Funny story. I missed (or forgot about) the announcement that this was going to be a two (split) cour season of Beastars. For the last couple of episodes I had a growing conviction that there was no way Itagaki Paru could tie up this many loose ends in the dwindling time remaining. So you can imagine my disbelief when I got to the end of the “final” episode. But this is going to be a Shingeki no Kyoujin style “Final Part 1” kind of affair, so we do have one more cour to come (though I don’t believe we know exactly when).

So – there’s that then. My general take on this season (so far) is that it falls right in-line with its almost concurrent ONA, Link Click Bridon Arc. To wit, a solid step up from a mediocre second season but not a full-on return to the high level of the first. I like a lot of what Beastars did this season but things kind of got a bit scattershot there at the end. And once more I’m highly irritated at the near-total absence of Haru, whose relationship with Legosi was the best part of the series for me.

That said, I thought Legosi’s komodo dragon grandpa was a very nice addition to the cast. As was Sagwan-san, the harbor seal whose perspective was quite different from anyone else in the cast. There was fun little flourishes, like the sloth tattoo artist who worked so slow he put most of his customers in the hospital (or the morgue) from blood loss. The big new additions were Lahya and Melon of course, and about them my feelings were more mixed. Lahya was helped by another great Miki Shinchirou performance (listen hard for the subtle little horsey flourishes he puts in). Melon was just kind of an over the top villain, though his mixed heritage added another interesting element to the series thematically.

On that note, I’m still thoroughly at a loss about what Itagaki is trying to say here, symbolically. But that’s nothing new – the second season scrambled all my assumptions and they remain in that state. Maybe it really is just a story about carnivores and herbivores, but she just seems like too smart a writer based on S1 for it to be that simple. A story like Beastars written in one of the most homogeneous cultures in the world is going to prompt speculation, inevitably. The problem is whatever you try to pair with it from the real world – immigration, racial diversity, gender politics – doesn’t match up neatly. It certainly allows Itagaki to preserve an air of mystery about her intentions.

I’m sure I’ll be talking more about that once the series concludes, when we might even have some clarity about what – if anything – Beastars was trying to say about our own world and Japan’s place in it. My sincere hope is that we transition away from the action hero stuff and the Legosi false demise of the week pattern that’s dominated much of Seasons 2 and 3. Beastars is very good when it’s about relationships – most of all that relationship – and I hope it slows down and gives itself a chance to show that off before it’s done.