Assassination Classroom is one of the big ones, both in terms of popularity and in terms of length. The latter has made it something of a challenge to consider reviewing in the format to which I am accustomed, but for Back To School month, I decided to finally take a crack at it. For this case, I’ve decided to err on the side of giving a general overlay, rather than full detail
The setup for Assassination Classroom is this: a giant yellow octopus man who can fly at mach 20 just blew up the moon, leaving it a perpetual crescent. He threatens to do the same thing to the Earth in a year’s time, but has deal with the governments of the world: for the next year, he’ll be the homeroom teacher for a particular class of middle school students, who have that time in order to kill him (and score a huge bounty in the process). Of course, he has many superpowers, so this is far easier said than done. The octopus is shortly given the name Korosensei by his class, a portmanteau of korosenai (“unkillable”) and sensei (“teacher”), and both he and government forces are ready to teach the students in both ordinary academics and assassination techniques in the hope that they’ll be able to save the world.
The class in question is Kunugigaoka Junior High Class 3-E, also known as the “End Class”, into which all the otherwise prestigious school’s failures, troublemakers, and misfits are sorted. Most are not used to anyone, least of all authority figures, actually helping or believing in them because the End Class is used as a whipping boy by the rest of the school. Korosensi, however, is very serious about his teaching job, and even while being targeted with a barrage of gunfire (consisting of pellets made of a special rubber that would be devastating if it hit him, but which is harmless to humans) calmly takes roll call and the like.
However, the core loop for the first half of the show is much more “Heartwarming teacher” rather than “Kill the monster” as Korosensei, rather than giving up on his students the way most of the other authority figures in their lives have done, seems determined to be the best darn teacher ever, using his super powers (and petty salary) as well as the general idea of assassination techniques to impart important life lessons and help his students be their best selves and ready to follow their dreams. He’s also a complete goofball more often than not. It’s about as weird as it sounds.
While all the kids are important to some degree or another, it seems most worthwhile to introduce our main focal character and some of the more plot-magnetic other characters, and in so doing, introduce more of the plot.
The main character, then, is Nagisa Shiota – a rather small young man, overall unassuming and not the most outwardly physically capable student, who functions as the closest thing the series has to a narrator, since he’s also highly observant, tracking Korosensei’s “Weaknesses” as well as usually being aware of what’s going on with the rest of his class. Nagisa is usually quiet and conflict-averse, or at least that’s how he appears at first. Both his general timidity (or passivity) and his amazing ability to observe and read people seem to come from a home life with a narcissistic mother whose mood swings he has to be amazingly in tune with, though we mercifully don’t see her all that often.
One of Nagisa’s closest friends is Karma Akabane, the first late addition to join the class since he started the show suspended from school. As you might guess from that, he’s not in the End Class because his academics are poor; in fact, he’s one of the stronger students in the entire school and has a rival and tertiary antagonist in the form of the Principal’s son. Instead, he’s there because of disciplinary issues – he picked fights, usually with bullies, which he got away with until it was a couple of the more “promising” students who ended up on the wrong side of his fists. Feeling betrayed by his teachers, who supported him until adult BS suddenly got in the way, he enters deeply wanting to kill one, so very eager to have it be a monster he’d be praised for taking down. After failing a fairly good early attempt to take down Korosensei and being brought to understand that this teacher actually sees him, Karma becomes a more chill member of the class than he started. He remains aggressive overall, and contrary to Nagisa comes in with probably the class’s highest conventional fighting ability.
The students aren’t alone, either. The government is aware of Korosensei’s present occupation, and has a special forces agent named Karasuma overseeing the situation and acting as a PE Teacher for the kids. He’s very tough and not exactly used to teaching middle school students, but much like with Korosensei himself, it’s hard to doubt that Karasuma is actually taking his charges seriously, in a way that makes him a good fit for the very nonstandard mission.
Not quite so fit to be a teacher is Irina Jelavich, a seductive assassin sent to, technically, be the kids’ English teacher, but really to score the kill herself. She fails at both jobs, earning the title “Bitch-sensei” from the students even when she turns around and actually commits to her teaching gig. I try to not swear in these reviews, but “Bitch-sensei” is in the show and how she’s usually referred to so I will go ahead and use it.
Interference from forces above the school also informs the other new arrivals through the kids’ first term with Korosensei. Joining the class is an autonomous AI artillery unit as a “student”. After a few upgrades to better understand why it’s not integrating with the class and why that’s important to complete the mission, the machine takes on the identity of “Ritsu” and acts, largely, as a fellow student of the class (if one without a conventional body), rather than interrupting lessons with constant automatic fire.
There’s also a pair of appearances that don’t stick around (at least not at first) that bear mentioning. The first is Itona, a boy with white hair who calls himself Korosensi’s brother, and who demonstrates the ability to manifest tentacles not unlike the ones that make up Korosensei’s body. After being fought off, he leaves the class for the time being, largely at the instruction if his mysterious robed handler, Shiro.
Lastly, the government does try to assign an agent other than Karasuma, a nasty piece of work named Takaoka who, after posing as extremely friendly to gain their trust, attempts to subject the kids to some seriously sadistic “training”. Facing him down (in a challenge of his choosing, intended to make bloody example of one kid), Nagisa first really shows his assassin skills, managing to best Takaoka hand-to-hand per the rules of their, essentially, duel. And before he’s so much as recovered his composure, the principle of the school, Asano, gives him his walking papers and an ego crushing for good measure.
Which makes this as good a time as any to talk about Principal Asano. From at the latest episode two onward, it’s clear that Korosensei isn’t really a traditional antagonist type. Instead, Principal Asano serves as the closest thing the show has to a villain for most of its run. When introduced, a few things about him are clear. He’s dangerously intelligent, dangerously fearless, and absolutely dedicated to maintaining the order of the system that stigmatizes the E Class. We do at least get a passable reason for his spite early on: he believes that by making an example of a small subset of his students, he can motivate all the rest to be hard workers, rather than having the “normal” situation where there are a small number of hard workers, a small number of failing slackers anyway, and a large mass of merely “average” students. Of course, for his system to work, E Class has to be ground down into the mud to such a degree that being placed in it seems like a fate worse than death. This is why the E Class is shuffled off into a distant old school building segregated from the rest of campus (useful for all the hijinx they get up to, and for hiding Korosensei from the public when he’s supposed to be a secret), and why Asano stands as a rival to Korosensei when the latter attempts to lift up the failing students of E Class and teach them to believe in themselves, their futures, and the assassination techniques they can apply as life skills. Unlike most of the interlopers, who are just trying to do exactly what the E class is technically trying to do (that is, to kill Korosensei), Asano opposes both what Korosensei is actually trying to achieve and, in a different way than rival assassins, he opposes the kids. And, unlike rival killers, Asano can actually win a bout or two.
Ultimately, school terms in Assassination Classroom come to a head in two ways: on one side, the students are challenged in their academics, and have to face down against their school’s exams (with problems often rendered, briefly, as giant monsters in a rather creative visualization of what it feels like to face down a high-stakes test), and on the other with a more action-focused scenario. For the first term, Korosensei challenges the kids to make top scores in single subjects, offering to allow them to disable a single tentacle for each top-scoring student (reducing his capabilities temporarily for each one destroyed.) Some of the Class E students do quite well on their term finals, and thanks to the class screw-ups managing to dominate the top spots in Home Ec (which was not exempted from the deal) they get quite a window of opportunity. They cash it in on their summer school trip, utilizing several weaknesses they’d been made aware of as well as their own coordinated skills in an attempt to take Korosensei down.
They aren’t successful, but that’s largely because Korosensei is forced to take his previously unknown “ultimate defense form” becoming a small, indestructible sphere for a couple days (inflexible on that timer) in order to escape catastrophic damage. While Korosensei is in this state, though, another rival killer makes a move: half the class is poisoned and the man responsible wants Korosensei in his reduced state to be delivered very particularly if he’s to hand the antidote over.
This leads to the able members of the class, including Nagisa, making their best attempt to reach the mastermind and take him down. The getting there has all the action-spy sort of stuff you’d want to see: the teachers peeling off to get the kids deeper into the hotel the mastermind is using as his base, the lot of them going up against pro assassins hired by the mastermind to act as bodyguards, Nagisa having to cross-dress to get through an area (okay, very few people asked for that, but the sequence is actually funny, which is worth mentioning when that’s a hard joke to make land), and ultimately the confrontation with the mastermind.
This turns out to be Takaoka, not only out to kill Korosensei (his plan: bury the Ultimate Defense form and one of the students in anti-Korosensei BBs, so that when he leaves Defense Form he’s instantly destroyed, and will be hampered by the kid he absolutely can’t hurt being right there) but also to get revenge on Nagisa, and to a lesser extent the rest of the class, for humiliating him. He blows up the case with the antidote and fights Nagisa one-on-one again. This leads to Nagisa using a technique he was taught by one of the other single-episode sorts of characters (Bitch-sensei’s mentor, who came to recover her at one point) to entirely disable Takaoka and taze him into submission, likely wrecking whatever was left of the man’s sanity in the process.
But what about the poison? Well, it turns out the hired killers weren’t exactly keen on murdering a bunch of school kids, so the poisoner among them swapped out the requested deadly poison for one that would just cause about a day of severe stomach pain, so nobody actually needed treatment at all.
Follow a fight to the death on a night rooftop with a goofy episode where Korosensi tries (poorly) to set the students up with each other and the students try (more competently) to set Bitch-sensei up with Karasuma, and you have the end of the first season of Assassination Classroom.
Which makes it as good a time as any to talk about the tone. Assassination Classroom rather effortlessly slides through a lot of tones. It can do screwball comedy, heartwarming personal growth, good action, and even heavy drama… and what it does at any particular point isn’t something you can easily predict. Perhaps the biggest single factor to the show’s credit is that it can use the full range well, knowing when to apply each sort of scene and how to move between them without it being jarring or distracting. It’s hard to mix tones, especially tones as disparate as some of the ones in Assassination Classroom, and have it work. But the rewards of doing it successfully are, as we see here, pretty great.
The show does shift tones gradually as well, moving steadily away from the funny stuff and towards the dramatic. Even towards the end you’ll get the occasional joke, but there are fewer episodes focused on zany learning/killing adventures and more arcs delving into the secrets of the setting.
We start to get more of that when, in the second term, Itona returns (this time for good). After failing yet again to kill Korosensei, Itona’s grafted tentacles begin to act up, causing him immense pain and driving him mad. Korosensei manages to remove the parasitic appendages from Itona, which allows him to act as a normal student going forward and gives us some insight into what Korosensei may actually be.
After that, the next major incident sees the entire class facing down an assassin known as The Reaper in a multi-episode arc. The Reaper has skills far beyond the kids and even the human teachers, and a willingness to leverage anything against Korosensei as well as to potentially slaughter the E class students as collateral damage. The day is saved (both by efforts from the captured students and Korosensei and by Karasuma, Bitch-sensei having both been a hostage and a partial conspirator) and the Reaper is fought off.
Following that, we get another big arc with the final exams of the second term, which serves to bring Principal Asano’s run as a major antagonist to its climax, in the process essentially resolving the academic side of Assassination Classroom.
The arc begins as, after another surprisingly good performance out of E Class in an endeavor they were expected to fail utterly, the Principal decides to take matters into his own hands to humiliate them at the exams. He takes charge of his son’s top class, practically brainwashing them with hatred and bloodlust as his son watches, helpless to stop his friends from being subjected to his father’s cruelest methods.
Ultimately, the student Asano goes to his rival, Karma, and asks E Class to be sure to defeat his father’s efforts. Both classes (A class, with the exception of Asano, seeming almost zombie-like) put everything they have into the tests, a clash between the educational philosophies of the Principal and Korosensei by proxy.
E Class prevails in a dramatic fashion – every single student in E class makes the top 50 (which would authorize them all to return to general student population, though of course not a one wants that by now), and Karma even manages to knock Asano the Younger to the #2 slot, claiming first for himself thanks to how his time in E Class has broadened his perspective.
This finally sets the Principal off. Up until the end of the exams, Principal Asano has always been the picture of the cool and collected villain, unflappable in the face of whatever Korosensei tries. His brainwashing of others was especially noticeable, his words and presence being visualized as dark fogs or crawling centipedes as he taught Class A or broke Takaoka. Here, he practically glitches out, and follows up with extreme measures: taking an excavator to physically wreck E-class, promising to destroy everything (and fire Korosensei) unless Korosensei agrees to a rigged-seeming deadly contest in which Korosensei has to solve random problems in four of five school workbooks. Four of the workbooks are loaded with anti-Korosensei grenades and the fifth with a regular, person-killing live grenade all set to detonate as soon as the pages are opened. And if Korosensei manages to live through his four solves, Principal Asano will take the fifth.
While the first blast makes a mess of Korosensei and the next solves are set to not offer him the time to regenerate fully, Korosensei manages to do all the others fast enough to not set off the grenades, leaving the last book (with the regular grenade) for Asano.
Facing what seems like certain death, Principal Asano gives us an extended flashback to what made him the antagonist we’ve known. It turns out he was once a teacher with a manner much more like Korosensei’s, but that he broke and became obsessed with strength when one of his first students, who he cared about deeply, was driven to suicide by bullying in high school.
Naturally, Korosensei saves/spares Principal Asano, and their relationship going forward is much less conventionally antagonistic. It’s a fairly impressive redemption for a character who had largely seemed like pure evil up until these episodes.
It is, however, almost totally eclipsed by the movements of the very next arc, starting in the very next episode.
Kaede Kayano is not a character I’ve discussed up to this point. She’s had a moderately low profile in the class, being physically smaller than most and emotionally close to Nagisa, but not really particularly distinctive. Her focal episode was largely based around a plan to off Korosensei that was worthy of Wile E. Coyote, involving booby-trapping a giant pudding, and thus didn’t do much to build her character. However, at this point, she steps directly to the forefront, revealing (in a very sudden moment) that her identity something of a fake, that she has tentacles much like Itona did, and that she personally blames Korosensei for killing her big sister.
Kaede, it turns out, was once a prodigy child actress, and endured the pain of the tentacles and bided her time until she could strike best. She goes all out against Korosensei, a process that threatens to tear her apart even as much as she might be able to threaten him. She eventually breaks down, part of her begging to be stopped while the rest can only continue to fight, until Nagisa jumps in and distracts her with a forced kiss for long enough to basically reboot her brain and let Korosensei extract the tentacles.
This leads into the flashback that actually gets us Korosensei’s history and identity. He was a top assassin, in fact the original assassin known as The Reaper. He was betrayed by his protege (the current Reaper) and ended up a human guinea pig, receiving the antimatter biology/tentacle treatments in a lab run by a mad scientist, the real persona behind Shiro. There, Kaede’s big sister was a part-time assistant (as the mad scientist was her fiancee). She was also the former E Class teacher, and talked with the future Korosensei a good deal about her class, the joys and foibles of teaching… really just about everything, forming something of a strong bond that stood in stark contrast to the abuse that Shiro (real name: Kotaro Yanagisawa) subjected her to, over the course of an entire year that the future Korosensei was imprisoned and experimented on.
However, an earlier experiment than Korosensei, a mouse held on a moon-based lab, had its antimatter biology run wild, resulting in the destruction of much of the moon that Korosensei was blamed for. A decision was made to terminate the test subject, and the man who would be Korosensei made his escape at that point. Kaede’s sister found him in the collapsing lab, but was killed by one of the automated traps.
Finding himself devastated by her death (perhaps because she was the only honest friend he ever had, perhaps because he could have saved her if he had the instinct to use his power to do so in the split-second that mattered) Korosensei finished his transformation, responding to the tentacles not in search of power but in a desire to be a weak, flawed being, kinder and softer than he once was. (this is in contrast to Itona and Kaede both wishing for power in some degree). He then took up the mantle of E Class’s teacher, essentially hoping to carry on his friend’s work and do something good with what remained of his life before his mutated physiology might go out of control and blow up the world.
Faced with this reality, the class is very much divided, and Nagisa spearheads the faction who want to search for a way to save Korosensei’s life if it’s possible, rather than keeping to the plan of killing him. Nagisa manages to overcome Karma in the intra-class conflict over which path to follow, and the students apply themselves to their new goal.
To achieve this, Nagisa and Karma hijack the ISS, where some research on the antimatter life is being done, in order to recover the results. Yeah, even with everything else in this show, this bit does kind of strain credibility. It’s strange, we’re talking about antimatter life in the form of a mach-speed octopus man and have had these kids take on adult professional killers and special forces and it hasn’t seemed strange, but perhaps because the ISS hijacking is a lighter episode (They actually end up on decent terms with the astronauts after explaining their mission to get a copy of the research data) it feels really noticeably out there, perhaps the only time in the show where you might not actually accept the scenario.
The result of the data is that larger Antimatter life-forms should be more stable, meaning that Korosensei will not blow up the Earth at the end of the school year, and therefore could be saved – rather, in something approximating a normal human lifespan, he’d eventually disintegrate harmlessly.
After a little quiet time towards the end of the school year (With the kids going through Valentines’ day, focused on Kaede’s blooming feelings for Nagisa, along with high school entrance exams), the deadline approaches and it turns out that the governments of earth are not going to be taking any risks. One late night, while Korosensei works on his yearbooks/life advice books for the class, a secret government project deploys an energy field, lethal to antimatter life but harmless to ordinary mortals, over the E Class campus, entrapping Korosensei while a kill sat is brought into position to blast him with a flood of similar radiation. In theory, not even Korosensei’s Absolute Defense Form would survive.
The plan is, actually, more or less foolproof, and over the week it’s set to take to prepare the final blast, it becomes abundantly clear that Korosensei’s demise is unavoidable. Thus, on the last night, E Class reconvenes to storm the security area around the barrier and say goodbye to their teacher the only way that’s fitting: by having a heartwarming farewell party, and then doing their best as assassins.
Before the Class can do their thing, Shiro intervenes. He brings in Reaper, who has taken a Tentacle treatment to become a super-powerful abomination with a strictly limited life-span. Shiro nearly kills Kaede, but Korosensei is able to save her with techniques he taught himself thanks to his guilt over her sister’s demise. Then, he has to have a great final battle with his first student, the Reaper.
Reaper is, by all means, higher spec than Korosensei. Bigger, stronger, faster – it’s exactly what he would have wanted, to surpass his master… but he’s also sort of been reduced to a big roaring monster, while Korosensei has spent his last year teaching and learning human matters, in which power isn’t everything. Korosensei manages to pull out one last ultimate attack, disintegrating Reaper and launching Shiro (also augmented) into the barrier, which fizzles him.
The effort, however, leaves Korosensei too exhausted to move. Before the satellite can come and do its thing, E Class knows what they have to do. They all work together, holding Korosensei down as he takes one final role call to the tears of all involved, and Nagisa wields his knife to end it.
At this point, the show is basically over. There’s an epilogue, both on the immediate aftermath, and regarding what became of many of the characters. The satellite passes and even fires, but of course its energies don’t hurt humans, so the class was mostly asleep for that part. Their successful assassination is recognized, and as the story gets out (albeit in fragmentary and inaccurate ways) Principal Asano is forced to step down, not that he didn’t have a huge nest egg prepared and next opportunity lined up. In the following time, Ritsu escapes into cyberspace as a free AI, Bitch-sensei is married to Karasuma, Kaede goes back to her super-successful acting career and continues to carry a torch for Nagisa, Karma enters politics, and Nagisa grows not a centimeter taller nor ounce manlier in appearance. This troubles him little, though, as he becomes a teacher and takes on a tough class of delinquents, who he challenges in a way very reminiscent to Korosensei.
Assassination Classroom has a lot of things going for it. It has good animation, good action, clever cinematography to up the school drama, loads of character building which I by no means had the time for, and a solid plot that makes you actually buy the absolutely absurd premise. It does humor well, it does emotional moments well, it does fighting well… basically everything the show tries its hand it is a success.
More than that though, there are a couple other factors. One is the balance, on which I’ve already commented, but it bears saying again that the show knows when to use all its disparate components and when not to, an essential skill for a show that’s trying to touch as many bases as Assassination Classroom is. Another is the fact that this is a nearly 50 episode show with, if not literally no waste, at least very close to no waste. Almost every episode is meaningful, pushing things forward and getting you more invested in the growing struggles of the E Class. Assassination Classroom isn’t the only longer show to have a very tight presentation, but it is a rarity to hit this level where, really, there is no meaningful fat to trim out of such a long endeavor
All in all, the show is superb. Assassination Classroom has high enough ambition and clean enough execution to earn an A+. If you’re even the least bit intrigued by any part of it, do yourself a favor and check it out.