Resolution? What resolution?
What They Say:
In the crooked city of Ergastulum, “Handymen” Nick and Worick are the guys to call on for dealing with trouble. During one of their jobs, they get mixed up with a prostitute named Alex, who’s pimp is next on their target list. However little do they know that their fates are about to become intertwined…
The Review:
Content (warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
So, uh…that was…a thing. I wasn’t really expecting there to be any major resolution given the amount of time left, but that has to be the biggest “go read the manga” slap in the face I’ve ever seen an anime adaption dish out. There’s not even an attempt at pretending to close a few of the plotlines raised and as a result we’re left with an episode that’s okay-ish on it’s own, but as a finale is almost cartoonishly frustrating in regards to how much it fails at being one. There’s a lot to say about where this adaption went wrong, but before I get into that, I suppose we should talk about what actually happened (or didn’t) in this episode.
The episode opens up with a series of flashbacks to Alex’s history of coming to Ergalstrum in the first place. It’s intentionally jumbled, but the two biggest pieces of interest are that she apparently came to the city in search of the person who murdered her parents and that she may have actually met Nic sometime before. It’s not terribly hard to piece two and two together on that one, but since this is the last episode it doesn’t really matter, although it certainly would have been interesting to see play out. From there, Nic gets involved with the search for Connie while Marco deals with her grandmother’s anger at getting caught up in all this again. Seems that Marco used to be a member of the Hunter group called the Esminets that’s currently attacking the city and that since he’s now sided with the Twilights, they kidnapped Connie in retaliation. Again none of this really means anything to the adaption itself right now, but it at least gives us a bit of information regarding how the Hunters are as physically evolved as the Twilights are (minus the defects) that immediately plays out in the next part.
Worick has his own chaos to deal with when one of the Hunters named Striker decides to attack the Monroe Family hideout. Worick decides to take charge in the fight against him, and it’s a surprisingly well directed and decent looking action scene. Sadly, while he manages to hold his own, Worick’s not really any match for him, and ends up getting tossed out a window. We’re then treated to a nice bit of internal monologue about Worick’s refusal to accept the gulf between Normals and Twlights, which more specifically means himself and Nic, and how they can’t be equals. Of course his exact feelings on the matter are a little more complex than just wanting them to be equals but none of that matters because that’s the exact spot where the episode ends.
As you can imagine, this leaves a ton of questions open. What about Connie’s kidnapping? Will Delico ever actually reunite with his sister for the amount of time the show spent on it last week, and for that matter will Alex ever see her brother Emilio again? You’ll be getting none of those answers here, and to make matters worse, the show doesn’t even have the decency to wrap up the Twlight Hunter invasion. I partially suspect that we were supposed to have one more episode to resolve at least a couple of these things, but the show’s production problems, and that recap episode we ended up getting as a result may have put a stop to that. Alas we’ll never really know the answer, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re left with an utter mess of a finale.
Ultimately, I think this adaption tried to do too much. The kind of story the series is going for is one with an ongoing structure where things build up and and connect to each other rather than having any sort of individual arcs, which really doesn’t play well into a single cour anime. This frankly either needed to be 24-26 episodes with it’s own ending, or it should have just adapted the first 4 volumes of the manga straight. The former could have made for something more worthwhile in regards to how ambitious it was, and while the latter would have ended things right at the introduction of the Esminets, that would have been a much less obnoxious ending than what we actually got. At this point all I can say is well…go read the manga. Preferably from the beginning if possible, since it does a much better job at balancing moods than the anime did and it’s better structured. Gangsta’s anime adaption is far from the worst thing out there, but the production issues, combined with this non-ending makes it pretty hard to recommend.
In Summary:
Gangsta goes out on a whimper as despite an otherwise, decent episode in regards to direction and action, it ultimately fails to resolve absolutely any of the various things it’s raised over the last few episodes. This adaption just had way too much ambition for a single cour series and mixed with the show’s various production problems, ended up making it far weaker than it could have been otherwise. The Gangsta manga is good stuff, but in light of this non-ending, it’s hard to direct anyone towards the anime in good faith
Episode Grade: D
Series Grade: B-
Streamed By: Funimation, Hulu
This episode pissed me off…a lot.