An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Tales from the Memory Hole – Pandora Hearts Spoiler Review

So, apparently there exists a show called Pandora Hearts. I put it that way because, despite having seen it and engaged with it, I often struggle to remember that this show exists, much less what its content was like. With effort I can summon recollections regarding Pandora Hearts, but honestly and for a different reason as is usual this is a hard one to review.

And the funny thing is, this doesn’t at all seem like it should be a forgettable show in any way. It features its main boy get banished to a strange and esoteric hell, only to team up with that dimension’s top dog, an entity known both as Alice (and styled as a palette-swapped Alice in Wonderland in her human form) and the Blood-Stained Black Rabbit (or B.Rabbit). Add in battles against gribbly monsters, time abnormalities, changed identities, delves into lost memory, and grand conspiracies and you would think you’d have a recipe for a show that would at least be memorable.

So, let’s get on with the plot. Our main character is Oz Vessalius, the fifteen-year-old heir to one of four great dukedoms, who is looking forward to his coming-of-age ceremony as he hangs out with his friend/servant Gilbert. Oz is not entirely a blank character, but at least at the start he gets only a little characterization, being somewhat impetuous and not tending to take matters as seriously as he perhaps should. Gilbert is the opposite – in addition to practically worshiping the ground Oz walks on, Gilbert is your typical overly-serious sort, being quick to point out with worry whenever anything isn’t 100% according to protocol. It’s not the most fun character to watch, but it is at least a character, and makes something of a counterpoint to Oz.

At the ceremony, though, everything goes wrong: Gilbert is mind controlled, a broken clock strikes midnight, and a bunch of cloaked cultist dudes (Blatantly including Oz’s father, not that he realizes that) appear to banish Oz to a place called The Abyss, punishment for the sin of existing, such as he is.

Places called “the Abyss” are pretty much never going to be pleasant, and this one I can mostly describe as what would happen if Lewis Carroll wrote Inferno instead of Dante. It’s colorful and full of weird imagery often suggestive of childish things, but also dark and threatening. And, in this realm, Oz encounters Alice. She’s a Chain, a creature of the Abyss, whose “true” identity is the Blood-Stained Black Rabbit, appearing in human form as a young woman with dark hair in an ornate sort of dress, and in monster form as a gigantic yet dapperly dressed black rabbit monster. She’s also, supposedly, the most powerful Chain in the Abyss… but that doesn’t mean she can escape alone. However, by making a pact with Oz, they’re both able to leave and go to the mortal world.

Alice, for her part, takes this “contract” business exactly as you would expect of a supernatural tsundere, insisting that Oz is her manservant while otherwise being loud-mouthed, temperamental, and a big eater as well. But, of course, she has at least a few tender moments as well where it’s clear that she does actually care about Oz however shouty she may be.

There is one rub when we return to the normal world, though: while Oz’s jaunt into the Abyss wasn’t very long from his perspective, probably not even an hour, it turns out that time doesn’t flow the same way down there and, back in the world he left behind, ten years have passed.

Oz soon runs in with Sharon (a girl he knew before, who hasn’t aged due to the contract she has with a Chain), her servant Break, and an older Gilbert, now going by Raven (so it takes Oz several efforts to confirm that the obviously-Gilbert guy is, in fact, Gilbert) and adding to his former stick-in-the-mud persona by going all in on brooding. This team, representing the organization Pandora, were planning to use a ritual to fish Oz out of the abyss when he escaped himself, since their order is dedicated to the study of the Abyss. After some misunderstandings, we get some explanations. One about Alice, that she’s missing a lot of her memories which may be scattered throughout the world (one shard being in a plot trinket Oz had) and a lot more about Contracts and the Abyss.

Some Contractors, who use Pandora’s knowledge to properly bind chains, seem to be in a good way. Other, Illegal contractors who make deals with Chains themselves have it a little worse. They’re able to summon Chains up from the Abyss and utilize their power, but the purpose of the contract is always a greater goal: changing the past. The Chain needs more fuel to do it, driving the contractor to sacrifice, and there’s a time limit represented by magic clock tattoo, which when it runs out sees Contractor and Chain alike dragged to the Abyss. While Oz doesn’t have a goal for his contract with Alice, he does have a clock seal, and it advances when she uses some of her powers, meaning that there’s a limit to how much they can do before inevitably being drawn back to the Abyss, probably with no hope of pulling another escape.

There is a way around this; if the Chain is killed, the contract is broken, and the contractor can be saved. However, Oz is loathe to take that route with Alice, since she’s essentially a friend and thus seeks some other answer.

After that (displayed through the hunt for an Illegal Contractor serial killer), Oz visits the Vessalius mansion, and there gets the truth of it being ten years and Raven actually being Gilbert. They’re attacked by one of the people who banished Oz the first time, agents of a group called Baskerville, but manage to escape and find another of Alice’s memories, this one sending them into a bizarre encounter with an entity that manifests as a white rabbit plush.

After that, we get another Illegal Contractor situation, Oz being personally wrapped up as he encounters the Contractor’s son and bonds with him. All the same, he isn’t able to stop a Pandora agent, Vincent (a relative of Gilbert), from ending the threat and sending Chain and Contractor on to the Abyss. From there we putter around for a bit, including a decent sequence where we learn what Gilbert was up to over the past ten years and how Pandora operate their contracts safely, before everyone ends up shanghaied to or chasing into the weird otherworldly domain of a chain called Cheshire, who seems to be related to Alice’s lost memories.

The sequence in the Chesire Cat’s domain is both long and, at times, a little hard to follow, since everyone is sliding between a variety of illusions, memories, and otherworldly spaces. Importantly, we start to get more information about events that happened a hundred years before the present. The main event of “back then” was the founding of the four Dukedoms, in response to an event known as the Tragedy of Sabrie, where an entire city was swallowed up by the Abyss. Key to the events of that time is Jack Vessalius, Oz’s ancestor from back then and, as he appears in Cheshire’s realm, Oz’s doppelganger as well. He lets Oz head into Alice’s memories centered around that time, with the mission to save her. This results in seeing a load of plot hooks that aren’t really well addressed: Alice as a human girl locked away in a tower living a lonely life, the Alice of the past dead, Jack and someone who looks a lot like Vincent running around doing cryptic things… you can kind of make up theories about what the truth of this world and these events might be, but I don’t think there’s really enough to make them much more than blind guesses. That wouldn’t be so bad, but the anime actually never comes around to resolve any of this.

And things only get shakier from there. People lose their minds and/or fight across Cheshire’s dimension, ending with Cheshire defeated and his bell (containing some of Alice’s memories and the truth of the Tragedy of Sabrie) is claimed, but Break and Gilbert escape separately from Alice and Oz, the latter interrupting a meeting of Pandora big-wigs, with Alice in her B.Rabbit state no less. From this state, Jack manages to possess Oz, convince Pandora he’s him, and tell them that an enemy from the past, Glen Baskerville, is still around to cause trouble. But, before we’re able to do anything about Glen Baskerville, we have to deal with side quests!

The first involves Vincent being evil and kidnapping Sharon, who is recovered at the cost of Cheshire’s bell. The second involves Oz visiting his little sister (now the older of the two) at her school because she supposedly has a crush on someone (with some indication it might be Gilbert). There, he runs into some new characters, and thereafter some Baskerville agents who make trouble for everyone. During this scenario we get more mysteries about a hundred years before and other anomalies, like a kid at the academy claiming to have written a song Oz has heard from an artifact left by Jack. This should be interesting, but frankly at this point it’s hard to care. I don’t think the show quite cares either: it cools off with a comedy routine before and as our heroes meet with another crazy eccentric theoretical ally of Pandora.

To be fair, while this might not seem quite like the logical next thing to do, they are at least looking for more information on Sabrie and Baskerville. We don’t get it direct, though, as the ancient man recognizes Break as a former Illegal contractor who was dragged to the Abyss ages ago (which lines up with him having gotten his current identity after appearing in front of one of the Abyss gates, suggesting he clawed his way out.)

We see some of Break’s past, though, which slides into Vincent’s past. Both had important encounters with an entity known as The Will of the Abyss, who is basically White Alice and is, in fact, revealed to be our Alice’s… sister? This might be metaphorical sister and instead some sort of alternate personality, second soul, or what have you, as when Alice was a living human she apparently swapped minds with the Will now and again, expressing different tastes. The Will of the Abyss was apparently able to grant Break’s wish to change the past when he met with her, though that didn’t work out so well for Break since the people he wanted to save died fairly shortly after anyway, including the one person he did save the first time around. It’s unclear if this is just fate or if Will of the Abyss is a nasty genie.

And, at this point, with all the questions in the world and not much in the way of answers, we start episode 23. Of 25. The show is almost over and it really feels like it’s just getting started. The characters lament that they seem to have gotten nowhere hunting for Contractors or Alice’s Memories (or any of the other plot threads that the show can’t hold), ask more questions, get no answers, visit the place where Oz was banished… and then return to find the entire city on fire with Chains rampaging everywhere.

We spend a whole episode fighting through the nightmare scenario, which is apparently the result of Will of the Abyss throwing a temper tantrum. It’s basically action on rails, and everyone shows up to get some hits in. Even the Baskervilles show up to help out because, hey, their motivations are so enigmatic that you can’t even call them inconsistent going from what passed for villains to unreliable helpers.

Eventually, the big boss monster comes out. Team secondary characters fights it, and gets owned. Alice goes ahead and fights it, but she loses as well. Then the boss gets turned to stone and Oz unlocks another Alice memory from it. Apparently, this happened because Oz is the reincarnation of Jack, who Will of the Abyss was in love with, and because of that he can control the powers of the Abyss.

For the last episode, then, it’s time to search out Oz’s father. What, you thought the big boss fight was a good ending? No, no, we need to check up on a character we haven’t seen since the first episode and, in fact, no one has seen in the last ten years in-setting. They find him surprisingly easily by visiting the ruins of Sabrie (which is apparently Baskerville HQ) and, after fighting off a rushed attempt to once again banish Oz, he just sort of tells off his dad and they go their separate ways as the show ends. The final credits roll, and presumably they flash a Neuralizer from Men in Black, because nothing is remembered out of the entire mess that just happened.

And, I feel, a “Mess” is the best way to describe Pandora Hearts. The show is told at a pace that’s insane – not just insanely fast, but speeding up and slowing down seemingly at random, taking time off here and there, lingering in some scenarios and racing through others. And, of course, the plot is a pile of story elements without much consistency or structure.

I know Pandora Hearts has the unenviable task of adapting less than the entirety of a plot-driven piece of media. However, that really doesn’t excuse how fundamentally broken the show is. The first season of The Promised Neverland had a good structure as an anime despite not adapting the entire story. Made in Abyss had a good story as an anime even though the story doesn’t even really have a true ‘break’ where the show ends and there are, when you get down to it, loads of unanswered questions. The vast majority of these adaptations that I’ve seen either find or make a better break than Pandora Hearts does, and know better how to tell their stories so they don’t get bogged down in a constant parade of twists and turns that set up but fail to pay off within the context of the story being told on screen

That said, I don’t hate Pandora Hearts. Its visuals are creative, its characters often have at least the starts of good arcs. Oz has more personality than some “nice guy” heroes, Gilbert is at least a watchable brooding type, Alice is pretty fun when she actually gets screen time… it’s all in all a fine cast, an just a shame that they don’t have a better narrative to be in.

At the end, I feel like Pandora Hearts is worth a C-. You can watch it, and do just fine in the moment, but don’t expect it to leave any sort of lasting impact.