Cop Craft

Episode 5

I've gotta give it to Cop Craft this week, it actually managed to stay on topic and stick to a single storyline this episode! Sadly, that doesn't mean it did an exceptional job with that story, but points for trying, I suppose.

After giving us half of a vampire story last time, we're now treated to the other half. Or two-thirds? Who really knows at this point, because even with a single plot, the pacing of this episode is wild. Hope you're ready for characters to be in one location, immediately travel to another, and then simply teleport to a new destination, because Tilarna and Kei have a sexy naked Vampire Lady to hunt down and there just isn't enough time for connective tissue. This trend toward quantity over quality includes the action scenes, as they attempt not one, not two, but three separate set pieces in this episode, each one worse than the last. The first is a continuation of where we left off last week, where our duo combats the vampire with every blow being cut away from to save animation. I should also mention that the vampire's increased power is demonstrated by being covered in a terrible smoke effect that looks absolutely awful in every scene. This includes the second action scene, in which the SWAT team proves that ancient vampires are weak to bullets. We get to see this a lot, because it's much easier to animate a single hazy lady being shot up than more dynamic types of combat. After escaping once again, we're rushed to the final confrontation in the subway, where the show suddenly becomes a first-person shooter. For some reason, the camera is placed down Kei's gun sight so often that it becomes comical. When the vampire lunges only to be met with an entire clip of awkward FPS action, it feels like a bad carnival game, repeated multiple times with little to no variation.

Somehow if that wasn't enough, we also get the slowest moving subway train ever, because the editing is so weird that it feels there's no speed or weight to the thing approaching. Kei is held down on the tracks by the vampire, then gets saved by Tilarna, in a sequence of awkward cuts that end with the vampire being run over. The positioning and physics involved to get to this result are absolutely baffling and certainly anti-climatic, speaking to some deep ongoing issues with the production. Surely if all the action scenes were going to be this terrible, one or more could've been reworked or removed? Or the pace could have been extended to avoid such a haphazard result? There's so many different ways this could've been avoided, but apparently even this single storyline has to be rushed to its unsatisfying conclusion.

Anti-climax might have been the intended point, as the only thing the Vampire contributed to the overall plot was being asked by our old wizard friend about “The Book of Niba.” Of course we get no answers about this MacGuffin yet, so this whole bloodsucker farce may have only existed to set up another storyline, after the fairy nuke plot ended without a bang. Now I feel even worse for the Vampire Lady. She certainly deserved better than being railroaded to an insignificant final death. Her bewilderment at the modern human world was actually fun and interesting, and I would totally have watched the weird reverse-isekai of watching her try to survive in an urban environment. Instead, we're now at a point where Tilarna and Kei have completed another battle, but are left with no ongoing leads, so I'm curious where we go from here. I think this is the first episode to end without a cliffhanger, so I suppose the hunt for Zelada is still in play as he made a minor appearance, but it could just as easily pull out an entirely new storyline and speed through it recklessly again. Personally, I'm hoping for Chupacabras.

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Cop Craft is currently streaming on Funimation and Hulu.