Angels of Death ep 14 – “For Someone So Insane, You’re Way Too Serious”

• Genre : Josei, Horror, Mystery, Psychological Thriller
• Studio: J.C.Staff

I have a feeling most people jumped ship on this anime at episode 12. The hiatus really did make it look like it wasn’t going to come back. I get it, but this is why you should read my review! How else are you going to know what happened.

Ok so this week was kind of boring. See you all next Sunday!

I’m joking, although not really. This week was kind of boring in my opinion. I do like Ray, more than most people I think, but she just can’t carry an episode. As far as I’m concerned, Rachel was if anything too emotional this week but she fails to convey that in any sort of interesting way. Brushing aside all my meta speculation about Rachel, on a practical basis, she’s incomplete.

The character been used mostly as an audience surrogate and info dump so far and the show hasn’t developed her personality enough beyond that for her to act as a full fledged character yet. Seeing as we have 2 episodes to go, I think it’s fair to assume it just will never happen. I’m not saying this has to be a bad thing, if the story can pull off an interesting reveal then a plot device character is just fine. But you can’t rely on that same character to be your emotional core. It’s simply incompatible. Basically Rachel is fine as long as she’s reacting, either to a situation or a person, but she’s too weak a personality to be a catalyst.

Up to a certain point, I want to blame this on the Visual Novel root. Not that it should matter in any way. An anime should be able to stand on it’s own. But there is a tendency to make Visual novel main characters really plain and basic. Sort of like empty vessels that the player can fill with their own persona. As such, adapting such a character to anime becomes a unique challenge. Then again, I still haven’t played the game. Maybe Game Rachel is fantastically fleshed out.

Beyond my issues with character development though (are you proud of me, that tirade was fairly coherent!), was the actual dialogue this week. As an anime fan, I’ve made concessions for some pretty rocky dialogue in my day. I understand the challenges of translation and even find some of those odd phrasing quite charming really. Still, I should be spending half the episode going WTF are they talking about???? 

Angels of Death does go on some pseudo philosophical soliloquies from time to times that don,t seem to concerned with making much sense but at least they are more or less in line with the nonsense going on in the story. This week, I honestly just couldn’t follow anymore. OK this might be on me, but it sounded like they were just talking to fill up the silence and none of it actually meant anything.

I was so happy when Zack was on screen because at least someone made sense. I’m just going to go ahead and say that again, this week on Angels of Death,  Zack was the Voice of  Reason.

Oh wait, I just said I was writing this for people that haven’t seen the show. OK So Zack, Rachel and Danny are in a Mexican standoff and Rachel shoots Danny instead of Zack because she’s nuts. Then she goes on to give a speech that makes no sense and Zack does what everyone in the audience wants to do. Tells her to shut up and make sense. Mercifully this works but before they leave the floor Rachel needs to go back to her room. She meets the Priest there and they have a conversation that makes no sense. People talk about god a lot.

Also when they go back to the first room, Zack and Rachel find that Danny’s body is gone and for some reason they’re surprised about this. First, Danny has already come back from death. The other may have been illusions but Danny for sure doesn’t tend to die easily. Second, every time they have had to retrace their steps, the bodies left behind are always gone. If we go by this series’ internal logic, there was absolutely no reason for Danny’s corpse to still be there.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger of sorts. Zack and Rachel seem to have patched things up because reasons, and have just discovered a long red carpeted stairway leading up. Rachel mentions remembering being brought down that stairway at some point but she had been blindfolded. This implies that they are normal (if murderous psychopaths) people and that this is a normal place on earth. That would go against everything Angels of Death has been showing us so far.

We all agree that these aren’t normal humans right? Aside from their resilience to losing all their blood, I don,t think anyone has eaten or gotten hungry ever. They don’t seem to need to sleep either, although they did nap once.

Anyways, as they are going up the stairs, they hear a self destruct announcement. Yup…

So bottom line, for me, this was on of the weakest episodes of the series. BUT I still want to know what’s going on. Sure part of that is because there’s only two episodes to go. But I have to believe that it’s not entirely Stockholm syndrome. At some point Angel of Death did weave an intriguing enough mystery to keep at least a small part of me interested.

I managed to get a few more shots:

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