Edens Zero

Episode 9-10

The first season of Edens Zero is approaching the climax to another arc, but I'd be lying if I said the excitement taking place was of similar quality to that which we had at the very beginning. Previous arcs and character beats spoke to larger ideas about the characters and world, whether it was Pino's existential crisis or Shiki's upbringing that allowed him to act as an outlier in this overly brutal world. Now, however, it does feel like the show is struggling a bit to find a place for its female leads as that seems to be where the narrative shortcomings are beginning to crop up. I'm starting to understand and respect the fact that Rebecca is very much supposed to be pretty much the “every girl” amongst this growing crew of extraordinary people. Compared to everybody else, she seems to need to do a little bit more in order to catch up with everybody, so it makes narrative sense that if anyone was going to be captured or need to be helped, it would be her. However, the downside is that unless she's able to make up for that power gap in other creative ways, it makes it hard for the story to justify her place in it. Even when she does think a bit more creatively and outside the box, such as the way she executed her escape plan here with the rest of the kidnapped girls, it gets undercut by the fact that she needs to be immediately saved afterward. I'm not saying Rebecca needs to have some kind of gigantic powerup, but if the show is making a point that everybody has their specialties, I'd like to know how the stuff we set up with Rebecca early on in episode two plays into her overall growth moving forward. None of this is helped by the fact that one of the main baddies in these two episodes amounted to a frog monster that just doesn't see women as people. I understand he's primarily like that just to instill a reaction in the audience so we want to see him get his ass kicked, but compared to some of the other more one-dimensionally quirky characters that we've seen so far, this came off as a bit lazier.

The new character we get introduced to, Homura, is on the opposite side of the spectrum. Her introduction seems to go out of its way to show just how powerful and capable she is with a rather interesting (albeit obvious) mystery surrounding her. However, unlike Rebecca who is a bit more of a straight shooter, Homura's quirkiness does get old rather quickly. Maybe if her habit of always saying what's on her mind was spaced out a bit more or delivered in more over-the-top ways, then it could have landed more, but I didn't feel the comedy around her particularly compelling. This feels like a shame since the setups in these episodes were interesting and filled with other quirky character exchanges. I also like the way that Weisz is suddenly getting a bit more character to him as he tries to scope everybody out and play situations so that he comes out on top. I have a few more lingering thoughts regarding the plotting for this mini arc but I'll save those for next week's review so I can properly see what conclusion a lot of these threads will come to. What's going on with Sister? What's this mysterious force that suddenly threatens the planet our heroes find themselves on? We'll just have to tune in next time for my final review of this first season!

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Edens Zero is currently streaming on Netflix.