I'm Standing on 1,000,000 Lives.

Episode 21

Bad news if you were hoping things might look up for the I'm Standing on 1,000,000 Lives gang after all the dire straits they were dealing with last week: things just continue to go south for everyone in this episode. I really don't think I can undersell the travesty the team is up against at this point compared to the blunt way it's all presented. Remember Froc's mom, the sweet lady who took in Jezby and her brother in the previous episode? She, along with like 99% of Zagroth's population, gets casually melted by monsters off-screen as our heroes can do nought but retreat with the handful of people they are able to save. It's perhaps the inevitable endpoint of the escalating stakes and struggles we've seen them scale through in these quests, with the only glimmer of hope being articulated by the bare platitude they lay out at the very end of this episode: "All you can do is try the best you can."

That simple feeling of raging against the dying of the light is communicated mostly through the occurrence of events in this episode, with little time for reflection and evaluation between the massive monster attacks and poisoned pools flowing out over everything. Of course, Million Lives has cultivated enough character over its couple seasons that they're still able to slip in snippets of perspective in little asides throughout the happenings. Even in the midst of all this death and destruction, there's opportunity for the show's particular style of dry, irreverent humor – like Yuusuke and Glen criticizing the structural soundness of Cox's dungeon after they manage to tunnel out of it, or the way half the party ends up having to blithely yeet themselves to the bottom of a well and just wait to revive after dying down there. But this style also allows for moments of more sincere characterization, like Kusue commenting on how the aforementioned well-jumping plan tests Yuusuke's now-established pragmatism, and indicates how he might be coming around on more empathetic expressions. This is a quiet, personal moment right before we see Kusue's ghost exclaiming glee at the 'success' of the plan next to her own crumpled corpse. Million Lives continues to be that kind of show, regardless of the heaviness of the overall situation.

The generalized hopelessness permeating these events seems to be about testing our resolve as much as the heroes'. The show seems to expect us to maintain some level of faith in the main characters, exemplified by the way Iu is able to almost immediately rescue everyone from the falling bridge, or Yuusuke and Glen's amusingly simple dungeon escape. But we've also become aware of their limits: with the difficulties they experienced just taking down a few orcs in the previous arc, their complete inability to handle the horde of monsters set upon the town here isn't surprising. It rapidly becomes less of a question of "How are they going to succeed this time?" and more "What's the best they can do to satisfy the conditions of their quest?". The perspective I hit upon from last week gets confirmed here: Saving Zagroth as a town was always hopeless, so Yuusuke and the others are instead saddled with protecting its spirit in the handful of survivors they have. But is that enough to keep up the resolve of them and those that remain? Or does it only impose more of a feeling of hopelessness?

Obviously there's more to the whole situation, with answers to come in the future parts of this story. Yuusuke deduces that there's obviously some other power moving these machinations behind the scenes; something is controlling those monsters to compel them to attack Zagroth in a coordinated effort. And morsels of that more complex conspiracy get dropped close to the end of this episode, like the mysterious settlement they come across, or the revelation that Bayne wasn't Jezby's biological father. The latter props up the question of her real identity, and how that could be instrumentally relevant to what everyone's really doing in this situation. In terms of being formative for the heroes as these adventures are meant to be, we also get some appreciable movement from Torii, who's been somewhat disappointingly sidelined for a few episodes now. It speaks to his devotion to family that his memories of his own mother spurn him to go off on Cox's goons, even at the expense of much of his experience points. But he also expresses it in more positive ways, showing off how good he is with kids through taking care of Iris, Cox's granddaughter.

Cox and Iris probably provide the biggest drag on this episode, even more than the base death and destruction. I understand the conceptual compromise in the heroes needing to bring along and protect them as well as the sweet kids they actually care about, but the sheer irredeemability of them at this point threatens to overburden the tone even more than they already pointedly have, especially on the part of Cox. This is a guy who just shifts straight into demagogue mode the instant things go to hell for everyone, deflecting blame and spewing accusations on whoever he's trying to get rid of at the moment. It's another point that was alluded to last week that gets textually confirmed here, that he manipulated what little was left in Zagroth and "ruled over that tiny, closed-off world". But it just leads to frustration in seeing him get off scot-free while most of the people he used perished, and he and Iris get to act super ungrateful to the heroes who are now stuck with them.

That will probably even out as more of Million Lives's ideas for this story come together in the next episodes, but for now it mostly came off as an annoyance in an episode that really could have been made just a bit lighter. I very much get what the show is doing at this point, and I'm here for it, but the fact that those motifs are so clear means it could stand to have more of an arc, or just a little more relief injected into its proceedings. But even as I continue to hope for the best for everyone, I'll still be steeling myself for the remaining episodes, since as this one showed us, things absolutely have to get worse before they can start to get better.

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I'm Standing on 1,000,000 Lives is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is a freelance writer who appreciates anime, action figures, and additional ancillary artistry. He can be found staying up way too late posting screencaps on his Twitter.