All’s well that ends well…
What They Say
The anomaly brought on by Dizelmine continues to engulf Earth. As everyone watches helplessly, Yoko continues to believe in Madoka, who disappeared into the Rin-ne.
The Review:
Inside the Rinne, Madoka and the others find Dizelmine on the beach, where Yurikano is standing by him – and the Rinne is changing in tune with Dizelmine’s inner desires. As the place starts to close up, Madoka insists on leaving, and on taking Yurikano and Dizelmine with her. Moid, meanwhile, realises that his thousands of years of scheming have been for nothing – but doesn’t get much of a chance to do anything about it…
Slightly annoyingly, it seems that last week’s episode was really the payoff to the story of the Rinne, as this episode simply picks up the pieces – the first half covering the girls’ return from the Rinne to the real world, and the second half going for the “what happened next” approach as graduation comes and goes and the worlds of the Polyhedron get to grips with the idea of ‘peace’ – which in this case comes with a Jersey Club twist.
The Rinne, for all its dark power, responds to the inner feelings of those who carry Memoria – and once you put the happy-go-lucky trio of Madoka, Lan and Muginami in the middle of it, no amount of dark feelings is ever going to stand a chance. Even Moid takes the “Oh, well…” approach to defeat, after a brief flirtation with rage – before fate catches up with him and makes sure that he won’t get a second chance at creating mayhem. All of which could be taken as a bit of a damp squib, as the darkness dissolves, replaced by happier (and, apparently, far more useful) things that go out into the universe in the name of helping people, in true Jersey Club fashion. It’s epic, but in a distinctly Lagrange way, and I’m not quite decided yet on whether that’s a good thing or bad.
The problem is: we’ve been conditioned from years of anime to expect truly dark things at the end of shows like this – stick a teenager in a mech, and the spectre of Evangelion is always there, raising expectations that the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket. Lagrange has been up-front about not playing by that playbook right from the start – the lead trio here are clearly no Shinji / Asuka / Lan, and the relentlessly positive outlook of the series tells you there’ll be a happy ending. But all the way through, I’d had this little voice telling me that the series was going to turn. Riiight… about.. NOW… – and then I’d feel disappointed or cheated when it didn’t.
And therein lies the show’s achievement. It’s been its own creature from the start, never really flinching from what it set out to be, and showing us that you don’t have to be a moody, emotionally-unstable loner with a shopping list of personality issues if you want to save the world. You can save it by simply being yourself and caring about others. There’s nothing unusual about the Jersey Club, other than the circumstances that brought them together, and they just did what they thought was right. There’s probably a lesson in there, somewhere.
For all aggravation I felt through the series on account of it not going where I expected it to, come the end of this episode I realized that, despite all that, it had actually ended how I wanted it to – even though I didn’t realize that for most of the run. Lagrange ultimately left me with a dose of the warm fuzzies, and more than a little disappointed that the show’s run has come to an end.
In Summary:
Not the ending that I was expecting, but still an effective and entertaining way to round off the story. Perhaps not meriting Madoka’s trademark “Maru!” (“Perfect!”), but still worth seeing nonetheless.
Content Grade: B+
Streamed by: Viz Media
