Thoughts On The Eureka Seven: AO Finale

I agree, Ao. I felt the same way after watching it.

(Note: Contains E7 and E7AO spoilers)

 

If you haven't read my review of Eureka Seven: AO, here it is in a nutshell: First half was great, second half was a mess with too much plot and not enough clear motivations. The final two episodes, which have finally aired after an annoyingly long hiatus, are actually fine, but make me angrier at the creators than I was before watching them. Not only did this show have a good idea to begin with – the idea was apparently good overall (including all the reveals and ultimate finale concept), but they felt the need to fuck around for about 8-10 episodes in the middle, and then were forced to cram in the entire explanation and pseudo resolution of everything into the last two episodes. In fact, it's mostly in the last episode, since the one before it is basically more setup (in that sense it reminded me a bit of Trinity Blood – another show that tries to explain everything in the last 5 minutes).

I can say that things were generally explained to the extent that I have a pretty good handle on what happened, but why should that be a chore? Why couldn't they properly build up to the finale by slowly revealing things and letting character relations develop naturally instead of having Ao and Renton go through an entire father-son arc of hate, understanding, disagreement, acceptance, sacrifice, etc. in the space of one fucking episode? And the ending is fairly complex and involves multiple timelines and universes, and once again this is basically all confined to the last 20 minutes of the entire show. As a result of this there are plenty of loose ends, and several subplots simply remain unresolved. Fleur was about three seconds away from professing her love for Ao, but then not only is he gone forever – he's erased from the fucking timeline so she doesn't even remember him. And what about Ao and Naru? Yet another subplot that went nowhere. In general the whole Naru merging with the Scub Coral thing was terribly unclear. I also found it somewhat comical that after sacrificing everything to protect the Scubs and make sure they could coexist with humans in E7, Renton is now willing to erase them from existence just so he can raise his kid in peace.

If the finale had been truly awful, I probably wouldn't have even written anything. I would have just said "yeah, it sucked" and that would be it. But it didn't suck. It contained all the elements that I wanted to see, but they should have been spread out over the last ten episodes, not the last two. For example, ultimately the politicking of the world and the power balance between the Americans and Japanese and such ended up being entirely irrelevant and didn't really have an impact on anything, yet it occupied tons of time that could have been used to: 

  1. Flesh out Elena's character and all the weird shit she did.

  2. Explain the whole jumping between timelines and universes concept more.

  3. Let Renton and Ao have more than 2 minutes of combined screen time so their relationship could develop naturally.

  4. Explain more about Naru and the Scub Coral, and flesh out the Ao-Naru storyline.

  5. Provide some kind of resolution for Renton, Eureka, Ao, Naru, Fleur, Elena. Hell – everyone.

  6. Explain more about Truth and how exactly he suddenly became an archetype in the Secret-free universe.

And so on. It was like a computer program was asked how to convey a detailed world and replied: "OUTPUT LINE A: Explain political relations and processes. END OUTPUT." There was a ton of stuff we didn't know or understand about the world of E7, but it didn't matter. They focused on the stuff that advanced the story, and still managed to make a detailed world in the end with zero mentions of international treaties. It's even more offensive to me that the creators of AO had enough good content to last them ten episodes but instead used eight of them mostly for irrelevant filler. If the filler was due to a lack of ideas and things to explain, I'd at least understand why they did it. 

In conclusion, this has to be one of the weirdest shows I've ever seen. Everything about it is terrific except for the show itself. How is that even fucking possible?

 


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