“Picture of a man, a weary dreamer in a mundane world, and thus like many steeped in occult matters and fantasy diversions. One harmless enough after all, indulging in the fictions of alien visitors or out-of-place artifacts, the coy suggestions of might-have-been believed fervently by others and made believable by careful atmosphere and storytelling. But in the search for horror fiction and urban fantasies, such a man is likely to encounter horror of a very different kind, in the form of a show that purports to trade in such favored topics but instead trades in other things, a profusion of cheap twists supported by obnoxious characters and forced scenes. Because, at this Occult Academy, the subject we’ll be teaching is not about monsters or spirits but about writing, and the worst is about to be on display.”
So, Rod Serling style narration aside, let’s talk once again about constructive issues in shows, because there are going to be a ton of them to explore in Occult Academy. Many we’ll have to get to as we get to them in the summary of the plot, but let’s lay out the basics here at the start. For one, we’re going to have to talk about tone and atmosphere. We’re also going to need to talk about character growth, twists, and when a writer should let something go.
How do we actually start Occult Academy? Oddly enough, somewhat promisingly. We follow a young woman, Maya, as she arrives at her estranged father’s, well, occult academy. While she meets some friends, the reason for her visit isn’t a nice one or a social call. Rather, she’s come because it’s her father’s funeral, and she’s obliged both to attend and to handle matters as his heir. Things get difficult, though, when her father’s corpse rises from the coffin, possessed by an unclean spirit that attacks the assembled mourners.
Maya thinks fast and clears the hall, insisting that nothing supernatural is going on and what they’re seeing is, in fact, trickery. She then faces the possessed corpse, revealing that she knows full well not just that this is something legitimately supernatural, but exactly what that something is, what its weaknesses are, and how to take it down. She does so in triumphant fashion, revealing to those closest to her that she doesn’t not believe in the occult, she hates it.
Maya is, by far, the best character in this show. Really, she’s not above perfectly serviceable, but next to the rest of this show’s cast? She at least has a fun and watchable demeanor (being gruff but not exactly cruel, and very capable on her own) and something of an interesting issue and arc in the fact that her hatred of the occult stems from how her father’s obsession with occult matters, the obsession that lead to him founding the titular academy, resulted in her family being torn apart, and this despite some complex memories of her early life with her father muddying the waters. Given that his death complicates matters further, this could be an interesting story, particularly given how she inherits her father’s position as headmaster.
Sadly, the plot arrives in the form of Bunmei. He arrives from the future (nude, as per Terminator rules, causing no little embarrassment) as a man with psychic powers on a mission to save the world from an unspecified predicted-by-Nostradamus disaster that will occur very soon. Said disaster is caused by something called the Nostradamus Key; if Bunmei destroys the Key, the future will change. He doesn’t have any clues as to what the Key might be, but does at least have a tool to identify it.
Bunmei, though, is no respectable time agent. Put Jack Harkness, or Milo on the job instead. Please. This guy is a simpering, obnoxious moron. He’s a wormy coward, and all too full of himself whenever he gets an inch. Imagine if you took Shaggy (from Scooby Doo) and surgically removed all his fun and likable traits along with what positive contributions he was actually able to provide, leaving only his propensity to run away from danger. Into the empty void, transplant half the ego of Daisuke (from Revisions), but none of the coordinating skill or ability that could possibly offset his obnoxiousness. Do this, and you come up with an approximation of Bunmei, possibly my most hated single “lead” character in anime. Daisuke and Kazuma probably did more damage to their shows (since Bunmei gets dropped for episodes or even arcs) and there are characters who are in much more noxiously bad shows, like In Another World With My Smartphone who might therefore be worse characters by default… but there’s just something particularly grating about Bunmei and I don’t think it’s intentional.
The show is composed like we’re supposed to feel for this guy, and it does not work as advertised. Would it be possible to feel for a guy roped partially against his will into a dangerous save-the-world mission that’s way over his head? Yes, absolutely, but we’d need more pathos to the situation, the sort of thing where even playing for humor emphasizes that this is a bad situation not of his choosing and he’s just trying to survive… or, on the other side, to go hard for comedy, and not have a seriously-treated end-of-the-world scenario. Kazuma (The other one this time) kind of played that type; at least when he’s first hit with the Isekai scenario. Could it be interesting to see Maya, who’s knowledgeable about the occult but opposed to it, play opposite a character who’s basically a charlatan? Yeah, that could be a pretty interesting dynamic, especially when Mr. Fake Spoon Bender does really need her help. You could get an interesting interplay of truth and lies, which would lean into the occult theme. But Bunmei doesn’t manage that, he’s too pathetic to really be a good charlatan, and too much pathos is put into his inability to do things to be comfortable regarding him as a faker.
The show wants you to want him to be awesome. Which, again, could have worked, desiring to see a character come into their own and really live up to their potential… but then the struggle needs more focus to really understand it. Or, if you prefer, it needs more tact. We don’t understand why the whole spoon bending thing is important to Bunmei – it comes up rarely enough that when it does, even though it’s pushed heavily, we don’t really know what the whole situation means to Buinmei as a person. In A Certain Scientific Railgun we understand what gaining even a weak esper power would mean to Saten, and this despite her being more of a secondary character, so when she uses the Level Upper against what might otherwise be her better judgment, we feel for the plight she’s in. When Bunmei mopes and eats his curry with chopsticks, we don’t feel a thing, because we don’t know what we’re supposed to feel and don’t understand what he’s feeling.
Anyway, he comes in, proves himself useless, gets a teaching position at the academy, gains the disturbed comedic affection of the vice principal because he complimented her hairstyle, and meets one person who has actually nice to him, the waitress at a curry shop near his apartment. All in all, not much of interest once we find out that he’s from the future, but a loser rather than an actual badass Time Agent. The hunt for the Nostradamus Key, though it should be all consuming because, you know, short timer until the whole world goes, fades somewhat into the background in favor of dealing with monster-of-the-week sorts of affairs.
Which brings me to another thing wrong with this show, the poor balance between a strong and urgent plot (The Nostradamus Key) with a pull to episodic storytelling. I get why the latter was a compelling choice for the writers: “The Occult” is a broad topic, consisting of loads of different phenomena that aren’t really related to each other. Aliens, the undead, cryptids, spiritualism, time travel… the whole kitchen sink is part of it, and that’s pretty hard to navigate. If your show pitches “Occult” or “Urban Legends” as its theme, you have to get multiple in there even if they’re disconnected. To that end, you kind of need an episodic format where your main characters can go from one supernatural scenario to another without those scenarios being tied to each other. Or, if they are tied together, it’s by something sufficiently strange, from which the individual arcs are not
But in shows that do this well, like The X-Files or perhaps something like, from a certain point of view, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, any sort of meta-plot isn’t something that the characters are aware of the details of, and that the characters are empowered to do anything about, and that is pressing and important. Occult Academy does have a plot like that, so when we’re diverted from it, it feels like we’re wasting valuable time.
I suppose I should actually get into the plot. First arc, mysterious disappearances, Bunmei is useless, Maya tracks things down to an underground cavern in the nearby woods where lair a nest of mothmen, depicted in this show as being vicious, feral, predatory monsters. Not exactly what one thinks of when considering the legends around the Mothman cryptid, but okay. After Maya manages to get out of trouble, rescuing a friend who was taken, and Bunmei fails to be anything but a millstone around the neck of the cast, the nest is secretly collapsed by the Vice Principal, which would seem to be a blow to the enemy, but that the show wants you to believe is sinister.
The next topic is the “Near Death Experience”, where one of Maya’s friends agrees to undergo a simulated one, which gets her possessed by an otherworldly spirit while her true soul remains trapped where she went. Bunmei, pretending for 5 minutes to have something resembling a virtue, goes into the machine to recover her spirit from the netherworld, which works out pretty well. If the show were better written, this could even have been a turn for our unfortunate lead, as it leads to Maya seeing some of Bunmei’s memories of having lived through the apocalypse, confirming to her that the story she had come to doubt was, in fact, real. Because of this, she decides to actually work with him rather than ditching him like she had been doing, despite his general incompetence.
Does this lead to a legitimate attempt to deal with that Nostradamus Key? Not exactly. Next up they end up chasing crop circles, only to find that the supposed alien visitations were a hoax being pulled by the father of one of Maya’s friends, who was trying to help her recapture the love of (rather than hate for) the occult she had as a child.
Of course, this causes Maya to take some issues with her friend, which makes things complicated when said friend is grabbed by a hive of chupacabras (which, like Mothmen, are gribbly hungry monsters in this show. This time it’s appropriate, but I felt it bore mentioning all the same). Maya saves her (Bunmei was there too) and they make up.
So what about the Nostradamus Key?
The next arc, which in isolation is the best in a show, sees Maya encounter a little ghost girl summoned by a séance at the Academy. Maya decides to try to help the poor lost soul move on, and thus spends the arc engaging with her unfinished business. The little girl, it turns out, froze to death waiting for Santa to arrive for Christmas, leading to Maya throwing an out of season Christmas party in order to help the ghost. All the while, Maya sees reflections of herself in the little ghost girl, particularly the troubled relationship she had with her father standing compared to the relationship that the ghost girl had with her father. This is the one point in the show where emotions actually work. As for Bunmei? He’s a background extra through this arc, and the show is better for it.
We still have made no progress on that whole Nostradamus Key thing, and look what time it is! Each of these arcs (Intro, Mothmen, Near-Death, Chupacabras, Ghost Girl) has taken two episodes, so we’re starting episode 11 and, with it, the big damn final arc. Funny, we’ve done so much yet accomplished so little to get here.
Through some rather confusing transitions, curry waitress who Bunmei had been crushing on (despite the show trying ineffectually to ship him with Maya) brings him to a weird cultic ceremony in the woods where she tries to seduce him and/or convince him that Maya is the Nostradamus Key and needs to die. Bunmei ends up back home in a daze and manages to be bad enough to warn Maya of danger instead. Maya fakes her death, but because Bunmei’s complete failure is a double-edged sword he outs her pretty quickly and curry girl, revealed to be a witch and our main villain, attacks. She’s got enough hold of Bunmei to paralyze him with her magic (because Haruhi forbid he contribute to anything) and goes after Maya, who is protected by the vice principal character.
Now, there’s one of the show’s philosophical problems on display here, and I feel like I should talk at length about it, because it happens four times across three episodes here at the end. The mistake is this: the creators clearly had something they wanted. A particular image, a particular moment, even perhaps a particular line that was awesome to them in isolation and thus they wanted to be sure to fit into the finished show. And they did it, but they forced it and they didn’t properly support it.
The ‘twist’ where curry girl is actually an evil witch is the first of those circumstances. First, this twist was not properly set up. I’ve said it before and will happily say it again: the most ‘unpredictable’ twist is, contrary to what some people seem to believe, not the best twist. A good twist, particularly a final-act twist (first-act twists are more forgiving) should have clues, and a scenario to let the viewer in on the fact that this is something that’s possible, even reasonable in context. The best twists are the ones where, after they fire, you see how it couldn’t have been any other way, even if you didn’t see it ahead of time. There were no real clues that Curry Girl was someone to worry about or something evil until the time it becomes relevant.
And yet… it was still freakishly predictable. The text and the subtext didn’t provide any reason to believe the twist or anticipate it, but the context meant that it was inevitable well before it fired. The thing is, Curry Girl was loudly in much of the show. She even got her name (Mikaze, though I intend to just keep calling her curry girl or maybe curry witch) on one of the early episodes. She said nothing interesting, did nothing interesting, and unlike Bunmei never even got involved in any of the supernatural events. But she kept appearing, and the show kept showing us the interactions between her and Bunmei, keeping her in the show. The smart read of the context was that she was either going to be kidnapped or imperiled, or she was going to be secretly evil. The longer the show went without threatening her life as a motivational tool, and especially the more it shipped Bunmei with Maya instead (at least in terms of composition. They never have anything resembling chemistry), the more likely it was that she was in this show just as an eventually surprise villain. So here we are, and it’s not surprising, it’s just poorly arranged and poorly presaged.
But, and here’s why I’m talking about having that “cool thing” you want, the scenes where she tries to seduce Bunmei at the cult gathering and where she paralyzes him and takes on her witch form? If you took them entirely out of their cruddy context, just screened those moments on their own? They’re good enough moments that I understand why someone would say “That! I want that in our show!”. Especially the cult ceremony has a good atmosphere, carefully toeing the line between what’s ‘hot’ and what’s creepy. Is it objectively great? Probably not, but it executes what it is well. Again, on its own and not considering that it doesn’t fit where its been put.
This absolutely reeks of a scenario that I’ve known all too well: you go into creating a narrative with a specific moment in mind. It’s awesome and it’s engaging and it’s one of the moments that excites you and drives you to tell the story. But, when you reach it, it turns out that the moment you thought was so awesome doesn’t really fit any more. The emotions are wrong, the setting is wrong, for whatever reason if you include that thing you really wanted it would be jamming a square peg into a round hole. And there is a significant desire to do just that. Naturally, as a creator with an emotional investment in your creation, you want to. But you need to not, desperately, because very little will kill a story faster than the incongruity of following up on something that doesn’t fit the bigger picture. This is why you hear writing advice like “Kill your darlings” or “Throw out your first, last, and favorite pages”. It’s not absolute – sometimes a darling fits despite being pre-decided, or sometimes you hit something mid stride that becomes your darling after it’s already been created in its proper place, and in fact I think it’s a piece of advice that’s over-taught or over-emphasized in some circles, but it is important advice all the same. And it’s advice that the creators of Occult Academy either didn’t hear, or didn’t follow when they really should have. The result is that we get these indulgent scenes, but we get them in a terrible show with a terrible climax.
Anyway, I mentioned earlier that the Vice Principal reveals herself as a good witch and protects Maya. This actually isn’t a bad twist because while the show tried to fake us out into thinking that her actions were something sinister, we did kind of know that she was something more than she appeared to be. The stupidity with her, however, comes fairly shortly. After Maya gets away from danger, the Vice Principal then lays down her life for Bunmei, freeing him from curry witch’s spells and dying in his arms with a tearful goodbye.
This is absolutely another “darling” scene that should have been killed, and is in fact the one that made me realize where the show was having its problems. Because the Vice Principal’s death should have been a really good scene. More than any of the others I’m going to call out as “darling” scenes or concepts, this one would, taken totally in isolation, be a really good scene. The emotions, unrequited love on one side and someone struggling with what to do with that even as the die has been cast, are strong. There’s just one little problem: the Vice Principal was, up until this moment, a joke. It was seldom funny, but a joke is what she was by in large and especially what her feelings for Bunmei, that were over the top and came out of nothing, was. It’s alright to have her die as a legitimate dramatic character, but the foundation here built fundamentally couldn’t support having her feelings being treated as an object of pathos and source of drama. Because of that, the scene that should have and could have been powerful is a near total wash.
After that moment, we get a brief juggling of suddenly-important plot devices, leading to a struggle at the Academy between Bunmei, Curry Witch, and to a lesser extent Maya. She even manages to use their contrived mechanism to check and sees that something in the picture of Bunmei struggling with the curry witch is the Nostradamus Key. Since Curry Witch was summoning monsters and doing generally evil things, that means it must be her, and they pull out the magical bull to banish her to the shadow realm. Bunmei calls in to his bosses in the future (including Maya’s father, who it was revealed only faked his death in accordance with prophecy) to report that the Nostradamus Key has been destroyed. They peek out of their bunker to see the fixed world… but the future refused to change.
This is “darling” moment #3, and is either the smallest and most forgivable of the lot or the absolute worst. Again, like all the “darlings” in this show it’s a good moment in abstract, but it’s founded on nothing. The Nostradamus Key, as I may have implied, is extremely poorly used over all. It’s stressed at the start, and then it comes in here at the end, despite the timer theoretically being pretty short. It’s just a couple of seconds, but it is a couple of seconds that feel like they were written before anyone decided what the fake Nostradamus Key was going to be. However, where it might be big is in how remarkably useless the time travel is for most of the show. Bunmei comes from the future, which few know and fewer believe, except he has no useful knowledge of future events that aren’t (in theory) laid out in the prophecies of Nostradamus, which already exist. The bulk of the show could have worked just fine if he were a nobody former spoon-bender rather than that and a man from the future. Which means, I need to ask myself: was the time travel element, which is massively mishandled, included solely because someone wanted the future refusing to change? It’s a question to which we’ll never have a satisfactory answer.
But enough of that – it’s graduation day at Occult Academy. Maya, feeling oddly well-disposed towards Bunmei even though he is basically the source of all her woes still, invites his young self (a child with spoon-bending psychokinetic powers, who’s growing weary of being paraded around as a freak, more or less) to perform for the ceremony. Future Command thinks that a temporal paradox, the result of Bunmei and his younger self meeting, could be the real Nostradamus Key (since he could have been the false positive from before), which results in Maya canceling the ceremony at the last minute despite it randomly being presented as something extremely important for adult Bunmei (he understands, remarkably). Of course, the warm welcome that had been on offer was also important to Young Bunmei, who gets away from his stifling and overly controlling mother to show himself around the Occult Academy. There, after Maya has too much of a soft touch, he encounters Adult Bunmei, and this triggers the end of the world with a giant blazing sigil in the sky and the arrival of interdimensional aliens in War of the Worlds tripods.
Adult Bunmei then takes the spoon his mother gave his younger self, tells Little Bunmei to have a great life and Maya to take care of him, and squares off against the aliens. Bunmei unlocks and unleashes vast and impressive psychokinesis and, using only a spoon as his weapon of choice, takes down the entire alien invasion in the moment of its inception, though this somehow costs him his existence in the process. This is “darling: #4: Alien invasion defeated with spoon. It’s less awesome out of context because it turns out that this show isn’t great at action, but it is markedly better in isolation than much of the show, and is such a suddenly and arbitrarily focused-on element that it’s hard to miss that the powers unlock and time changes for absolutely no reason – if the Paradox was the Nostradamus Key, then it was self-sustaining, and there’s no indication that this encounter was anything different from its original form.
The Future Command leave their bunker and find that everything is OK. I don’t know how they still have their memories of the prime timeline, or who else does, if their bunker was just isolated from the time-stream and they’re stepping into foreign lives, or if they’ll slowly realize they just emerged from an epic D&D campaign, but all’s well that ends well. Maya’s dad even gets a call from his precious daughter (alive in the peaceful world). She’s happy with her husband, Bunmei (young version, now grown) and expects her dad over for dinner. They’re having curry.
I could go on about how creepy it is for Maya (old enough to seem properly matched with Adult Bunmei through most of the show) to be paired off with Younger Bunmei when the time travel difference was twelve years to start out, but frankly it’s so quick at the end that it only deserves the short version: She’s a creepy cradle-robber. End of story. And that really is the end of the story, because this is where Occult Academy stops.
The ending was just a rapid fire round of new bad, one of the worst this side of Shangri-la, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the show gets off; it was pretty bad the whole way through. The two arcs that had absolutely nothing to do with the Nostradamus Key (Near-Death Experience and Ghost Girl) rather than merely not a whole lot to do with it were a little better, and the show might have been able to squeak by with a pass if it had just been a long sequence of more of that delving into occult phenomenon after occult phenomenon. However, in trying to have its big plot that pays off in all these moments that should have been given up on, Occult Academy kind of lost everything it could have possibly aspired to. The school setting is, surprisingly, quite underplayed, with very little time spent with Bunmei as a teacher or Maya as Principal/Student, and we don’t meet many other students, just a couple of Maya’s close friends. With both the themes and the setting so underused, we don’t get a lot of the good moments we should have gotten indulging in this setup where everything strange and supernatural has been collected in one place to be investigated and studied. The Occult side is also really badly done. We get two flavors of shrieking monsters and two much more conventional ghosty scenarios (though the possession in the Near Death Experince is at least a little creative) and most of the other “occult” elements are quite understated and seem to emphasize that most of them are fake even though other moments show that this is clearly an “all myths are real” universe. When I’m promised the Occult wholesale I want to actually explore it. Spirits, cryptids, ancient aliens, lost civilizations, out of place artifacts, visitors from other worlds, all the jumble of conspiracy theories and psuedo-science that places style over substance. The theme practically has an obligation to do its individual components right, carefully evoking all these familiar stories and exploring something about them, rather than making Mothmen (the quiet and eerie harbingers of oncoming disaster) into green things with fangs that are gonna eat people.
The show’s title is only two words and it still didn’t manage to represent either of them.
In the end, I feel like this show is not quite a complete failure. It does have two decent arcs, totaling four episodes out of thirteen. Some of the other episodes aren’t objectively bad, even if they are lame, and while Bunmei can be gratingly obnoxious it’s actually surprising how little damage he does. You kind of want him to shut up and the camera to get off of him and…. it does. Maya is the lead character more than Bunmei, and that by far, and the show is better for its focus on her. But does that make it a decent or really even a watchable show? No. Not at all. This thing is a D-, and I’d advise anyone to stay the hell away from it and find something else to scratch that itch for the strange and conspiratorial.