Kekkai Sensen & Beyond – 06

「ゲット・ザ・ロックアウト！！」 (Getto za Rokkuauto!!)
“Get the Lock Out!!”

Steven is acting nice? Run.

I think this episode finally taught me what kind of “sense” a Kekkai Sensen episode should make. It doesn’t need to make logical sense, clearly; the zanier the better. What it should be is relatively easy to understand. Gilbert’s regeneration last episode is a great example—he gets cut, he speaks like two lines, and we’re clued in on what’s going on. The episode prior was too much exposition by half, and this one had two different things going on, one of which required too much exposition (the earthshaker, which was confusing initially) and one which didn’t require much at all (the rapidly evolving bugman). With both in one episode, it ended up overstuffed, and that’s perhaps the real point—

One episode. This Kekkai Sensen is exclusively episodic, and that presents difficulties. The first season did more complicated things with the Black & White arc, but it worked out fine because a moderate amount of exposition, when spread out over a season, doesn’t bombard us with too much exposition at any one time, and it can avoid confusing the viewer. When each of your adventures only lasts an episode, exposition either needs to be brief or easily digestible, lest too much of your limited runtime be wasted on world-building. It didn’t work when they were introducing the stealth werewolves + a villain and her back story, it worked fine when it was all Gilbert all the time, and it only sorta worked this time with the earthshaker stuff and the bugman. If you’ve only got an episode, you can only afford a little exposition. A lot can be done with stylistic elements that don’t require explanation, but they should consider their actual exposition time to be sharply limited. They went over the limit with this one.

Storytelling issues aside, this episode was—okay, I can’t even. Where is Anila!? What happened to her? Why didn’t they tell us at the end! I mean, I assume she’s dead—it seems the fate of most secondary or minor characters in this story—but why no confirmation!? Now I’m just left wondering, and argh!

The best part of this episode was undoubtedly Steven, even if he still spells his name wrong. Seeing him get all happy due to exhaustion, and then later on freak out, was amusing as hell. Everybody else was fine, just doin’ their thing, save for K.K., who is also awesome. They’re probably my favorites, though Leo is also up there. It’s a good thing Kekkai Sensen actually managed to make its main character one of the most likable ones.

I’m still really struggling for meaning with these episodes, though. The meaning of this one was that Leo was wavering, and that, through seeing Klaus work, he regained his determination. Leo was passive in this, and we never saw him take any action outside of that which he’d take anyway. It was tell instead of show, though it’s a good thing they at least told us, otherwise I would have missed it entirely. But without a larger meaning to all of this, what’s the point? Stop doing all these Michella flashbacks, or rather the same flashback, and get to whatever’s going to happen between the siblings now. Or at least stuff that’s already happened which we haven’t seen. Until then, things are just happening, and there’s no rhyme or reason to them. That might be closer to how life actually works, but I expect better from fiction. It isn’t allowed to be as damn stupid as reality can be, see: any newspaper headline in the last two years. Jeez.

Random thoughts:

• After just writing about Yuuki Yuuna, it occurs that legs and eyes are some of the most frequent disabilities in fiction. I wonder why? If I had to guess, it’s probably because it’s immediately apparent how inconvenient it would be, they’re highly visible, but they’re also easy to work around when you have access to narrativium. Not so much the case in real life, I suspect.
• Ohhhh, it’s Gilbert’s niece’s wedding. I was . . . I was assuming something else.
• K.K. saying “Hiiii, Ste[ph]en-sensei” is going to be my new ringtone. Just sayin’.

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