Monday 30 August 2010

Occult Academy - Episode 9

Although the house in which Maya used to live is about to be demolished (as we learn as this latest episode begins), there isn't much time allocated to worrying about such things as this instalment's featured lesson sees Chihiro giving a demonstration of summoning a spirit.

While the class decide upon the academy's former principle as their "victim" for this summoning (despite Maya's presence), when it comes to the crunch a rather different spirit emerges - that of a young, lost girl who is looking for her family home named Mayoi Hachikuji. Oops, sorry, wrong series... I meant a young girl named Akari.


Of course, you can't just have a ghost wandering around the place, so Maya and friends take it upon themselves to help Akari make it back to her home, except of course everything turns out to be far more complicated than that, as Akari turns into a full-on angry poltergeist and it emerges that she didn't exactly have the happiest and most caring of childhoods. The only solution to the problem is to find Akari's father and persuade him to intervene, but it looks as though this won't be a particularly simple task either...

Honestly, I don't know what's happened to the Occult Academy I've been watching so far all of a sudden, as all of the traits which have made it such an enjoyable series prior to this point have disappeared without a trace this week - you could almost say they've been spirited away. Aside from a couple of very brief moments, the humour that underpinned the entire show has vanished, replaced with a story which is suddenly taking itself far, far too seriously, which might not be so bad if the story was actually interesting and not a dull as dishwater sob story that is about as far from interesting as you can get. What's worse, this storyline is all set to roll-over into next week's instalment as well, which leaves me wondering what they're thinking at this point in time. Unless it proves to morph into something incredibly important next week this was a truly wasted episode and a huge disappointment in what has been a really enjoyable series so far.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Andy is pissed of this week