I’m bored.

It seems almost beyond credulity that in a season almost totally devoid of other series I want to follow, I should be on the verge of dropping one like Deca-Dence.  It’s sci-fi, it has my favorite director behind it, and a really good staff – in any season this show should be a slam dunk, much less this one.  But things don’t always follow their expected course, in anime and otherwise, and here we are.  Isn’t that a thing.

One thing Deca-Dence does make clear: big reveals alone can’t carry a series.  It can drop one (via clumsy exposition) every week – and for all I know it will – but unless there’s something interesting going on behind them, they don’t amount to much.  And big plot twists start to lose their impact if you just keep piling them on top of each other, which will be a danger for D-D going forward.  Not that this one – that the “aliens” where actually digitized former humans – came as a huge shock.  That seemed like a pretty strong possibility after the first big plot twist.

To be frank, this all comes off as pretty lazy and uninspired given the pedigree of the names involved.  The constant exposition by explanation is beneath Tachikawa’s standard, plain and simple, but that’s only the most obvious manifestation.  The characters and situations come off as incredibly flat and generic – just as much as they did in the premiere, before we knew what we were watching wasn’t what it seemed.  The goalposts may have moved but the players are the same.  Tachikawa wrote a masterpiece in Death Parade, and Seko Hiroshi did very well with Mob Psycho 100.  But that was an adaptation, and Tachikawa didn’t write this original – Seko did.  Maybe this is just his level.

I don’t know where we go from here, to be honest.  I find Natsume incredibly annoying and Kaburagi a walking cliche, so it seems unlikely we’re going to get much help there.  All of the supporting cast have been NPC-level so far.  There’s some potential in the premise itself, but nothing about it strikes me as especially interesting so far.  Ironically, even after the “game-changer” Episode 2 Deca-Dence is still basically a pastiche of various sci-fi and mecha anime chestnuts, just as it looked like when it started.  And if that weren’t enough, it doesn’t even look all that interesting really, which should have been a given – the animation and fight choreography are nothing special (and CGI-heavy), and the monster design isn’t exactly Made in Abyss-caliber.

I know what Tachikawa-sensei is capable of, and that isn’t a matter of faith – it’s all there in his track record.  He’s clearly better than this, and while just like great bands invariably make one mediocre album if they stick around for a while so it is with anime directors and mediocre series, it would be no shock if Deca-Dence found its stride and become something genuinely engaging.  But the farther we go without that happening the less likely it becomes that it ever will, and in that respect time is not on our side.