Zetman – 03

This is why signing consent forms are mandatory

This post is kind of late because of a torrent of real life events (exams, sudden hospital visits, karate) and aniblog tourney stuff. Well, as long as I don’t start racking up two episodes in one post, I’m still in the green zone. I’ll be faster next week when things are less hectic…..SO! NOW THAT YOU’RE PUMPED UP FROM THAT INCREDIBLY ENERGIZING OPENING TEXT, LET’S TALK ABOUT ZETMAN

The Amagi family stole all the credit for Jin’s heroic acts, much to Kouga’s alarm. He would rather them praise him for something he actually did, so he’s pretty frustrated with himself for being so powerless in so many different ways. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Kouga and Konoha, Jin has bigger things to worry about that who got credited for saving some civilians. Jin’s being experimented on by that suspicious grandfather guy and his colleagues. They’ve got him locked in a room with a Player prototype and the corpse of Akemi.

Seeing Akemi dead quickly riles up Jin so he enters ZET mode. However, he doesn’t even start reacting to the other Player’s blows until he takes a few heavy hits himself. After he’s decided to actually do something, he wins the fight with a single punch. The experimenters comment on him being simultaneously very strong…and yet weak. He still hasn’t entered his complete, red mode. Now that the Player is dead, Jin punches the safety glass separating him and the experimenters and then starts to…melt.

Kanzaki – a creepy old man who is telling them what to do via a chatbox – tells them to make Jin revert back to human form before everything melts into a pile of angsty, black and white goo. As this is happening, Akemi starts staggering about in a very disconcerting fashion. Jin has a “touching” moment before she is shot a bunch of times by one of the experimenters. Jin turns back into his human form, and Kanzaki laughs thoroughly at Jin now being roughly 99% human now. Ah well, a minor setback.

“WHAT DID THEY DO TO YOU?!?! YOUR NIPPLES ARE TOTALLY GONE?!?! Oh..and I guess you have a hole in your head.”

As all of this craziness is going down, Kouga is attracting new fangirls despite his decline in self-confidence as of late. He’s really questioning what his version of justice is. His sister tells him plainly that he just saves people to get attention, which would explain his kid-in-a-candy-store level of excitement before rushing into a burning building in episode 3. Ouch. Still, things are much worse for Jin. The first time he wakes up, he just gets a tranquilizer to the neck through the bars in his cell. The second time he awakens to a creepy, underground lab that was used by Amagi and Kanzaki to create both the Players and Jin. That’s right, Jin is a weird experiment, and Kanzaki hid him away during a falling out with the lab so Jin could live as a normal dude. It didn’t really work out so hot, huh?

Jin listens only after 1. trying to kill himself by biting his tongue and 2. writhing on the floor in excruciating pain because the 1% or so of his Player blood was reacting with the door. Having no choice but to listen, Jin learns a whole lot about himself and how the Players were created to dig the Amagi Corporation out of debt. Most importantly, he learns that Amagi wants him to track down all the Players that escaped in order to kill them.

Why trust a guy like that? Well, apparently the whole Akemi death scene was a farce and she’s alive and well. Jin just saw a copy die. They had to expose him to something traumatic in order to bring out his super amazing awesome wowza ZET powers. This is apparently enough to convince Jin to join them and fight the Players. He can no longer stay around Akemi or anyone else, or else Players will target them and kill them. A hard life lies ahead of our perpetually depressed protagonist, Jin.

You just couldn’t go an episode without your 10 seconds of screentime, could you?

Bonus Screenshots:

So basically Kouga was ALWAYS useless and Jin was ALWAYS badass.

Charming.

TEARS OF MELTED FLESH TO SHOW HOW SAD THIS SCENE IS. CRY YO SKIN OFF, GURRL.

“Mmmm yeah, I know what I’m doing with this hand tonight.”

 

End Thoughts:

…Why am I watching this? I thought this to myself during the OP sequence, before anything had actually even happened, so that’s a bad sign. Was I in a bad mood? Yes. I was expecting to have my opinion for episode 3 be a little less optimistic than usual..but that just means you bump up “terrible” to “bad.” I’ve given Zetman the benefit of the doubt, assuming the kickass action would override the wonky plot progression. Now we’re 3 episodes in, and I can’t see things improving any time soon. I made it to the end of the episode, so it wasn’t too terrible…but it was pretty damn bad. There was literally nothing to redeem the breakneck speed the story was plowing along by or to counteract all the failed attempts to be cool, surprising, or touching. I felt absolutely nothing while watching this. The bad is officially outweighing the good at this point.

Why was it so bad? Oh boy, here we go. For one, I had no idea what was happening. It’s only until you finish watching the entire episode that you can really look back and understand why the old man was kicking Jin around like dirt and what the whole experimentation thing was all about. Having Jin suddenly go from one place to the next with no fluid transition and endure an infodump for an entire episode is not my idea of good storytelling. Even when you piece things together and say “oh, okay, that’s what happened.”….WHAT HAPPENED WAS STUPID! Jin just trusts some stranger who forcefully put him through emotional torment after such a short period of time? Even after he had finished with the whole trauma part, he was a major dick. He could have dropped the act at that point and started to explain things nicely then. He’s not a very trustworthy guy, yet Jin agrees without hesitation and believes everything he is told. If the events were more spaced out, then maybe I’d be more accepting of his choice. But after seeing him act like a villain, I’m going to see him as a villain.

I was very worried about Aunt Akemi dying in this episode, but when she actually appeared, I didn’t really care. Mostly because she was censored and because Jin looked like he was melting. “I’M MELTTTIINNNGGG!!!” kind of melting. It was so bad I wanted to laugh, but felt too dead inside to even move at that point. The whole lab scenario was just so forced, ridiculous, and full of meaningless numbers and special terms that I couldn’t care less if he was 99.25% human or 100% of Lucky Charms cereal. The focus was on all this jargon, so when Akemi died, I promptly forgot that she was even a character I liked. When we saw her again later, alive and well, I had to mentally remind myself that I was supposed to be shocked. Not a very effective death scene if you forget the character died, now, is it?

The action is usually the saving grace, but not this week. Shows like Jormungand can go a little loose on the plot, and I’ll still enjoy it as long as the action is hard-hitting and exciting. Zetman is…more than just a little loose. The action wasn’t even really there to make up for it. The ZET vs. random prototype Player battle was over really quickly and kind of lame. Only one person ever attacked at the same time. It was pretty disappointing. If there’s no action, Zetman really has NOTHING that’s worth watching. That’s kind of sad. I’ll check out episode 4, but there’s a 95% chance that I’ll be jumping ship to blog about Lupin III instead. I can’t imagine anyone would enjoy reading what I would have to say about Zetman every week at this rate, anyways. Someone else on the team who likes this might blog it. If not, just head over to Anivision and check out steev’s posts. You’ll get something more satisfying than a hate rant.

Preview: Jin grows up and meets a set of braces with a girl attached.