To Your Eternity Season 2

Episode 2

“Beating Will” is one of those episodes of To Your Eternity that, unfortunately, acts as a perfect showcase between the powerful difference in quality that can lie between a concept and its execution. It's a damn shame, too, coming so early as it does in this second season. Last week's premiere was certainly rough around the edges, but I truly hoped that a fresh start in this new chapter of the story would be what To Your Eternity needed to get back on track after the lackluster conclusion to its uneven first season. That may have been a foolish thing to hope for, given where the show has taken us, this week.

Here is the concept, the underlying bones of story and theme, that “Beating Will” provides for us: Fushi, having to confront the imminent death of his old friend Tonari, so soon after their reunion, is forced to reckon with how much suffering he will have to endure whenever he allows himself to get close to anyone. When he reviews all of the forms he's taken on over the years, he his shocked to discover that he can now take on Rean's shape, which means she passed on before they could ever meet again. Tonari's form comes to Fushi not long after, and it's enough for him to fall almost completely into a hedonistic kind of despair. Hisame eventually succumbs to the infection of the Nokker in her arm, but as decades pass, or perhaps even centuries, her descendants continue their fruitless efforts to win Fushi's affections. Fushi is tired of losing everyone he loves, though. He cannot reconcile his desire for companionship and his fear of losing every last companion he ever meets.

That's pretty good stuff, all things considered! With Fushi becoming increasingly learned and aware of his own emotions, not to mention the painful traumas that will be inherent to his very existence given the whole immortality thing, this is exactly the kind of meat that TYE ought to be chewing on at this stage of the story. There are certain beats that contain such raw but subtle heartbreak, like Fushi wordlessly reckoning with Rean's death, that indicate how much potential this anime has to be a masterclass of fantasy drama. And yet, when the show tries to execute on all of those ideas, the end result is not nearly as powerful or memorable as it ought to be.

The production issues continue to be a contributing factor to this schism of unrealized potential. To be blunt, “Beating Will” looks pretty awful all the way through. Characters are frequently off-model (and not in a way that indicates any sort of artistic purpose or aesthetic choice), the storyboarding is all over the place, and the pace of the edit still feels rushed and incomplete. Last week, I mentioned that it felt like the scenes were playing at 1.5 speed, but I'm no longer speaking in analogy—I'm convinced that there are some crucial dialogue exchanges, specifically the ones between Fushi and a dying Tonari, that were sped up in post-production. If that isn't the case, the fact that it feels that way is a sign of how something vital has gotten lost in translation from page to screen.

Alternatively, I suppose this could be an issue that is present in the source material, which I haven't read. The way that seemingly important characters are dispatched and forgotten so quickly certainly givens one the impression that the anime is simply blitzing through chapters and making mercenary cuts left and right. The thing is, it makes perfect sense for the audience's sense of time, and their desensitization to the loss of all of the people who come and go throughout our immortal hero's long years, to become warped and stretched right alongside Fushi's. There is a version of this story where the coming and going of all of these people feels totally natural and, if not exactly satisfying, then at least fitting. I just don't think we're getting to see that version of To Your Eternity, and what we have gotten feels extremely compromised.

I'll give the episode credit for one sequence, though: When Hisame started to go on about bearing Fushi's child and “sleeping” with him, I became terrified that the show was going to do exactly what I applauded it for not doing with these characters last week. Thankfully, it ended up being a genuinely sweet and revealing moment that revealed how fundamentally naïve to the ways of the world that both Hisame and Fushi are. It's a good piece of character writing, and one that feels very of a piece with what this story is trying to accomplish. It's just a shame that we only just barely started getting to know Hisame before she was gone from Fushi's life forever.

Or maybe that's entirely the point. Either way, I'm feeling just as aimless and frustrated as Fushi after watching this week's episode, and while that might be a thematically relevant note to end on, I'm not at all confident that it's where the creators of the show actually wanted their audience to be, right now. That's never a good sign.

Rating:

To Your Eternity is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.