To Your Eternity Season 2

Episode 7

Non-American media is much more comfortable balancing and juxtaposing out-and-out farce with grave drama, and it's a feature of anime in particular that I've come to really love and appreciate over the years. That said, every man has his limits, and “Crime and Forgiveness” is one of those episodes that I think I would have liked a lot more if it wasn't focused on such a goddamned goofy character as Bon. It's one thing to put the comedic relief character in a high-stakes situation to really amp up the emotional impact of a story, but To Your Eternity seems to have gotten that concept confused with “doing a bunch of silly shit, and then suddenly deciding that we're a serious and sad drama again”, and it never really bothers to make either version of itself feel compatible with the other.

Take the entire opening section of the episode, where Bon finds himself trapped in that suspended prison cell opposite Todo's, with only a starving young boy named Chabo to keep him company. This is a kid who was imprisoned and orphaned by the Church of Bennet for the petty crime of stealing bread, and now he and Bon are being actively tortured and starved by Cyralis and the other clergy simply for the sake of their politically motivated anti-Fushi spectacle. Bon has to be the one to reveal the murder of Chabo's mother, and all the while Bon and Todo can only sit and wait for their inevitable demise, since Fushi is currently down for the count. It's the darkest and deadliest situation that any of our characters have faced all season, and it's just the kind of life-or-death conflict that could drive a guy like Bon to figure his life out for once, and become the kingly sort that he always could have been, underneath all of his campy swagger.

Why, then, did the episode feel the need to frame this half of the episode like it was some hacky sitcom? Why did Chabo's character have to be defined by that idiotic face-slapping gag? Why did the music, and the direction, and the acting all have to go so far out of their way to convince us that there was absolutely no danger to worry about whatsoever, even though the gang's situation is so dire that there is no point in trying to pretend otherwise? It all just completely defeats the purpose of the entire episode, and I think it really kills a lot of the weight of Bon's final sacrifice, since, for me at least, Bon never grew out of his own obnoxiousness enough for me to give a damn about him.

It doesn't help that Fushi's story is set mostly on the backburner this week, if you'll pardon the pun. Yes, his newfound ability to generate molten heat is indeed a nifty powerup, and the image of his cast-off shell's body writhing out of his iron prison would have been cool, but this is yet another example of the show's chintzy production values smothering most of its potential. Fushi's prison break only ever looked either goofy or cheap, when it needed to look nothing short of mythic.

The same goes for Bon's green-mile walk to the gallows. The Church of Bennett is so comically evil that there was never any remote chance that they'd let Bon live after what they'd done; Bon himself pointed out that the whole point of this charade was to publicly declare victory on their war against sin. The Church has no interest in justice or mercy; they simply need to consolidate their power in the face of the existential threat that is Fushi. In that sense, Bon's attempt to sacrifice himself so that he can try to help and shield Fushi and his loved ones from the Church's gaze is certainly a noble act. I just didn't feel anything about it.

Maybe it's because To Your Eternity has been making it very clear that death doesn't have to mean the end of a character's arc, which leaves Bon's story feeling unfinished until a more definitive fate can be established in the future. Maybe it's because I just don't like Bon all that much, either way. The result is the same, no matter how you slice it: An episode of To Your Eternity that could have been great once again ends up being just barely passable instead.

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To Your Eternity is currently streaming on Crunchyroll. James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.