Thunder 3 ‒ Episode 12
For any other poor souls who endured this first season with me to the end, I'm sure they're just as dissatisfied with the lack of an actual conclusion. Nothing is resolved, and most of the funny-cartoon-kid-on-alien-violence in this episode is just reused footage from the penultimate episode, which features a ridiculously overlong 6-minute pre-credits recap. I know this episode was delayed by a week, but the amount of padding here is unforgivable. The show's pacing has been whacked since almost the beginning, but seriously, almost nothing happens with any urgency here. The supposedly climactic events we witness should have occurred no later than the fifth or sixth episode.
Honestly, it's agonizing having to endure endless reaction shots and very little actual action. The massive mech things with the Cylon-esque red light eye-visors teased in the opening sequence? One has a tiny role right at the end of the episode. The viewers demand a massive, destructive mech fight! I feel cheated.
Poor little Futaba is still wandering around the alien ship. Her plot threatens to move along ever so slightly when her brother Pyontaro, incensed at the apparent demise of his friend to an Alien Death Ray, launches himself aboard the mothership and starts running around at random. They almost reunite when the aforementioned mech thing gets in the way. That's all it does. It's an impediment, a prop rather than a kaiju-sized monstrosity to fight.
I'm also pretty sure Pyontaro's friend isn't dead, but we'll need to wait for the second season to confirm his fate. Some crusty-looking bad guy is teased too, but who knows what his deal is? So, I guess if anyone out there actually enjoyed this terribly-paced exercise in narrative frustration and aesthetic atrocity, then the announcement of a second season is good news.
It does come across as somewhat cynical that the week that the show's finale streams is when Gantz manga creator Hiroya Oku unmasks himself as the true creator of Thunder 3, under a pen name. It doesn't surprise me, or anyone else who's been paying attention, but it feels like a last-ditch effort to get anyone interested in the show. What's really sad is that, if handled correctly, Thunder 3 could have been a great little cult hit. I should have realized at the beginning, when Thunder 3's animation studio was revealed to be the “artisans” behind the universally derided KamiErabi GOD.app, that I needn't have bothered getting my hopes up.
What frustrates me most is that even in this final episode, there are sparks of what could have been. The mech design is great. The backgrounds are often atmospheric and cool. Whenever the funny cartoon characters are on screen, the janky CG doesn't matter so much because it fits the silly presentation. Many scenes would work really well… at half the duration. Cut down the entire series' runtime by half, surgically remove most appearances of the terminally boring human characters who add almost nothing, and you would end up with a half-decent show. Oh well. Anyone up for a brutal fan-edit?
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Thunder 3 is currently streaming on Netflix.
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