[barnstenchfartface]

Black episode 26.

This episode felt like a breath of fresh air.

I'm not gonna mince words, I've honestly grown to find Black kinda boring. I don't find Kotaro to be a very compelling protagonist, and while it is the most modern feeling of the Showa shows I've seen, in practice that mostly means its plots of the week are more...grounded, I guess? It's not quite at the serialized level of the Heisei series, but (and I've started to notice this especially watching more X) they feel like they lack a lot of the insanity that makes the Showa series as endearing and fun as it can be. Not all of them, not all of the time (stuff like the mom-kidnapping episodes, among others, are bizarre enough) but it just doesn't feel as entertaining to me.

This though? Man. "Buffalo monster possesses girl to wreck stuff" is at just the right level of batshit. Pretty great episode.

Slightly off topic, but...I gotta say, I am pretty surprised that, in addition to more grounded, Black feels so...sanitized. There is so little death in this show, it's pretty shocking. Some people do die, don't get me wrong, but the numbers are staggeringly low. In every other Showa series (maybe, least the ones I've seen a significant amount of) they have basically no reservations about killing off any random people who happen to be around during cold opens, or kaijin introductory scenes and things like that. Quite the opposite, wanton murder is how those things tended to go. A lot of times in Black, however, people who would have been dead ten times over in any other show get off with mere injuries. In particular, I can't get over this one guy that I think one of the mutants threw off a mountain or something, and he still survived. Or that one about Omanyte the Mutant and his psychic powers. "Drunken guy stumbles into the monster and gets killed to death" is a classic way to start an episode in the Showa era. Dating back to the very first series. But in that episode, the drunken guy gets away! It's crazy.

The low mortality rate is probably the most surprising thing about Black so far, and the thing that stands out as the most different from other Showa shows I've seen.

I can't tell if my opinion on this is positive or negative though. On the one hand, it makes Gorgom appear less threatening and more ineffective than its predecessors, and often the crazy deaths contributed to the entertainingly weird feeling of many Showa shows. On the other, it always was hard to take the happy endings at face value when basically every monster still got away with a surprising amount of killing before being stopped. I don't know, it's complicated.