Platinum End

Episode 13

For weeks now, there's been a burning question hanging over every moment of Platinum End: why in the hell does Metropoliman have his dead sister's frozen body on display at his evil hideout? Well we at last get the answer we've been waiting for, and it's just as unintentionally hilarious as you'd expect from this weird mess of a death game.

That's a good thing, because outside of learning Metropoliman's motivation and backstory, not much actually happens in this episode. Our hero and villain decide to resolve their super-powered stalemate by agreeing to a Gentleman's Duel of sorts, where they each take turns firing arrows at eachother until one of them finally lands a hit, and that's what they do for the entire rest of the episode, slowly inching towards one another inbetween monologues. It's dumb, but also kind of inevitable with how these powers were set up in the first place. With the angel wings as an infinite teleportation cheat, pretty much the only way for any fight in this show to actually conclude requires at least one party to willingly give up an advantage, so setting up rules that operate on the honor system is the only option if we want this story to actually move forward.

Not that it does this week. Said duel is still going on by the end of the episode, with maybe five minutes of time having actually passed in-universe. The rest of the episode is instead concerned with finally fleshing out the enigmatic villain of this whole shebang, giving us an explanation for how Metropoliman became the weird bastard we know and tolerate today. Those answers aren't exactly enlightening, though. He was obsessed with his “pure” little sister and freaked out so hard about her getting a boyfriend that he threw her off the opulent gazebo in their family's greenhouse of eternal and undying flowers, a common household accident if ever there was one. But instead of calling an ambulance he decided to perfectly preserve her corpse and keep her on permanent display in his super villain compound like a weirdo. Like the mini-boss characters from before, it's an incredibly goofy story, but presented with just enough self-seriousness that it becomes accidentally hysterical to watch. None of this nonsense actually explains anything about his current personality though, and mostly just plugs the hole of how somebody so self-obsessed and megalomaniacal wound up suicidal enough to become a God Candidate. It does, however, segue into a monologue finally explaining what Metropoliman wants to do if he becomes God, and that in itself is kind of illuminating.

See, it turns out my dude took his favorite Dead Kennedy's song way too literally, and wants to kill all the poor people in the world, leaving only the good and beautiful and perfect rich people alive to live in an immaculate world of wealth. If that sounds dumb as all hell that's because it is, and we could waste a lot of time just going into the very obvious logistical problems with all that. But it's not worth it because, just like Mirai's belly flop of a heroic speech last episode, this isn't actually a considered viewpoint. There is certainly a strain of thinking that presumes the richest people in the world hold some kind of inherent superiority, and it's lead to a lot of evil, horrible things being done in their name. But this isn't Platinum End trying to make a critique of neo-malthusian theory or the like, it's just trying to come up with a motivation for its villain that's simple and easy to hate, the same reason it made him a purity obsessed siscon. It wants the audience to root against him, and “I want to kill everyone but Jeff Bezos and bang my dead sister” is an efficient way to make him the heel. But that's all it is.

And in a way that's fitting, since Mirai has an equally unconsidered point of view he's ineffectually fighting for. Really, this episode has finally shaved away any pretensions Platinum End once had about itself, narrowing it down to a playground slapfight between a pair of grumpy 6-year-olds. For any other show that would be disastrous, but for this one it feels like a fitting way to conclude this whole story arc, so here's hoping it can come to an appropriately dumb conclusion next time.

Rating:

Platinum End is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.