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sw00ty

  • Joined Jul 6, 2016
  • 28

In case anyone hasn't watched the original Blood Blockade Battlefront, here's the skinny; it's a heavily stylised series which can effectively be summarised as a blitzkreig for the eyes, in that it constantly pelts you with new and unnecessary characters and comedic sub-plots until it's easy to forget what the franchise is actually supposed to be about. The show's attitude to world-building, narratival construction, characterisation and character development are similar to my attitude towards cooking; don't spend too long on anything and hope it looks impressive enough to fool yourself.

Thankfully, this season Bones has decided to actually include things such as, y'know, character-centric narrative arcs, and BBB is all the better for it. Though we're still following Leonardo Watch, the young man who gained new eyes from an eldritch entity and found himself working for a clandestine pseudo-vampire-hunting group in a half-Otherworld New York (the whole set-up is really too bizarre and winding for me to go into more detail here) this time the extended cast is allowed to shine in episodes that explore their backgrounds and personalities. As we're still in very monster-of-the-week territory, there are very few arcs that survive the entire season, more-so vignettes and brief fly-by tours of supporting characters' lives, but it beats the hell out of the weird last-minute-profundity of season one, and I actually found myself being able to tell what the heck was going on most of the time, which helped immensely. Generally, when an episode in Beyond begins a story, it carries it to the end credits rather than dropping it halfway, as did the capricious child that was the first season.

Still, style remains the main draw of the franchise, boasting as it does a carefully-selected soundtrack, a mostly rapid pace and a really interesting way of melding New York topography and gritty underground-resistance imagery with sky-high monsters that, in the BBB universe, are actually fairly commonplace. Characters are, sadly, still more visually interesting than wholly compelling AS characters (and there at least three too many of them), and while the last two episodes are strangely engrossing for a series that finds more comfort in rapid car chases and exploding blood crosses, we're still not exactly looking at Fullmetal Alchemist here, folks. One thing that I would love to see more of in a prospective third season is more of a focus on interpersonal relationships, as the likes of Leonardo and Chain, or K.K. and Klaus, feel like they have more meat on their shared bones than has been picked at in the franchise thus far. 

TL;DR

I'm not quite sure what makes fans of the series think of this as anything more than "just decent", but if you were a fan of the first season (or if you liked aspects of it but yearned for more focused storylines and character arcs) then you should be well-served here. '& Beyond' IS, whatever else I might think of BBB, a marked improvement over the first installment and if we can improve from here then I think this might really be a grower.

And please continue leaving the Black and White and Lord of Despair or whatever stuff for cameos and flashbacks, because they aren't needed and I really don't miss them.

4/10 story
8/10 animation
8.5/10 sound
6/10 characters
6/10 overall

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