This week, it bears reminding everyone that what I write are full spoiler reviews. I’m willing to go over every movement in the plot, in order to analyze what makes it good or bad. Usually I think putting the word “Spoiler” in the review title is enough, but when it comes to The Promised Neverland , I feel like there needs to be a more certain and bold message: If you aren’t sure you want spoilers for this show, you are in the wrong place. It’s worth watching and because of its nature it’s probably worth watching unspoiled if you are at all the kind of person who minds spoilers. The review and analysis will still be here when you get back.
The basic setup is this: We’re
following a group of children who live in an orphanage. It seems to
be a pretty nice place where the kids get some schooling (we see them
take a test) and also have plenty of chances to enjoy themselves.
And the three top-of-the-ranks kids at the Orphanage are Ray (a
perpetual sourpuss), Norman (an uncompromising intellectual with a
head for planning), and Emma (a cheerful girl who really loves her
home and especially her housemates). One day, they’re all to say
goodbye to a little girl, Conny, who’s getting adopted. But when
Conny goes down to the gate to begin her new life, she forgets her
precious stuffed animal. Our leads, knowing how much she loves the
thing, decide to hurry and take it out to her even though they’ll be
breaking the rules in the process.
They find a truck, and in it they find
Conny’s dead body. They also narrowly manage to escape detection by
the beings managing the truck, demonic monsters that make it quite
clear they eat humans, which is exactly the fate that poor Conny has
been consigned to. They return to the orphanage with a new,
existential terror at their existence. Based on what they saw and
heard, they realize that this isn’t a place for kids to be happily
adopted from. It’s a farm, and they’re the livestock, destined to be
slaughtered and devoured – soon, no less, given that everyone is
shipped out by the time they turn twelve at the latest – unless
they do something to escape.
Emma, Ray, and Norman are the oldest
and smartest kids in the Orphanage. They’re both in the most
immediate danger and are the most capable of pulling off any plan
they come up with. But Emma has a condition: they need to escape
with everyone, because she can’t just leave people she cares about
behind to be slaughtered. Then, the game is on: Emma and her friends
have to make, prepare for, and execute a plan to escape the Orphanage
with everyone, doing so under the nose of the matron, Isabella, and
before anyone else gets shipped out to grace a monster’s table.
If you’re like me, you thought this
would probably take the first four or six episodes of The Promised
Neverland, because it didn’t seem likely that the escape could be
dragged out for much longer than that and remain tense and effective.
And, if you thought like I did, you would be wrong: this is the
object of the entire season, and it makes for one of the most tense
and effective shows I’ve seen.
This review is probably going to be a
short one because, when it comes to using screen time and holding the
interest of the audience, the devil really is in the detail, and I
tend to take more of a broad strokes approach in my summaries rather
than detailing every blow-by-blow.
So, what are the obstacles that need to
be overcome? The adults are one – shortly after the discovery,
Isabella is joined by the rather creepy Sister Krone, a much more
unbalanced woman who covets the position Isabella holds even as she
works for Isabella, and who could therefore be both an asset as well
as a huge hurdle. She’s fast and strong in ways Isabella never was.
More basic, though, are other matters. For one, an escape route
won’t be easy: the orphanage grounds are surrounded (at great
distance and thus usually unseen) by high walls, and past the wall is
a sheer drop to a deep canyon, with the other side problematically
far away, especially when there are toddlers and infants involved.
There’s also the fact that the kids realize they’ve been tagged with
some sort of tracking device. These allow Isabella to find them
wherever they go, and unless they ditch the chips, a deed that would
have to be done fairly close to the time of escape to not raise the
alarm, their escape will prove short-lived.
Complicating all of this is a tangle of
cloak-and-dagger dealings. It’s unclear to the kids exactly how much
Isabella knows, but she clearly knows something, hence the arrival of
Krone, and they suspect that there’s a spy in their midst. The spy
issue, the trust the normal kids have for Isabella, and the sheer
horror of what they’ve discovered make it hard to bring other kids
into the circle. The first couple that our main trio recruit, Don
and Gilda, aren’t told of Conny’s death, and the discovery of
evidence for it (the stuffed animal, in an ominous secret room
belonging to Isabella) causes quite the breakdown. It’s hard to
trust anyone, for any number of reasons, and it doesn’t get easier as
the plan progresses.
Of the issues, the spy is the first
resolved. It turns out it’s Ray! This is surprisingly not that huge
a moment (it does go somewhat big, but it doesn’t become a permanent
break) in part because he seems to be interested in playing double
agent, feeding the authorities bad intel, or intel with a critical
blind spot, while also learning what he can from those interactions.
There is, at least temporarily, a surprising lot of backstabbing
among the kids, though: Norman corners Ray about the matter alone,
and Ray agrees to fully help, but only if they abandon the “save
everyone” goal without telling Emma they’re dropping it.
What this does is build a situation
where no character can really have the full picture, even as much as
the audience has. Norman comes closest, and that really helps sell
his “genius” credentials. Really, the flow of information
through The Promised Neverland is very carefully and artfully
controlled. While the characters are usually in a position of
relative ignorance, there are times when instead it’s the audience
who’s been misled, usually along with other characters, the biggest
examples of that being in the ending.
For now, though, the next hurdle that’s
faced down is Krone. She makes an offer (on the crazy end of “offer
you can’t refuse”) to ally with the kids, hoping to get the ammo to
backstab Isabella and take her job before backstabbing the kids and
shipping them out despite assurances of safety. However, Isabella
catches wind and preempts Krone with a backstab of her own,
delivering Krone to their monstrous superiors where she’s brutally
murdered.
When Isabella strikes, though, it’s not
just Krone. She locks Ray up after telling him that their deal is
done, tracks down Emma and Norman, and after a fairly emotional
confrontation with the kids, breaks Emma’s leg so she won’t be going
anywhere any time soon and informs them that Norman will be shipped
out the next day, ahead of schedule.
It’s during the following day, as the
kids scramble to find some way to save Norman, that they find out
about the trench, and that simply climbing the wall won’t be good
enough. They spend two episodes and a battery of plans attempting to
find a way that Norman can escape his date with destiny and… fail.
Norman ends up getting shipped out, just as Isabella planned. Their
safe attempts fail and Norman is unwilling to jeopardize the
possibility of the group escaping later (particularly because Emma is
part of it) in order to try a risky gambit to save himself, and goes
to his doom. Emma is utterly broken-hearted, and thus is in no mood
when Isabella tries to recruit her as a successor, revealing that
Isabella (like Krone) was once product on the farms much like Emma.
Specifically, we get later during her breakdown that Isabella was
amazingly similar to Emma, even having managed to reach the top of
the wall after learning the truth (via the death of someone implied
to be dear to her as Norman was to Emma), just alone rather than
supported like Emma.
And by one thing and another, two
months pass. The escape plan looks dead, Emma’s soul is crushed, Ray
grimly readies himself for the next shipment, which will be his own.
At least, that’s what it looks like until, on the eve of Ray’s
shipment, everything goes to hell.
It turns out Norman may have left, but
he didn’t leave his friends empty handed. For the past two months
while her leg healed, it looked like Emma was just moping, a case
where the audience is fooled by the framing of the scenes to make it
feel more shocking, so that we can believe someone as smart and
competent as Isabella was actually taken in by the twelve and under
crowd. But, as the kids played, they were actually training. As
Emma moped under the tree and everyone came to her to try to cheer
her up, she guided them. As Ray prepared for his shipment date, he
made ready the escape plan, not intending to be offered up.
The kids use Ray’s tracker, embedded in
his severed ear, to convince Isabella that he’s trying to commit
suicide rather than being shipped, setting fire to the house in the
process. The kids scatter out – as they planned – but when
Isabella makes ready to chase them down, she finds that she’s got
other things to worry about. All through the show, there had been
the concern for Emma’s escape that the younger kids, going as young
as infants, would be dead weight and prevent a daring escape. But,
in a stroke of brilliance from the leads, the four and under crowd is
left behind – not left behind to die, though, because no one is
shipped out until the age of six; Emma gave herself two years to plot
a return and jailbreak before the oldest of her friends would be in
mortal danger, and in the process passed the handicap off onto
Isabella, who has to delay her hunt to ensure all her charges are
rescued from the out-of-control fire in a move that essentially uses,
as a weapon, the similarity between Isabella and Emma in their
empathy (Isabella, as warped and hopeless as she is, really believes
that she’s giving the kids the best lives they can have, even if
those lives are short).
Isabella’s pursuit brings her to the
top of the wall, where the kids have used some cheeky technique to
thread a rope across the chasm that they can slide down, zipline
style, when only Emma remains left to escape. Isabella flashes back
to her past, and though she could have spitefully lashed out, lets
Emma go. She returns to the group and reassures the eldest of the
kids – who Emma and company brought in on the secret – that the
escapees are safe, as said escapees flee to an uncertain future.
That’s the summary of The Promised
Neverland and… wow, does it ever not do the show justice. As I
said before, the devil is in the details. The control of
information, the play to hope, despair, and fear, the use of
silence… this is a truly excellent show, a particular rarity in
that I’d say its overall genre isn’t mystery or adventure, but rather
horror. It has all the classic horror hallmarks. Doubt and
isolation play heavily on the kids and you’re right there with them,
resulting in The Promised Neverland being (at least on the first
view) one of the most, if not the most, tense anime that I have ever
watched. Every moment you think the house of cards is going to come
crashing down and a few times, particularly with Norman’s shipment,
it kind of does. The kids are facing a simple, visceral threat
combined with an extremely daunting opposition, the kind that makes
Isabella one of the greater anime villains you’ll find despite being
an ordinary (if dangerously smart) middle-aged woman in a category
loaded with gods and monsters. She has all that it takes: a
legitimate threat, a deep character with an engaging background and
fascinatingly warped world view, and the total control of these kids’
lives, making her feel more threatening than most kaiju or demons to
ever grace the screen.
The Promised Neverland gets an A+ from
me. If you still haven’t seen it, go watch it. As of this writing
there’s at least a season two in the pipeline, so you owe it to
yourselves to be caught up and ready for whatever wild ride the
story takes us on next.