[Locke]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SPLIT LIP

That's why I really wish this stupid 49 episode min/max would just get lost. A lot of good shows get wrecked by the forced limit, and imagine how well W could ahve been if it had less episodes, thus less filler,a nd could be written entirely rather than episodes being aired just as the one four episodes away was being written.

This is another thing I have to wonder is a result, maybe, of Decade jostling things out of order, being a much shorter series One has to wonder if there were difficulties returning to the longer runtime.

W, to me, definitely ranks above Wizard because of the emotional investment it pulled. Like you mentioned, to me Shotaro's crying may be the single most believable piece of acting in Toku. Every character in W had some emotional pull for me, be it big like Accel, Sho and Philip, medium like the Sonozaki's, or small like Akiko. Yeah, she counts.

And Skull. I've never seen a movie exclusive Rider have so much lasting impact on the show, and yet never actually really appear.

Also, on the plus side, now you can watch Message from Skull and Accel Returns.

Yeah I think if W didn't have to confirm to the whole arc of the week crap, and could have been more like Gaim, pretty much all of its problems would have been ironed out.

The of the week style worked REALLY well for W in the early days, but as it became clearer so much more was going on, it seemed ridiculous that Sho and Phillip were still running around chasing low level Dopants around the city. I guess it's a testament to them as heroes, but we really didn't need that crap like five episodes away from the end of the show.

Then - as you said - the length of the show really seemed to strain the show a lot. After Accel took down Weather, it felt like the show was lurching from climax to climax, completely unsure of what to do with itself and by the end I really do think it was a bit of a nightmare.

I won't argue with you on characters, pretty much all of W's characters were wonderful and that is something that far outshined Wizard. Wizard's characters were a mess of great ideas, but W's were beautifully drawn, fully realised, people.

The only real frustration with the characters is that Aki never really grew up, despite lots of turning points for her to stop being comic relief, they kinda wasted Accel despite being AWESOME and pretty much all of W's villains were terrible.