The ending this show deserved.
I’ll be honest, at the end of episode 10, I was not sure how Dusk Beyond the End of the World was going to stick the landing, but now that the show is finished, I can say it did so admirably.
On line A, Hakubo recovers to fight the shady guy and off him in a rather gruesome display of his charred corpse-to-be, allowing her to look after Amoru’s meat body in the pod.
Meanwhile, Yoiyami/Amoru greets Akira with a stab to the chest and an attempt to literally claim his heart. It’s clear that the fusion has driven her insane, and each persona slides in and out of dominance as Yuugure charges in.
Yuugure and the glitching amalgam battle, to the tune of the most impressive action in the show, while at the same time all three components dry to work out their interpersonal differences and irreconcilable frustrations. Both androids end up beaten to the brink, and the very end becomes something of a slapfest until it’s clear there will be no understanding and Yuugure divests the hybrid of all her limbs before her core finally fails and shuts her down.
But then there’s the issue that Akira’s insides are a little bit outside and potentially damaged. Yuugure opens up her own heart and begins a power transfer. This wakes Akira up and allows him to be healed, but ultimately means that Yuugure shuts herself down.
The little AI robodog shows up and leads Akira, carrying Yuugure to the core lab where she was made and thus can be fixed. She’s placed in her pod while Akira gets to have a little chat with, well, Akira. Extremely Old Akira has been watching this journey so far and is now satisfied with his life, hence why the remaining femtotech that was keeping him alive can be redirected to healing Yuugure before she suffers really bad memory loss or anything like that. She actually pops up in time to say her piece to him, conveying Towasa’s final message of love before the old man finally passes. In this conversation, he needles Akira a little as it turns out that old guy was the one to introduce the concept of Ehlsea (he says for human freedom in love and also for population control, but something tells me that “control” here means repopulating a devastated humanity more quickly), but also encourages his robot clone son to decide for himself.
But what’s there to decide? Well, it turns out that Amoru isn’t just stone dead. Since her meat body is okay she’s probably recoverable, though no one knows how long she’ll be out given the need to fix the fact that she was hacked. Yoiyami’s case is a little less rosy – she can still be fixed (and we see in the epilogue scenes that the others in fact did fix her) but her memories will be totally gone. Which I guess means the grudge with Yuugure as well, so that’s probably a good thing.
An unspecified time later, Yuugure and Akira visit Towasa. Or, rather, her grave, as Yuugure reveals that she died of natural causes in her eighties. They wonder if their kinda-mom would give her blessing for their upcoming marriage, and do you really have to ask? Incest! It runs in the family.
Neither Akira nor Yuugure is entirely comfortable leaving Amoru totally out in the cold, though, as interacting with her helped make them the people they became, so they agree to… work something out. What is that working out? Do they do a three-party union that’s a marriage and not an Ehlsea somehow? Do they adopt her since they’re not going to age or presumably have children but she will still do one and probably could do the other? We’re never told, but we do see Amoru wake up and be welcomed so presumably it’s going to be alright, given that we see elsewhere that everyone still alive seems to be working things out and making a brighter world under a less insane OWEL.
And… this is kind of all we needed. Though we mostly throw away the idea of OWEL being these big bad tyrants, this never felt like the kind of show that wanted to do the resistance arc, so having them just be going through an awkward period of dodgy hiring practices that the current headman, who we’ve seen is a bit of a class act, can correct is the graceful exit for our erstwhile antagonists. We get two satisfying fights, dispatching our traitorous shady guy and letting Yuugure have it out with both her love rival and her bitter sister at the same time. I was afraid that two episodes was going to be an awkward length to do something new in, but I guess the benefit of this being an anime original is that it could be cut to exactly the time it needed to be.
And I do kind of want to stress that – this is an outright original work. I do tend to like highlighting them when I can, but it’s especially nice when something dodges the “original” curse of feeling less refined because it had to deal with a finite production time from start to finish. Dusk Beyond the End of the World does that; it feels like any other… um… post-apocalyptic cozy scifi travelogue romance? Honestly, the exact blend we’ve got here is pretty dang rare, with its closest similarity probably being Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet.
If you recall my old review… I rather liked Gargantia. But while I have some natural affection for the old, I actually think that Dusk Beyond the End of the World may hold up at least as well. It has a less visually interesting future, and the change in vibe with the gangster arc hurt it feeling like its own thing a bit, but at the same time it also dispenses with the basic good versus evil conflict that underscored Gargantia’s final act. Ledo’s journey was probably more deliberately moving, but the show basically just had Ledo and a half point for Chamber when it comes to studied characters, Dusk has Akira, Yuugure, and Amoru at the very least. Personally, I’d count Towasa as well. Dusk’s episodic antagonists were complete clowns, but I don’t remember the pirate queen being that much more rounded nor a better screen presence. In both shows, the real antagonist(s) come in pretty much right at the end and do what they need to do. Gargantia had the bigger and better climax, but it had more action DNA while Dusk actually does reasonable work with romance, something Gargantia never quite indulged in, and the final Yoiyami/Amoru versus Yuugure fight made a pretty good account of itself, especially in the emotions. When it comes to the actual battle Dusk might honestly have the edge.
I’m batting this back and forth because I gave Gargantia a B+. Do I think Dusk Beyond the End of the World is not just a stronger show, but enough stronger to crack all the way into the A ranks?
In the end… I’m going to go with no, at least to that last mark. I kind of waffle on whether I should issue letter grades at the end of a seasonal watch, and this time I will: B+. There’s too much stuff in Dusk Beyond the End of the World that’s average or even lame for it to really push to A-. The good material is good, with everything after the reveal of Akira’s nature being fairly dynamite, but passing through the lives of random goobers and Amoru initially becoming obsessed so quickly, combined with the clowny antagonists, the out of place prohibition mobsters… it scars the total piece pretty badly.
All the same, I don’t want to diminish the core too much. B+ is a really good grade. Does Amoru fall in love faster than a Disney Princess, such that she feels kind of childish and annoying in the first act? Yeah, but when that’s really tested it’s after her seven year vigil where you can at least get what the sunk costs have done to her psychology. Are some of the early encounters kind of lame? Are there moments that kind of throw off the worldbuilding? Yeah, but the history of the world is extremely good and all of those weird little side quests do contribute to growing Akira and Yuugure as people in a great way.
So, that’s where the show stands, a B+ and my sincere recommendation to watch it the whole way through so it can do its best work.