What a fantastic penultimate episode, closing out some lingering plot lines and using characters to their fullest to create a dramatic connection with its viewers, all the while setting the stage for Le Finale Grande. I was truly impressed.

The above is a very bad joke.

Yeah, this episode sucked, probably because the series tried to pull out a climax out of characters it never bothered to develop past the outline stage, since it was so busy distracting the viewer with LOL WE READ OEDIPUS plots. Maybe I might have cared a bit about Five and her relationship with Nine had it actually existed. You know, had we seen it played out in some concrete fashion. Had we been shown why she was so obsessed with Nine, why they had a connection, what kind of past they had, etc. Maybe we might have cared about Twelve’s depression after “betraying” Nine had we seen any sort of friction between their characters before the ninth fucking episode. Maybe all of this might have worked had the writers of Zankyou no Terror gone back to school and learned the basic structure of a plot and the basic mechanics of character development.

But fuck that. Once again we have a plot that makes no sense, all of which would have been prevented had the fucking police had bulletproof glass in the van carrying Nine. This is a standard feature of police vehicles, I’m pretty sure. This would have stopped Five’s measly handgun from shooting out the driver and setting up the absurd situation in which the episode ended. In the space of about three minutes the characters die multiple times but continue living anyway because of plot inertia. And then finally Five kills herself in her last throes after kissing Nine (meaning what?) and shooting the leaking fuel with her gun. Okay. Was that supposed to carry any emotional weight whatsoever? Because it didn’t. Who fucking cares.

Our grand climax turns out to be another absurd scenario where Nine lets loose a fucking atomic bomb to float in a hot-air balloon above the streets of Tokyo. How is this supposed to be a problem for the authorities to resolve? Hey Joe, what’s with the hot air balloon floating smack dab in the middle of the city? That seems kinda odd. Maybe we should go check on it. And how does this make Nine anything but one of the most monstrous terrorists in the history of the world? Threatening the most populous metropolitan area in the world (40 million people and counting!) with a fucking atomic bomb. Oh Yay! I’m totally rooting for him now! Who the fuck is the main character in this series? Who is the protagonist? Who is the antagonist? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? What the fuck is going on? How about some fucking answers?

Let me guess: Nine’s gonna teach the people of Japan a lesson about their terrible government and blah blah blah blah blah blah. Fuck you. You don’t have to whine whatever sobstory about how the government mistreated you or preach some forced geopolitical mantra by threatening forty million innocent people with nuclear annihilation. Fuck you, Nine. Fuck you, Zankyou no Terror. Fuck your shitty writing team and its hack, undergraduate prose. Fuck this pretentious bullshit.

I’m gonna go do something fun and wait for next’s week batshittery.