“That person… Edward.”
What They Say:
“Questions”
Vanitas comes to the rescue and helps Noé and company battle Charlatan’s curse-bearers. Noé questions Vanitas’s methods. Some unexpected help arrives when they face another threat. Noé confronts Vanitas, but will it bring them together or tear them apart?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I expected this would be the case from my exposure to Pandora Hearts, but Vanitas is indeed as chaotic as I could’ve imagined. It feels like it should be an absolute mess, but its execution is just magnificent enough to hold it all together and deliver something mostly coherent and cohesive. The direction, animation, and music make it feel like a series of perpetual climaxes.
While there’s a lot to digest from this episode, the biggest takeaway is the difference between how Vanitas and Noe see their seemingly common goal. It reminds us that the two of them more or less ended up working together without really establishing any shared worldview. But if we think back, it’s definitely true that both of them, especially Vanitas, had always vowed to achieve very specific ends in their own very specific ways, and there was never any guarantee that those would align.
After getting to know Noe in so much depth last episode, his reactions to the horrors they’re faced with garner an earned degree of sympathy from the audience. But in acting unpleasantly, Vanitas forces Noe, and us along with him, to accept the cruelty of the world even with the best equipment to combat it, and in the process actually receives development that elevates his own character. Vanitas has always been fighting for what he believes in, so seeing what he’s had to endure in that process adds a great deal of complexity to him in a very different way than Noe’s flashback functioned last time.
In between all the character moments are more wild battles from all around, introducing more characters and quickly moving on to the next topic. Want Domi being a badass and then in a compromising position? You’ve got it. Want Jeanne to bust in with rage and power from her feast the last time we saw her? You’ve got it. Want to see each character, old or new, seem like the most impressive specimen for about 60 seconds until the next one arrives and absolutely dethrones them? There’s plenty of that, all within a relatively brief selection of the episode. Like I said, it’s very chaotic. The longer it goes on, the more it seems like it shouldn’t work at all, and yet it mostly does.
Still, the character moments, particularly dealing with our two leads, is by far the most valuable material. Their interactions have already been highlights in the early episodes, but they were a bit shallow in those lighter moments. There was lots of fun comedy and cool posturing here and there, but we hadn’t really gotten the opportunity for the two of them to be forced to confront each other and weigh their respective values against each other.
No matter how outlandish the lore, action, and plot twists become, that relationship is sure to always be the core of the series, and this is a critical turning point. Although both have had rather intimate on-screen interactions with women in the past few episodes, there’s certainly a sense of a deeper relationship budding between the two of them, even if only teased to pander to certain subsets of the fanbase. Either way, it adds more to their dynamic than it detracts.
In Summary:
When Vanitas doesn’t have a simple structure like the previous episode, it jumps all around with chaotic abandon. Due to its solid character writing and generally polished execution, this works better than it should. What really matters, though, is the development of the two leads, especially Vanitas.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Funimation
