Platinum End ep 7- Saki Saves the Day

There’s a sort of tradition with the episode reviews on this site. Whenever I get a bit too snarly for my own good, the series puts me back in my place by immediately proving me wrong. Last week, I had a bit of fun at Saki’s expense, because I found her character fantastically useless in the show and of course, Platinum End showed me the error of my ways.

I have been humbled!

In episode 7 of Platinum End, Saki finally showed us what she’s capable of by watching the action on TV while carefully avoiding adding any commentary or insight. She also told us that she was tired at one point. Girl boss!

Oh but wait, there’s more. Well not for Saki. I mean you can’t expect her to do everything after all. But we did get some character development for Mukaido. We learned that aside from his many hardships, the poor man is also incapable of logical reasoning. This was properly foreshadowed in the last episode mind you. But we got confirmation this week when for some reason, he was absolutely flabbergasted that Metropoliman would go as far as to kill using something other than his white arrows…

I guess having a teenage girl turn other teenage girls into ribbons didn’t really count. Also, why did he think Metropoliman had scruples? He was a witness to the guy shooting a child with his red arrow only to murder her in front of a stadium full of people. What exactly in that experience made him think that Matropoliman is going by some sort of code.

This wouldn’t make much sense under normal circumstances. Just like it wouldn’t make sense for Mikaido to clamly watch Mirai and Metropoliman fight for 10 minutes, without moving or even trying to aim, to then suddenly try to shoot Metropoliman with guns at the last minute. It would be weird pacing and a clumsily written fight scene.

OR it makes perfect sense and is very efficiently written to show us that Mikaido’s illness has advanced to the point that it’s messing with his mind and making him irrational. It’s sad but I am impressed at how subtle the narrative is about letting us know this fact!

Oh, I genuinely did like Mirai asking How could you kill all those people and Metropoliman answering It’s probably thanks to the arrows and wings I got. That was a good answer. It made me smile, It was funny on purpose and that’s a welcomed change. Metropoliman also did the classic bad guy move where he started to monologue instead of murdering their behinds. Like I have no idea why any of the protagonists survived but ok.

The latter half of the episode was mostly just Mirai slumping into self-pity. There was a speech. You should probably go read someone else’s review if you want details on that. I’m not very good at this. I didn’t care about anything that happened during this part to be honest.

I did however make a few notes regarding production. Now, most of you probably noticed that there were some clips from previous episodes used. I’m always wary when a show starts pulling out the flashbacks this early, especially when there’s no real narrative reason for it. But what you may not have noticed is just how often Platinum End reuses cells.

Because I take screencaps, I can see that there are consistent instances of completely identical visuals, no one at all has moved in the scene, with a change of dialogue. Often these cells have different imagery spliced in between so when you are just watching the episode, it’s not just one long still shot, but it does amount to the same thing for animation purposes. Although this is something I’ve noticed in every episode, it was glaring this week. About 15% of my screencaps were duplicate images. That’s almost impressive!

Previous Episodes

• Platinum End ep 1 – A Messy Start
• Platinum End ep 2- With Great Power
• Platinum End ep 3- Amore
• Platinum End ep 4- How Blasé
• Platinum End ep 5- Everybody Hates Metropoliman
• Platinum End ep 6- Another Fakeout