Undead Unluck

Episode 18

On the one hand, “Cry for the Moon” is an episode of Undead Unluck that consists of at least sixty percent recycled footage, and that's probably a generous estimate on my part. It is a mid-season clip show, which you usually only see these days if a series is desperately stalling for time to get things in order behind the scenes. This is something to be concerned about, what with how bad the shameless use of padding already was last week.

On the other hand, though, it wouldn't be entirely fair to call “Cry for the Moon” a completely useless recap of the story thus far, because all of that recycled footage is technically being paired with a little bit of new material to contextualize Undead Unluck'sbiggest plot twist yet: As Juiz spends the entirety of the episode explaining in laborious detail, the world our heroes are fighting for has been destroyed and rebuilt by “God” several times over, and the events of this story are merely the umpteenth iteration of a time loop that Juiz has dedicated her life to stopping for good. This would explain the fragmented echoes of eerily similar adventures that Fuko's brain got pummeled with last week. All of the Artifacts that Union has been hunting down are infused with the memories of Earth's past.

I'm of two minds about this whole thing. It is impossible to ignore the fact that, at the end of the day, the clip shows just inherently suck. No amount of voiceover narration and brief asides of people standing around and talking to each other with very limited animation can trick the brain into getting excited over seeing stuff that it has already seen before (especially since, given how bad the recaps and replays have been recently, this is the third or fourth time we're seeing some of these scenes play out). That said, I am inclined to be as lenient as possible with Undead Unluck because all of the stuff that this clip show is being used to concretely establish is goddamned cool.

The mysterious and surreal nature of Undead Unluck's world has long been one of its best assets, and this whole Time Loop/Ark scenario that Juiz outlines is just such a perfect explanation for all of it: The constantly fluctuating laws of reality; the history and knowledge that gets uploaded into the public consciousness by Apocalypse; the little seeds of foreshadowing laid out to suggest things like Victor and Juiz's shared history and understanding of the world(s) that Ragnarok shattered and scattered into space. I know that I ought to be annoyed with how much of the footage this clip-show uses is merely restating exactly what someone says in voiceover, but it is so hard not to be distracted by how freaking sick it is that the meteorites that have been summoned by Fuko's unluck are remnants of the older Earths that have been left in orbit for God knows how long. That's the kind of narrative payoff that only works when a story is doing something incredibly right, and it is for that reason alone that I can't be too irritated at spending so much time sifting through scenes that I have already seen (and written about, extensively).

This is the only freebie you get, though, Undead Unluck, and I mean that! If you try to pull another cheap clip show out of your ass anytime soon, then I'm not sure if I will have enough goodwill left to try and make excuses for you.

Rating:

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.