Angel Beats! 08 – Clones, Battles and Characterisation

As can be expected of this series, the eighth instalment of Angel Beats! was a wild ride indeed. And yet – despite the humour, action and adventure – for the majority of the episode, it looked as though we would get almost no plot progression. Until… wham! We received an absolutely killer ending (with yet another cliffhanger), which provided an excellent set-up for the remainder of the season.

Tenshi 2 shows off her sprinting prowess.

I’ll start my impressions off by stating what might be the obvious: there were a lot of parallels here to the second episode of the series. From the journey to Guild to the killing off of the SSS members one by one, it was pretty much the same journey, only with different obstacles to overcome and no backstory being told. This allowed for some fantastic jokes referencing the team’s prior adventure and made this a very funny ride (I also loved the dig at shonen action series); the action was also very well done. Suffice to say that standing alone, this was an excellent episode. As part of a larger work, though, it was something of a let-down. My main gripe with it was that I was left frustrated by so much repetition, especially so late in the game. In addition to this, even though the conclusion made things worthwhile, I’d question the director for taking so much time to build up to a rather simple reveal. The use of suspense would have made the wait forgivable, but that wouldn’t exactly have fit with the rest of Angel Beats!. Anyway, there are only four episodes left and there’s still a lot of ground that the series needs to cover. Now, with the addition of a powerful antagonist in the form of the fused Tenshi, I’m worried that the ending will be a rush job. I really hope that the series can get itself together, because this series just has so much potential and I don’t want to see it wasted.

Yui continues to polarise.

While I wasn’t all that pleased with this episode, it really reminded me how much I love the show’s characterisation. The series is excellent in the sense that it has characters who are so charming and yet so mysterious. They also behave in ways that make sense (which can be a rarity in works of fiction). Hear me out: when crazy things are thrown at them, the characters in Angel Beats! all act in ways that fit who they are. Naoi, for instance, remains cold and rational but still sweet to Otonashi; Yui remains annoying/adorable, depending on how you look at things, and babbles; Hinata is selfless, as you’d expect from him; etc. etc. On a related note, I loved how things were set up with Kanade and the doppelgangers. She’s a passive girl – you could even see it in the way she responded to the SSS, way back when she was viewed as the antagonist – and this characteristic was further accented by the fact that her aggression was transferred to her doppelgangers. I thought that this was a really nice touch and an extremely clever move too. It transformed the doppelgangers from battling clones into worthy adversaries.

Yuri tries out the yandere look.

With talk of characterisation in Angel Beats!, it’s inevitable that one comes to talk about Yuri. She’s an outstanding leader and really great to watch, but I have to wonder if there’s more to her than what meets the eye. My rationale for thinking this is that the other characters seem to have more facets to their personalities than she does. Yui and Naoi both have two distinct sides to them, Kanade and Otonashi are shaped by their experiences in this world (she being alienated and he being new to the afterlife), and the others are largely enigmas. Yuri, however, is an outlier. With her, unlike with so many others, things seem to be presented as black and white. Even though so many role-shifts have taken place in the series so far, she’s always the ‘good guy’ who’s bravely fighting the ‘bad guy’. One could argue that her treatment of Kanade in earlier episodes marks her morals as more ambiguous, but this can largely be glossed over because she was doing what she believed was right. So is she simply a unique case? Or is there something she or the creators are hiding? Strangely enough, I want to believe the latter. I’m craving a bit more depth from her character, and I think that Jun Maeda can give that to me.