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You know what. Let’s pretend that final episode never happened. |
When Funimation first put up this episode, they only uploaded the first half of the episode. I was thoroughly disappointed that Wonder Egg Priority was somehow going to end on a recap after going on a break for three months. Is that really the best they could have mustered?
Well. Maybe if it had only been that recap, that would have been better. Because this continuation completely shat on everything the series had tried to build up leading to this point. And it’s a shameful stain on the artistic ingenuity and creative vision that clearly went into this passion project. This is like Game of Thrones Season 8 but with cute girls – stupid, incompetent production management/writers getting full of themselves and going off the rails.
Ignoring the stuff that straight up made no sense, like the fact we never even received any resolution on Frill, I find it difficult to believe that Ai, Rika and Momoe would go through life and death to bring back the people they love, only to make the choices they made. Okay, maybe losing their pets was a really traumatic experience. However, I refuse to believe that they would actually choose to run away and give up like that. Not after everything they had gone through.
And for Rika to outright state she was not going to save a ‘robot’. Like hey, that robot was your friend and truly believed in you as one of her homies. And this is how you repay that friendship??? I just thought it was supremely out of character for a girl who had been depicted as a rampant wildfire when it comes to matters she believes in. I did not expect her to acquiesce so quickly like that.
The disturbing ramification of Neiru being in an egg spells it out clearly: she committed suicide after she had been shunned by every single person she had cared about. She deserved so much better than this. Don’t even get me started on those final 3 minutes where Ai eventually ran away. Then came back with a cheesy grin after proclaiming she would try to save Neiru. It disgusts me how fake this final note came across like after the genuine emotional struggles that these girls went through earlier in the series, as well as the genuine bonds they had forged.
Episode 13 completely ruined everything and was a mistake – to the point I would say a recap/no closure after Episode 12 would have been significantly better. It was utterly fake, with no heart and soul whatsoever; a pure production piece churned out to meet contractual obligations from hard animation workers dealt a tough hand through extreme burnout and an incompetent production management team trampling all over their efforts.
As far as I can tell, production management is massively to blame for this shambles. They had three months to work on the final episode, but left it on a back burner. Resulting in a one month crunch will resulted in this pitiful attempt to deliver a finale. I can vaguely get a sense of how the emergency script writing committee went when they realised they were students with no hopes of meeting a deadline after already getting an extension: ‘Ah yes, we’ve been toeing a mysterious line between fantasy/reality all this time in an abstract way. If we ham up the abstract, vague, postmodernist aspects going into the end maybe people won’t notice we have no clue what we’re doing and making up everything as we go along’. They certainly haven’t fooled anyone: if that 5.0-ish rating on MyAnimeList for this final episode is anything to go by.
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. Wonder Egg Priority could have been so much more. That special episode could have been a one hour cut worth three episodes of content to wrap off the series in a wonderful way, which would have been the least it deserved after coming so far in 12 episodes. But apparently it doesn’t get to enjoy a dignified exit. Instead it shall be unceremoniously shunted onto a pile of shows that are relegated to the dredges of history.
And that’s the real tragedy. Wonder Egg Priority could have been so much more with a truly meaningful message for everybody. But that’s the reality of the entertainment industry. Especially the modern anime industry where poor practices lead to mangled scheduling or hardcore burnout. This won’t be the first or the last time either that such a promising series meets a terrible end. Finally, we might become hopeful or feel emotionally attached to premises because of how they start out, but let this be a lesson for everyone to not put all their eggs in one basket – especially Wonder Eggs.
This final episode was all but iirelevant, it sort of just left me scratching my head. This is not the finale this series deserves. And they were basically just trying to justify themselves for a second season. The story was fine the way it was. Why try and extend it? Probably to make producers happy, which is a shame because like you said – it made for a product without a soul. The recap was a lot more fun than this awkward finale.
Thanks for talking about it anyway, I was really interesting in reading your take. 🙂
I was also left scratching my head. I highly doubt a second season happens, because unless the Japanese audience are foolish, I am under the impression WEP blurays won’t sell – bluray sales being the primary metric by which second seasons are typically determined. The only exception is unless the source material is ‘too big to fail’ – but WEP was an original, so that logic would not apply here.
In my head canon Wonder Egg Priority will always be that promising anime that never had a true conclusion. The alternative of considering this disaster as the finale breaks my heart. Not only it’s bad on every possible level, but it’s also unnecessary mean and cynic. Granted, the anime can be considered cruel in many ways, but it was appropriate with the ongoing theme of psychological trauma. This is just the reflection of an overambitious staff that saw their project crumble and that bitterness ended up pouring in this mess as a final outrage.
I don’t blame staff for pouring their bitterness into the work. Especially when their production management put such unrealistic workloads and expectations onto them. As Theyepman said, Umehara Shota had to be hospitalised three times from overwork during Wonder Egg Priority’s production cycle. If that’s any indication of how the rest of the staff were also treated, it’s no wonder WEP eventually fell apart assuming the production management did nothing to alleviate the unrealistic schedule burdens.
The problem are not the overworked animators but the original creator and writer Shinji Nojima who was clearly not on the same page of the director and also had the tendency to add too many plot elements (Frill…) to an anime ill suited to be able to give a closure to everything. While artists should be able to have their breathing space, he should have been restricted by the staff about the scope of the plot. Schedules or not his story was not going to fit in the allocated episodes. This “final” episode looks more like an aborted second season and illustrates quite well how unrealistic the writers of the show were.
A conclusion to WEP is just like series 2 of Darker than Black – we’re still waiting for it.
> Insert skeleton waiting meme
As soon as a I read someone else’s take on this episode, I didn’t hesitate a second to just delete the episode from my hardrive and just not take a glance at it.
The more I see comments about it the more I am certain this was the correct choice.
So as far as I’m concerned, Wonder Egg only had 12 episodes with no conclusion.
Ignorance is bliss.
Probably for the better. But even the 11th/12th episodes verged on stodgy territory.
Oof, yeah, I have similar feelings about that “conclusion”. It also threw in so many more questions and issues.
Neiru being a “robot” made no sense for the themes the show had. Everything pointed to her being a fully living being (how did her wound scar over? Why does she eat and drink? How do robots _dream_?) and this reveal did nothing for the plot.
I didn’t really like how the actual season ended, but was willing to be optimistic because I knew a conclusion was coming. Now I can’t even recommend WEP to anyone because it’s so incredibly unsatisfying.
Big bummer, this.
Now I can’t recommend it to anyone either 🙁
Honestly… I disagree – that this final episode should be the only thing we should pretend didn’t happen.
I’m not the only person that has pointed out that the jank started showing up as soon as episode 2 and there’s people out there who have done everyone quite the service of rewatching the show and noticing that none of it makes any goddamned sense whatsoever.
And that’s even before going into how callously offensive the show is towards women (and the audience’s intelligence), but I know that quite a few people in the anime fandom don’t give a rat’s ass about that subject. Thankfully, it’s not the only bad thing about the show.
Cloverworks allowed and probably pushed Umehara Shota to overwork himself to the point of being hospitalized THRICE. Staffers were losing weight at alarming rates for how hard they were working, split between 3 projects – all of which resulted in abysmal quality for different reasons. Materials were delayed until the last minute and every episode required crunch, and that might explain why no one gave the scripts a second glance – they’re the stupidest writing I’ve seen in a show in years.
I don’t know what people see in this show. It’s terrible, and the “pretty animation” does not compensate for every other thing that’s shit about it, and as we could all see, even the sakuga left the building for the finale.
Abhorrent show. Wish people had noticed earlier, because the writing was on the wall the entire time.
Pretty much. It’s a shame this is just one of the slightly worse stories in terms of how anime production goes, and that crunch/wringing staff until they burn out is the commonplace practice within this industry.
As you said, the writing had been on the wall for most of the time. However, I still held out hope that the fruits of the staff’s intensive labours wouldn’t go to waste.
Looks like the Priority should have been to take care of their animators.
It did feel like an insultingly hackneyed Ikuhara clone, except they were more than happy to bring up controversial topics without elaborating on them in any kind of way. You’d think there’d be more weight to topics like suicide (especially teen suicide) or sexual assault, but many of the reveals felt like it was just to add something spicy to their plot twists regardless of how messed up that is.
Once the Frill episode came around, I didn’t have much hope or excitement for what the 13th episode would bring. As it turns out, it ended up either being a massively underwhelming finale to a show that shat the bed a while back, or an underwhelming hook for a Season 02 as if anyone would gladly return after the Frill plot twist and after hearing about their staff being tortured to pump out episodes in time.
Think you captured it Choya. Felt superficial to bring up controversial topics for what seems to be the sake of controversy, as opposed to seeking to genuinely explore them in a meaningful way..
The end left me wanting more.
This is somewhat just part of Ai’s adventure in the huge landscape of Wonder Egg vs Frill.
Still lots of things I’m wondering about, lots left dangling.
In the end perhaps this is somewhat of an experiment of the studio?
Don’t really follow studio news so that layer is usually unknown to me.
But from other comments and Youtube videos, seems like Cloverworks is not a good place to work at lol