Platinum End

Episode 12

Last we left our heroes, they were being held hostage against the world by a sadistic fetish nurse, who had somehow constructed the most virulent and deadly virus ever seen and threatened to unleash it upon the Earth if they didn't allow her to kill each of them one by one. It was a ridiculous, nonsensical escalation that came out of nowhere, but at the very least it makes for a very clear problem that Mirai and the others would have to figure out a solution to. With a dead man's switch as backup, there's no immediate way to disarm or stop her, so what in the hell could they possibly do?

The answer is apparently to fudge how the angel arrows work to make Mirai seem clever. Turns out that because the virus was constructed partially by using human white blood cells (don't ask me how that works) it can be...killed? Maybe I'm misremembering my high school biology course but I don't think viruses technically count as being alive to begin with. But maybe God in this universe has a way more generous definition for life, so his magic arrows can indeed kill microscopic entities. It's also weird that this is just now being brought up despite several previous episodes explaining how these powers work in minute detail. But I guess then it couldn't be a big surprise. Either way I don't believe for a second that Mirai knew this would work, so he effectively gambled all of human life on a desperate guess. But you know what they say. If it works, you're a genius, but if it fails, everyone on Earth gets Super Ebola.

Unfortunately what follows is quite possibly the nadir of Platinum End and its stilted, laborious attempts at constructing a philosophical duel. We spend an interminable amount of time with Mirai standing off against the evil nurse as every single person yells at him to just kill her. Mukaido is literally crawling in the dirt, choking on his own blood, begging for Mirai to kill her so they won't all be horribly murdered by Metropoliman. You'd think that would shake something loose in our hero's brain, maybe give him some perspective on his stalwart but unexamined refusal to kill, but it doesn't. All Mirai does is stand perfectly still, refusing to act, and risking the lives of everyone he knows and loves in the process until Metropoliman and Nurse Joyless just try to off him themselves and move this whole thing along.

That on its own would be an excruciating repeat of what happened back at the tower “fight” but then things get frankly insulting when Hajime jumps in to save Mirai and Saki, getting himself killed in the process. The entire sequence is kind of sickening, but not for the reasons the show means it to be, since his melting limbs and skin are honestly pretty silly looking. No, what's sickening is how the show tries to wring pathos out of his liquefied corpse afterwards.

First Hajime insists he's happy to die, because he finally got to know what love feels like. In spite of, y'know, that love being entirely artificial. Then his own guardian angel insists that Hajime died at his happiest, despite his death being doubtlessly excruciating and terrifying. He literally melted alive for somebody who had brainwashed him into slavish servitude – hell, he never even learned Saki's real name – and we're trying to eulogize it as a grand sacrifice because it was technically less awful than the rest of his life. Then to add just a little more insult to the whole affair, his angel decides to hang around and watch the rest of the fight instead of delivering the guy's eternal soul to Heaven. Thus ends the tale of Hajime Sokotani; he lived a life of abject suffering, had to be tricked into finding some semblance of peace before a torturous death, and he still has to sit in the corner waiting to get a ride because his dad wants to finish watching the Raiders game. RIP.

And yet, somehow, even that baffling sequence gets topped by Mirai's heroic declaration in its wake. After months of pondering, fretting, and agonizing over just what he should do, he's decided. He won't kill Metropoliman...because killing somebody would make him sad. Not the actual loss of life – his plan basically involves incapacitating Metropoliman and then letting the court system execute him after all – but that the act of taking a life himself is something he just refuses to do. In his own words, he won't “sully his hands” because the guilt of killing somebody himself would mean he can't be happy. I know it sounds like I'm making this up to misrepresent Mirai's character, but I promise I'm not. That's how he verbalizes his reason for not killing.

It is, without exaggeration, the most sociopathic “hero” speech I can remember hearing. Mirai just watched a person die for him, directly because of his own inaction, and all it does is make him certain he never wants to shoulder any responsibility again. His ultimate decision is to let somebody else do the hard stuff and let them live with taking a life, because he just doesn't want to deal with it. So either a state-hired executioner or one of his companions can get their hands bloody, ruin their “happiness” in Mirai's own terms, so that he can continue living without consequence.

It almost feels like parody. As if Mirai is a purposeful satire of a hypothetical author's understanding of pacifism. I've said many times the creators do not actually believe in anything Mirai says or does, and it couldn't be more clear than this. It's a blisteringly awful way to characterize not only our protagonist but the entire narrative's flimsy thematic ambition. Platinum End has been bad in many different ways: boring, tasteless, stupid, or all three concurrent or consecutive. Now it's found a way to be bad that it cannot ever come back from.

Rating:

Platinum End is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.