Magia Record: Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica Gaiden- 02

While most everything about Magia Record: Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica Gaiden is competent enough as long as you can get past the bargain basement production values, I’m still struggling with it.  This series has a pretty high bar to clear for me – to wit, showing a reason why it needs to exist.  At least one that’s more compelling than the case offered by pretty much every other post-Urobuchi Gen Urobuchi Gen series – to cash in on what he started.

That said, there are some interesting stylistic touches at work here, just as there were in the first series.  That “Gauche Burger” really should have been named “Creepy Burger” because that was a very unsettling bit of set design.  Those enclosed tables with the projections on the walls – the happy-happy imagery paired with disturbing messages.  There are signs that things have gone over very Orwell in this universe in the time since the first series ended.

Apart from that, though, I was pretty bored by the time this episode ended.  I’m not really feeling any of the characters and the plot feels about as generic mahou shoujo as you could ask for.  I’m sure, this being in the Madoka Magica mythology, things will get very dark before we’re done.  But most of the time these sequels to Urobuchi shows end up playing like a competent cover band at a casino bar in Vegas – not unpleasant background noise, but never seeming worth your undivided attention.

ID: INVADED – 02

I feel after the second episode of ID: INVADED mostly as I did after the first.  There’s the germ of something interesting here, but you have to wade through a lot of piffle to try and get at it.

While the ID Well Sakaido dives into this week is less surrealistic than the last one, the overall structure and tone of the episode is pretty similar.  Which is to say, lots of interesting loosely connected tidbits and a blend of clumsy exposition and incomprehensibility which is particularly unsatisfying.  We also have the interesting spectacle of Sakaido seemingly being placed in close proximity to the men he captures, presumably in the hope that he’ll drive them to kill themselves.  He seems perfectly OK with this, even proud of it – if that turns out to be the perspective of the series itself, that’s pretty messed up.

I can’t shake the impression of a series which is very proud of how clever it is, but is in reality just kind of silly.  At some point it’s going to have to do a better job o explaining itself than just throwing a bunch of made-up terminology and “that’s how it is” at the audience (or who knows, maybe it won’t bother).  And I’m sort of interested in what the deal is with Sakaido, who on some level appears to be a victim being exploited by big brother here, but also seems to believe his grief over his daughter’s murder gives him license to do whatever he wants. Whether that’s going to be enough to keep me around much longer is a dubious proposition, though.