The Promised Neverland

Episode 12

This week's announcement that The Promised Neverland will return for a second season probably didn't come as a surprise to many. For all of the work this last episode puts into tying a bow on the children's journey out of the lion's den, by the time the last of them have scaled the farm's wall and disappeared into the forest, it's more clear than ever that their fight for freedom has only just begun. “150146” successfully wraps up the escape from Grace Field House, but it also does the equally critical work of whetting the audience's appetite for the chapters of The Promised Neverland to come. This finale is as much an agonizing cliffhanger as it is a well-wrought emotional conclusion, which is a volatile mix to play with at the finish line, but the show absolutely nails it. In fact, having considered both versions of the arc in their entirely, I might even prefer the anime's take to the manga's.

The most clunky part of the episode comes at the beginning, where we learn why Phil and the other young children stayed behind with Mama. Essentially, they're too fragile for the journey; with Norman gone and the wilds outside being so unknown, even Emma has to admit that the kids under four years old might be safer in the care of the farm and the demons, at least for now. The Promised Neverland has always struggled with how to best handle the necessary evil of these info-dumps, and cross-cutting between this final meeting and the shots of the kids fleeing into the woods helps keep the momentum up. Still, the episode might have been stronger if the show had gotten this out of the way at a different point and just jumped straight into the escape for the finale.

The one boon of this development is that it provides Emma and the others their next major goal, something to structure their adventures once they reach whatever is waiting for them outside Grace Field House. Once Phil and the others are old enough, Emma will return to rescue them, along with all of the children in other cells of the farm. The rest of the episode is so focused on providing the cathartic, triumphant escape that we've been waiting for all season that I think it's good to plant the seeds of future story beats early. It's going to be a long wait for the next chapter of Emma and Friends' journey, and it might have been deflating to reach the episode's beautiful final frame only to be wondering, “Okay, what now?”

With the little ones being taken care of for now, the remaining escape sequence is just as exciting as I'd been hoping for the past three months. We get to see the kids work with their homemade contraptions, like the coat-hanger zip-lines and the anchors made from rocks and fizzy soda bottles, which they use to sail over to the relative safety of the wild woods beyond the wall. It's the kind of “Home Alone meets The Great Escape” ridiculousness I always want to see more of from this series. For all of their genius and maturity, Emma and her siblings are still children. It's a necessary reminder of their innocence when we see them work with such basic materials, or when a few of the kids break down into tears over how scared they are to go careening over a bottomless pit with nothing but bedsheets and a hanger to keep them safe.

In the middle of all this madness, the finale also finds perfect moments of clarity for Emma, Ray, and even Isabella. Norman's big scene is perhaps the most cloying, but it makes sense that the most emotionally unavailable of the protagonists would have the most saccharine breakthrough of the episode. He has a vision of Norman, as the children are descending into the woods, where his friend gives Ray a good-natured “I told you so” for being wrong about Emma's ability to see most of their siblings off to safety. It may be a Storytelling 101 way of wrapping up a character arc, but that doesn't make it any less sweet to see the once calculating Ray be the one to strap little Jemima to his back and carry her to safety.

Emma's beat is the quieter and more effective one. Isabella, having scaled the wall once before as a child, is able to make it to the escape point just as Emma is about to depart for good. For a show that has been all about confrontational climaxes and battles of will, The Promised Neverland makes the brilliant choice to have Emma give Isabella no parting words whatsoever. In one of the few instances of internal monologue we've gotten all season, Emma instead bids one final goodbye to the fiery remains of the home she once loved so much. She offers Isabella nothing more than a glare of unwavering resentment, and then Emma and the children disappear from Isabella's care for good.

While that's seemingly the end of Emma and Isabella's relationship, The Promised Neverland has one final masterstroke to deliver, which is a flashback to Isabella's childhood to reveal how alike she and Emma were all along, fully engaging with the grief and anger that transformed Isabella into a monster complicit in the system. She once had her own version of a Norman, a young boy named Leslie who would sing lovely melodies on his mandolin before he got shipped off like all the children at Grace Field would be. Sometime afterwards, Isabella discovered the secret of the house and tried to flee, but the one key difference between her and her future protégé was that she was completely alone. When Isabella was confronted with the impossibility of the chasm and the forest beyond, she had no family to encourage her or push her beyond her limits.

So she gave up and became a Mama, effectively giving up on a chance for redemption. In the manga, both Isabella's past and present-day scenes were accompanied by extensive inner monologue that revealed her conflicted emotions and the true desires she had for her children. Once again, I think the show made the right choice in cutting them out, allowing the music and the imagery to carry the story. Isabella trains, she studies, and she carries a single child herself, which comes back to haunt her when she hears a young boy singing the same melody she hummed to her baby while it was still in her belly. When Isabella approaches little Ray, the look of utter horror she carries doesn't need any accompanying voiceover to be effective. When Ray asks his mother why she gave birth to him, it's the single most heartbreaking scene of the story so far, where Isabella confronts the evil she's been propagating Grace Field and makes the choice to swallow her horror and continue as a Mama. It's such a powerful scene that it almost justifies the silly plot device of Ray not having infantile amnesia.

In the present, as the children vanish into the wilderness, Isabella quietly folds their escape ropes and bids them a final goodbye. She wishes that they will be safe, and in that moment we see the possibility of a world where she might have been a good mother to them. The Promised Neverland's success at incisively developing both the monstrous and the loving sides of Isabella is a testament to how well this show works on an emotional level, beyond simply offering fun and suspenseful thrills.

And so we reach the final frames of The Promised Neverland's first season, which are as simple and effective as ever. As Emma and the others break through the brambles and into the real world for the first time, the sun is rising above the endless expanse in front of them, and Emma remarks that this is “their first morning”. Having read much more of the source material beyond this point, I don't think it is much of a spoiler to say that The Promised Neverland will be a very different kind of show when it returns in 2020. As long as the story hangs on to this emotional through-line, I have no doubt that it will continue to captivate audiences. At its core, this remains a story about children learning to survive in a world that is bigger and more terrifying than they ever could have imagined, but so long as they hang on to one another, there will be hope for them. Even in a world this dark and cruel, the sun is bound to rise again.

Rating: A

The Promised Neverland is currently streaming on Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, and Funimation.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.