Thursday 11 September 2008

World Destruction - Episode 10

I hate to be the kind to cheer with glee that a particular series is coming to a close as it always seems a bit harsh, but reaching the ten episode milestone of World Destruction has left me feeling somewhat relieved, such is the abject mediocrity of this series.

Indeed, this particular episode could well be a poster boy for "ideas that have been used before in myriad other movies and anime series, only much better", as the World Destruction Committee pay a visit to Clock Town (that's Clock Town, before you start misreading things and getting weird ideas), a town patrolled almost entirely by bland and generic looking robots. These robots are only programmed to take commands from beastmen, while of course allows Toppi to take control of one robot before this is noted, and said robot then decides more or less under his own will to save the gang at the end of the episode in an utterly predictable climax. Just to complete the charade, this robot also manages to save himself for a situation where it would be physically impossible to do so. Wall-E this episode ain't.


Apart from all that, all we learn in this episode is where Morte and company have to head for next as the Destruct Code interfaces with a Destruct Code Detector (if they'd built one of these in episode one it would have saved us a lot of bother most likely), which isn't a particularly exciting revelation, especially given the way this episode was set up to offer us something a little more substantial.

The more of this series I watch, the more its ideas feel like they've been pulled from various other sources, written down in unreadable scribbles, mauled by kittens with extremely sharp claws, then randomly stuck back together again to form plots for each episode. I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that most of the plots we've seen in this series aren't just old hat, but they're badly realised as well. To think, I was actually quite excited for this series after watching the opening episode. It just goes to show that you can't judge a book by it's cover. Or something.

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