What They Say:
God abandoned the world on Sunday. As a result, nobody in the world can die or have kids. A little girl – Ai – is the grave keeper for the village and is tasked with helping the would-be dead try and find peace. However, one day a boy who identifies himself as Hampnie Hambart – the Man-eating Toy – appears in the village killing everybody and disturbing the balance of things. Upon their first encounter both Ai and Hampnie come to realize shocking truth…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The previous episode took a bit of time to get where it was going, but the way they brought Scar back into the fold worked nicely and gave us a bit more of an insight into the gravekeepers themselves and a bit more on how the world itself works. That finally brought the group back together, with the newer additions we got from Goran as well, and they’re now back on the road and traveling right along. The latest stop has them coming to the town where Alis came from, a town where there are no living or dead left anymore. As we see from the prologue, things went badly in the school here, and in class 3-4 in particular, with a whole lot of bloodshed and violence. But now, as they’ve discovered, there’s nobody here and a barrier that prevents access to a certain part of the school.
Not surprisingly, Ai is set to help Alis do what needs to be done in order to set things right, and everyone else is along for the ride since she’s done well by them so far. For Alis, it’s a bit of trust in others that he has to deal with, but after all that’s happened since Goran, he’s fairly accepting of Ai’s help at this point. Beyond the barrier gives us the town from fourteen years prior, where we see how things are almost in a perfect happy place as the group is able to sort of settle into it for the time being. It’s through this entry that Alis is reunited with Dee once again, but she’s young, innocent and alive when she should actually be dead and gone. There’s a strange nature to the town in general and even a spot or two where we see how Alis learned in the past that he can move between the two worlds in order to get back to the real thing and figure out what’s going on.
The back and forth of events that’s explored here is quite interesting as we see more and more of how the world that now exists in this place works. In essence, it comes across as a place wished into existence and that means it works by its own rules and allows those that are there to survive in a curious way. It’s a kind of groundhog day in that the residents reboot nearly every year before the tragic events that are then nullified. As Alis goes on about it, he makes it clear that the whole thing is just a massive cage with everyone inside unaware that they’re actually captured up in it. The foundations for this arc are nicely set and with Alis getting a bit more background, it finally makes him a bit more accessible as well.
In Summary:
Though the series lost a good bit of its energy for me along the way, this arc and the tidbits in the previous episode about the gravekeepers has certainly kept me interested in it all. Giving us a groundhog day like place where there is such a tragedy that was dealt with, and providing for enough quirks in the larger situation as well with the way the dead are handled, well, it means we get a murky but intriguing story that leaves you uncertain of just how it will all be resolved. If it can even be resolved, in fact. With Alis taking more of a primary role here and getting a good bit of support from everyone else, he finally becomes a bit more interesting and engaging here as well, which helps quite a lot. I’m still not completely sold on it but it’s certainly interesting.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
