble nonsense. Arya rattles off some newfound rules and requirements about tattoos that might have meant something back in episode 5, but coming up so close to the end just makes them seem trite and arbitrary. Plenty of other productions have been accused of making stuff up as they go along, but I'm convinced that is literally true in Taboo Tattoo's case. The rules and mechanics of the tattoos have never been well explained or defined, and that frustrating obliqueness has bled into every aspect of the script. Nothing about Arya especially has ever made a whole lot of sense, and even in these final minutes of the season, her motivation and exposition all just jumbles together into some kind of barely recognizable Villain Scheme. It's weak and lazy writing compounded by underwhelming performances and lackluster direction. No amount of action or humor or giant monster battles can save this episode from crumbling under the weight of it all.

The humor was actually more off-putting than usual this week. While the show has always flirted with political satire, especially in regards to the actions and operations of the US military, this week it decided to straight up make a joke out of Colonel Sanders and his crew. His incredibly dumb name aside, the Colonel has barely had a presence in the show; his only real purpose seems to have been the last-minute reveal of being Izzy's adopted dad that we got last week. Any pathos or emotional drama that might have lent the story is completely wasted here though, since he's reduced to raving about nuking Arya on a matter of American principle, only to then be reduced to over-the-top wailing when nothing comes of his plan. It's an especially forced and not terribly amusing gag, speaking to Taboo Tattoo's general inability to tell good jokes.

After that, the back half of the episode is essentially one long protracted fight between two kaiju, one formed by Arya's magic and the other a result of Professor Wiseman activating a virus that combines Seigi, Izzy, and BB's souls into one giant monster thing. I'm honestly not clear on how the whole thing works. Still, one nice thing I can say about this episode is that it produces some decent-looking giant monsters. The fleshy H.R. Giger-esque designs look pretty neat.

But these designs are immediately undercut by the shoddiest, messiest animation the show has produced so far. There are multiple instances of the two monsters grappling and punching at each other where, in an effort to simulate actual motion, the camera just zooms in and out rabidly on fluctuating CG models. A couple of shots are obvious animation loops that have been conspicuously mirrored and recycled over and over. It's momentously underwhelming, especially since competently animated fight scenes have been this show's only saving grace for a while now.

To top it all off, the season ends with Arya escaping, somehow, while the army celebrates for seemingly no reason at all, as Seigi and Izzy take a moment to rest. If anything of importance was accomplished apart from inconveniencing a villain for a short while, I have no clue what it is. We even get some brief shots of future material involving a seemingly evil United States President, more Arya clones, and a weirdly specific (and somewhat dated) Platoon gag. Whether this is for a legitimate second season or just advertising future manga material, I don't know, but I really hope that it's the latter option.

I really didn't want Taboo Tattoo to turn out this way. Even with its shaky start, I was rooting for the show to succeed. I don't like being so overly critical for so long. Still, it's my job to call it as I see it, and Taboo Tattoo was a dud through and through. It had some strong choreography and interesting action scenes in the very beginning, but incoherent scripting and weak characterization marred the show badly in the end. This is bargain bin material, the worst of the season by a fair margin, and I'm sure it will quickly be forgotten, lost in the shadowy fog of mediocrity.

Rating: D

Taboo Tattoo is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.


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