What They Say:
One day a weird tentacle creature destroys 70% of the moon and threatens to do the same to Earth in a year. However in exchange for being allowed to teach a group of misfit students called the E-Class, he’ll allow them to try and assassinate him. With the chance to earn 10 billion yen and prove their worth to the world, the kids are willing to give it a shot, but this thing might just end up being the best teacher they’ve ever had.
The Review:
Content (warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
So this episode ended up getting delayed a week, due to a certain violent incident occurring in Japan around the same time. Exactly how that’ll affect the show’s airing schedule going forward hasn’t really been stated, but this episode was the only one to air today so presumably it’s pushing everything back a week. Hopefully this won’t have any serious repercussions on the adaption going forward, but with that bit of (kinda) bad news, it’s time to move on to the actual episode.
After a couple of fun antics regarding Karasuma becoming a new teacher for the class, this week brings us the introduction of the student from the end of the previous episode named Karma. He comes off as a bit of a violent delinquent and appears to be far dangerous than the others in the class in terms of how much of an actual threat he poses to Korosensei. Normally his kind of character is well-worn since they tend to be kind of one-dimensional in their insanity, but thankfully there’s a little more to him than meets the eye.
His assassination attempts on Korosensei are a initially closer to success than the others, and he’s the first to actually exploit Korosensei’s greatest weakness: That he has to maintain the appearance of a teacher. Surprisingly enough, it works pretty well in the beginning and he manages to throw Korosensei completely off his game for a while. It ends up backfiring in a pretty amusing way though as Korosensei begins directing more of his attention towards Karma’s tactics and utterly trivializing them by showing off his speed. Despite the somewhat goofy nature of the situation, Korosensei’s approach to the problem actually does feel fairly teacher-like and once again shows that he’s pretty good teacher.
Eventually, Karma to crack a little, and he decides to go for a more desperate attempt in taking out Korosensei. During this, the show gives him a bit of backstory by showing how he was betrayed by one of his teachers when he decided to stand up for a bullied student and ended up getting sent to Class E because the student he fought was an elite. This doesn’t really do anything to explain his personality (not that the show really needs to), but it does tie pretty nicely into some of the social commentary regarding Japan’s views on education as situations like that certainly aren’t unheard of. It also shows that much like the rest of the Class E students, Karma’s misguided moreso than anything else, and like with the others Korosensei’s influence may better him in the long run, and though Korosensei outfoxes him again, the end of the episode shows that he’s already starting to have an effect on him.
In Summary:
Assassination Classroom’s third episode brings the introduction of the class’s problem student and it’s a pretty fun one as he presents a good challenge to Korosensei and turns out to be fairly interesting in it’s own right. Hard to say if the episode was really worth dealing with delay, but it was certainly another solid entry for the show. Hopefully the show manages to keep that up going forward.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: FUNimation
