Clevatess Season 2 ‒ Episode 10
I am torn about this latest episode of Clevatess II. The critical part of my brain cannot deny that the overarching plot of the season has become a bit of a mess. So many elements are crashing together so quickly, and several developments in this episode had me wondering if I had accidentally skipped a scene or two without realizing it, only to realize that this is just how the season is drawing to a close. The narrative threads are ironically more fractured than Season 1, even though the scope of the story has been so much more confined up until this point. It's far away from being a badly written tale, thank goodness, but the proverbial duct tape holding the whole thing together is standing out more than usual.
Then again, we're talking about an episode where Clevatess reunites with an adorable Luna who apparently has a magical genius brain that lets him talk and fly and make jokes about peeing on ancient locks to unfathomably powerful technology from a forgotten age. He even whips out his sweetest and most irresistibly precious smile to ask Clevatess if he can snuggle up in the “big fluffy stuff” again. So, yes, in one sense, Clevatess II may be revealing some of its structural flaws and shortcomings. In another, much more powerful sense, it is more powerful than ever, and it wields that power with a ruthless guile. All Hail King Luna, the only Baby Genius who deserves to be spared from the freak gulags.
What's that, you ask? Am I being serious when I say a couple of pandering and blatantly manipulative scenes of Clevatess and Luna reuniting are all I needed to forgive this season's shortcomings? Yes, obviously. Please try to keep up. The show has struggled to clearly outline the central conflict of Vordin's attempt to revive the original True Hero (though the flashbacks we get to the birth of this post-apocalyptic world help a good deal). I will also fully admit that poor Alicia has been far too sequestered into her own corner of the plot for most of these episodes, with the tempo only just recently picking up in the last couple of weeks.
Here we have another case of positives balancing out the negatives, because Alicia has finally been given the chance to kick some proper ass, and what better villain to sharpen her rusty blade upon than a giant, eldritch spider made from the horrific stew of murdered children and black magic atrocities? This whole turn of events is, to use the technical term that I learned in Film Critic School, “metal as shit.” Clevatess II is, if nothing else, working hard to give the viewers what they crave. If it has maybe been working a little too hard to cram all of this lore and backstory into just one season, well, there are far worse problems for an anime to overcome.
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Clevatess Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.
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