Undead Unluck

Episode 4

“Do You Love the Change in Me?” is another episode of Undead Unluck that (mostly) manages to strike that perfect balance between madcap shenanigans and obscenely bloody action, with even a little bit of surprisingly affecting character writing tossed in for good measure. It still suffers from some of the same issues that have been here from the start, but even those shortcomings seem to be improving a little. Honestly, so long as you can handle the series', er, unique sense of humor, along with its occasionally rough-looking visuals, then I think you'll find that Undead Unluck continues to be a rewarding and fun battle shonen and one that that has the potential to become something really special once it finishes working out some of its kinds (pun very much intended).

One of my favorite aspects of the show is the way that it manages to make such interesting action sequences out of its (relatively) straightforward mechanics. In all fairness, that might just be the result of me getting burnt out on Jujutsu Kaisen's brand of needlessly obtuse and endlessly convoluted powers and abilities, but either way, I'm in love with the Negator system that Undead Unluck has been using. It's just complex enough to justify Andy and Fuko's constant mid-battle strategizing, but it also lends itself to prioritizing the visual impact of the violence, instead of having the show constantly pat itself on the back for how much effort it put into twisting its script into knots just to explain how one dude punched another dude. Gina's power is “Unchange”, which is an Externally Targeted ability that can cause any non-living matter to cease changing. Gina primarily Unchanges the air around her, which explains her force fields, her psychic battle tendrils, and the reason that she has to keep a very small opening of un-Unchanged air beneath her feet at all times, since she'd otherwise be frozen in place (and probably, like, suffocate to death, or something).

Thus, we get a twenty-minute-long battle of wits and blood geysers as Andy and Fuko set about snagging that second soon-to-be-open seat at the Union's table, and it's a lot of fun! Watching Andy zip himself and Fuko around on the gushing gore jets of his severed body parts is still just as fun and funny to watch as ever, and I genuinely enjoyed following along with the two as they puzzled out just how in the hell they were going to beat Gina. The show even does a better job of working Andy's “maximum surface area contact” Unluck strategy into the proceedings. The sight gag of Andy's body materializing underneath Fuko's shirt is too stupid to be properly offensive, and the show is becoming a lot clearer on communicating Fuko's agency in all of this. Don't get me wrong, the episode is still basing the very foundation of its heroes' victory on whether or not Fuko can smush her boobs against Andy's bare flesh long enough to ensure that his decapitated head (and Gina along with him) will be obliterated by a giant space laser, but it's obvious at this point that Fuko and Andy becoming a real couple is where all of this is going, so I'm more inclined to run with Undead Unluck's dumb sex jokes.

I'm less inclined to laugh along with the small chest jokes and cracks at Gina's real age, though, which had me worried about where this episode was going to go. Thankfully, and to my surprise, “Do You Love the Change in Me” manages to (mostly) do right by Gina, in the end. It's pretty silly that the show doesn't commit to showing us the real, sixty-six-year-old woman that is being masked by all of that “makeup”, even when she is dying and insisting that Andy not look at her when she “looks like this”, but the sentiment at least comes across as earnest. When Andy says that he would never let a few wrinkles get in the way of how beautiful Gina is, you get the impression that he means it, which is the kind of behavior that can almost get you to see how he could end up properly wooing Fuko, someday. Will Undead Unluck be winning any Drama of the Year awards? Of course not. Still, it's another sign that there's more to this story than meets the eye, and I'm excited to see what weird and wild places it will take us next.

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Undead Unluck is currently streaming on Hulu.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.