Previously on Sankarea: Fetishes everywhere. From Chihiro being crushed while making out with a zombie to several lingering shots of Ranko’s feet and legs, the saturation of fanservice in the last episode was such that it eclipsed everything else in the episode. It wasn’t the most annoying blatant fanservice ever used, but the way that the show shifted gears from a girl trying to escape an abusive home life to said girl then strutting her stuff was clunky and more awkwardly implemented than it could have been. Unfortunately for those that were expecting it to stay its course toward Foot Focus Island, it took this episode to once again resume the sham of a plot.
Alright, sham isn’t the right word to describe it; when the show decides to kick things into gear, it really picks up the pace quickly, painting an engaging picture without overburdening the audience with needless information. Even though this episode was all exposition (and fanservice) and hardly the most engaging thing around, it did a good job at pacing itself, playing out as a less bleak Pet Sematery with romantic comedy elements thrown in, as opposed the unintentional comedy of a possessed child running around in a tuxedo murdering everyone without the good fortune to have working motor functions. Even if it went with the cliché of the seemingly irrelevant senior knowing everything related to resurrecting the dead, I can forgive it for not taking an unnecessarily convoluted path, though the question of how long Rea will be walking around without losing sizable chunks of her leg to stray dogs still remains. And by remains, I mean that the episode left off on the worst cliffhanger ever, right after a fucking title card.
Something in particular really bothered me about this cliffhanger, and it’s not because I was interested in the plot to the point that I lost track of time. From the perspective of good storytelling, a cliffhanger shouldn’t be relied on to create tension. I know that if this episode didn’t leave off on one of the most egregious ones that I’ve seen I wouldn’t be quite so eager to watch the next, but it has a good enough story to make up for any shortcoming in tension. It’s not a generic shounen fighting show that relies on leaving battles unsettled for several episodes in order to keep generating interest, it does a decent enough job with its back story to avoid falling into that trap. I question the need for leaving off at “Two Days Later” because it doesn’t so much say “Oops, we ran out of time, sorry about that!” as it says “Tune in next week, hypnotized masses! We command you with our transitional title card!” Cliffhangers aren’t inherently bad or cheap, but they weren’t exactly used well here. Actually, that also extends to Chihiro’s grandpa being knocked over the head with a slab of concrete. Fucking hell, Sankarea.
It really says something about the quality of the episode as a solid, if somewhat uninspired use of exposition that I have to dedicate two paragraphs to the jarring use of cliffhangers in order to find something to bitch about. It brings me to the biggest issue though, that if there’s one problem that could have a greater impact on my feelings toward Sankarea , it’s that it doesn’t seem to segue very smoothly between plotlines. For now it’s a minor thing, but it could become worse the more that the show bungles it. Still, for what it is, it’s doing much better than I expected it to.
I didn’t hate the episode too much, it’s a lot better than 7.