It’s becoming a Christmas tradition for me to review a show I absolutely despise towards the end of December. And why not? Negativity is fun to write and to read; it’s probably what a lot of you are here for, and Haruhi knows I’ve wanted to tear into some of these shows for some time. And this time it’s my miserable pleasure to open up on Children of the Whales. Ho, ho, ho.
It’s worth noting, here at the start, to note that I feel that Children of the Whales is a show that’s more disappointing than it is actually bad. Make no mistake, it’s bad in an objective sense (as much as any media review can be objective) as well, but when it comes to the writing and pacing it’s more just garden variety bad. When contrasted with the heights it hints at, the overflowing barrel of LeGuin or even Miyazaki that it seems primed to unleash? That’s when the worst is suffered.
The set-up for Children of the Whales features a civilization that dwells on a living island called Falaina (or simply “The Mud Whale”), afloat and adrift on a seemingly endless sea of sand. The people living there consist of two castes – the Marked, who have the power of Thymia (essentially telekinesis plus psychic force blades) but who live short lives, and the Unmarked, who possess longer lifespans but no Thymia power. While they will rarely come across mysterious features out in the sea of sand, they have never encountered any other humans so far back as their records extend. It’s strange, beautiful (as is the art and animation) and perhaps a bet melancholy.
Our main character, Chakuro, is a Marked who acts as a chronicler for the people of Falaina, letting us know these basic facts with some early narration before the inciting incident. To say more about Chakuro brings us to one of the big problems with the show.
There’s a truism in writing that goes about like this: “Show, don’t tell.” It’s an easily misunderstood piece of advice, but it is an important one. It doesn’t mean that you should never have exposition, because sometimes that’s necessary, but it does mean that if something is going to matter, the audience needs to see it in action in such a way that the reality of the situation is felt or experienced. This goes double when it comes to character traits. If a character is supposed to be funny, we need to see them make jokes. If a character is supposed to be reckless, we need to see them get into tough situations because of their choices. If a character is supposed to be skilled in some way, they should use that skill at some point. If you say a character is a chess master and then we never see them play chess or otherwise use their chess skills, then why should we believe it? You can have these attributes tie back to the story less than totally directly, like a chess master applying their skills to military strategy or what have you, or talking heavily in chess metaphors, but it does need to be there, some way in which we understand more than just by being told that it is true that the character is a chess master.
The more major a detail is, the more focus it needs to be properly “shown”. If something’s supposed to just be a little quirk, you can get away with it only coming up once or twice. If it’s supposed to be a major part of the character’s persona, it needs to come up more often. For a character who does it right, you can look at… well, plenty of characters, but for the sake of argument I’m going to use Mikoto Misaka, and I’m going to leave aside her arguably largest trait (being the Level 5 Electromaster) at that. We are told that Mikoto likes the frog mascot character Gekota when the detail is introduced, and every once in a while Mikoto will be shown to make some sort of questionable decision for Gekota merch. It probably comes up more than it needs to in order to be relevant, because it’s something of a running gag as well as a quirk, but it’s well handled. On the more major scale, it is commented on at least once in as many words that Mikoto is hot-headed. And we see that constantly. Whenever a situation occurs, major or minor, Mikoto can be counted on to not totally think through her actions. She’s also smart, so sometimes she does reach a well-reasoned conclusion, but she certainly doesn’t slow herself down in order to do it. Her outbursts change how she interacts with minor downtime scenes (for instance, choosing to roundhouse kick or shock an ornery vending machine, even though she should know that will get automated security upset with her), and her general demeanor lenses how major arcs go down (for instance, she runs off on her own fairly often, sometimes getting into trouble because she doesn’t have backup). Mikoto is not a perfect character (if such a thing even exists) but she is a very good character, and one whose character traits are consistently felt and experienced, one who we are fully shown rather than just told about.
Now, how about Chakuro?
We are told two things about Chakuro that should be fairly important, at least given how the story develops. For one, we are told that his Thymia is exceptionally powerful, but that he is incredibly, dangerously clumsy with it, earning the ‘nickname’ of “Destroyer”. We see him, one time, make a mess of a coconut he’s attempting to retrieve from a tree, at the same time we’re told of this trait. And then? There are no other times in the show where we really see him having clumsy overpowered Thymia abilities, or being mistrusted because of those abilities (as the nicknaming would suggest). This is despite the fact that Chakuro gets involved in several situations where his Thymia could be a relevant factor: instead of something special (which we were told he was) he’s treated as an ‘ordinary’ Marked for most of the rest of the show. This includes being treated as such by other characters, who seldom mention his status after its introduction.
The other thing we are told about Chakuro is that he is the chronicler because he is always writing things down, practically in a compulsive manner. This, and the curiosity implied in it, is the single biggest “fact” we are supposed to believe about Chakuro. It informs his role in his society, it informs his role in the story, and… we seldom see it and never feel it. He does write things down now and again, but mostly within the bounds of his job as the chronicler, and the fact that this is something he is “Always doing” never comes up. He doesn’t try to write what he’s experiencing in an important moment, it doesn’t interrupt or add color to his otherwise unrelated character scenes, it never comes up except to add homeopathic color to scenes in which the writers didn’t know what to have Chakuro doing, so they had him carry sheafs of papers around.
Essentially, of the two most important things we are told about Chakuro, neither of them is shown. They don’t build arcs off of these traits. They don’t even build scenes off of these traits. And, as frustrating as it is to have this be the case for Chakuro (monstrously frustrating, in case you were wondering), he’s not the only case of a character being badly afflicted by being told to us, rather than shown to us. But we haven’t even really started the first episode yet, so I’ll get to those when the time comes.
The other characters we’re really introduced to off the bat are Sami, Chakuro’s generic in-love-with-him-not-that-he-gets-the-point childhood friend, and her older unmarked brother, Suou. Sami is every bit the stock character you’d think, but compared to so many of the other characters in this show, she plays her type well enough that she’s really one of the better characters in the show. At the very least, we see her do things and express herself in a way that’s not just us being told that something is true and never experiencing it. I actually believe she likes Chakuro, even if we don’t really get enough character out of him to emotionally understand why.
Suou is a little harder to get a bead on. At first he seems like a generic nice guy but, like his sister, he’s one of the few residents of the Mud Whale that isn’t deprived of a personality by the writers. He’s sort of a doctor, who has been working to determine why the Marked die young, a struggle we see him engage with and that has meaning for him. He is mostly a “nice guy” but, in keeping with the fact that he’s one of the moderately well written characters, there are a few scenes that show us that his calm niceness is more a deliberate choice. He comes more into his own later. And for the Mud Whale cast, that is about the count of decently-written characters. Given how many significant secondary characters and named extras are yet to be introduced (many of which I’m not liable to cover in this review, but which are still named characters who should get some development), that’s already troubling.
One day, as the series begins, the Mud Whale sights another island in the distance and a party (including Chakuro) is, after some deliberation, dispatched to explore it. This isn’t completely unheard of, strange islands being known as potential sources of water and other resources, but this island appears to be different, bearing signs of human presence. A critter even leads Chakuro to a living person on the island, the first outsider to the Mud Whale he’s ever heard of. Initial contact is not too pleasant, as she seems to be ready to fight, but she’s also weak and quickly knocked out by Chakuro alone, who omits her initial hostility when bringing her to the others, who return with her to the Mud Whale. The girl is dubbed Lykos, after a word embroidered on her clothes, and while that’s not actually her name she doesn’t have any other name so it might as well be her name.
After the party returns, we meet another character, and this another of the problem ones. His name is Ouni, and he’s introduced to us due to his release from prison. He’s marked, and a special kind of marked at that (though what exactly that special trait means is unclear), and we’re told he’s one of the “Moles”, delinquent youths who make so much trouble they spend the majority of their lives in the underground prison that is the “belly” of the Mud Whale. So, theoretically, Ouni should be a hardened criminal, prone to making trouble. I’ll give him this… he makes trouble once. Once, and then essentially never again, in any sort of way that makes us feel like his status as the frequently imprisoned guy is actually earned. Even the one incident isn’t really anything that seems like the acts of a repeat offender. Outside of that, he’s a brooding pretty boy who is exactly as intense as you would expect from a generic brooding pretty boy in anime. Whereas Chakuro is kind of generally nice, Ouni is kind of generally harsh, and that’s about the characterization he gets. Is it the absolute worst? No, but it also never really pays off or addresses what we’re told about him.
After coming to and surrendering to her current hosts, Lykos is interrogated by the elders of Falaina, an event that Chakuro spies in on until Ouni, in his one moment of actually doing anything resembling crimes, breaks in and grabs Lykos (and Chakuro on his way out), desperate to learn more about her origin and thus insisting on being taken to see her world, the other island like the Mud Whale. They’re successful in commandeering one of the little boats used to get to points of interest within a range of the Mud Whale, and once again board her island. There, they find the mass grave where she buried all the other soldiers who died before her, and also learn the truth about what “Lykos” is.
The character named Lykos, as I mentioned before, is actually a nameless girl, an emotionless soldier/slave serving a national power unknown to the residents of the Mud Whale. Her island/ship is named Lykos, and it draws that name from the thing at its heart, a creature called a Nous, of which this specimen is named Lykos. This “Nous” creature looks like a sedentary Shoggoth, a mass of blackish orbs in a pulsating mass with faint opalescent color to it. Let no one say that the creature and environment designs in this show don’t land. According to Nameless-Girl-We-Just-Keep-Calling-Lykos, the Nous takes away the ability of humans to feel emotion, and in exchange grants them Thymia, citing herself as an example of one subjected to this exchange. Though, lacking emotions, she shouldn’t really care about anything, Lykos does seem to like it, and suggest that emotions are, to her, unbearable. I suppose she might “know” since, if not subjected to a Nous regularly, those pesky feelings will supposedly reassert themselves. After this revelation, the trio are taken back to the Mud Whale and Ouni and Chakuro are imprisoned (though Chakuro is quickly released because he was coerced). From there, Chakuro takes an interest in Lykos (the girl) and tries to teach her feelings, showing her some of the wonderful sights of the Mud Whale and bringing her into the experience of life.
This is, by far, the best part of the show. If it was mostly about the journey of these characters and what they feel, especially what Lykos feels as she slowly becomes able actually experience emotion, and how they explore and relate to this strange world, it would actually be a fairly tolerable show. I likened it to LeGuin and Miyazaki in its high aspiration, and I do hold to that. Even if it never would have reached quite the heights of A Wizard of Earthsea or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it could have comfortably inhabited a similar conceptual space.
Unfortunately, there are two things I can share at this juncture. Number one, Lykos is essentially a static character. She is the character who most pointedly needs to not be static, but through the show, she pretty much is. Supposedly, by the time we get to the end, she should have emotions, but while she has one crying scene in which she wails about how much feelings hurt (when we have never seen feelings hurting her), it’s not really progress: she complained about the possibility of feelings here at the start, and while it wasn’t quite the same she did shed tears in her very first scene, while attacking Chakuro. Even if it were a new state, though, because we aren’t focused on her journey, at best it’s like a switch has been thrown, which is not compelling or dramatic in any way. Number two, it’s time for Children of the Whales to show its true colors with the arrival of another ship, and the fact that its people, a horde of shambling robotic-feeling masked soldiers (you know, what Lykos was supposed to be), immediately open fire and start slaughtering the Mud Whale residents, beginning with Sami, who gets shot to death in the first volley protecting Chakuro from the same fate.
The next episode is pretty much just harsh action moment after harsh action moment, and from here on it largely feels like the creators ran out of ideas, because the show will continue to default to pointless brutality whenever it starts to feel like maybe it should be doing something. In the immediate, I hope you enjoy people we never met dying in droves, because there’s going to be a lot of that.
On the side of the invaders, we do get at least one attacker who has a face and a persona rather than being a shambling vector of violence, an psychotic big-eyed villain who in contrast to the otherwise emotionless offensive front really loves hamming it up, hurting people, and chewing the scenery. I didn’t count him in the “Good characters in this show” list because, frankly, he never actually matters at any point. He could be another generic faceless soldier and all you would lose would be some padding later. So, while this character has screen presence, I really would prefer someone with actual agency or who could provide some manner of meaningful contribution.
On the subject of the defenders, Ouni breaks out of prison and, finding some of his friends are already dead, actually starts using his cool telekinetic powers to make this a fight rather than simply a massacre. Their efforts at least score some kills, much to the dismay of Suou, who thinks this must be a resolvable misunderstanding. He goes with a friendly guardswoman, Ginshu, to attempt to negotiate. However, his efforts are fairly in vain. There is some negotiation made, however, when Lykos intervenes. She uses her surprisingly potent Thymia to stop a pack of soliders, and in so doing gets the attention of the enemy commander, Orca, who happens to be her brother.
We get the answers about this in a fairly scattered way, but the short version is that Orca is the leader of an expedition to exterminate the residents of Falaina, who are held to be criminals by his home society. The reason for this is that these people refused to give up their emotions, and instead went into exile with a Nous with a different sort of life cycle, Falaina, close to a century ago – long enough that the Marked have forgotten, but that the Unmarked elders are only the second generation or so and knew this secret. Orca’s effort to wipe them out is happening now for… reason not announced, and while they met some other hostility first, it seems that the ship Lykos was also engaged in the effort. Lykos (the girl) stands up for the Mud Whale natives on the grounds that they weren’t the psychotic savages that she was led to believe they were and that were justly sentenced to die as, but it doesn’t particularly matter to Orca. He wants her back, but Lykos says she doesn’t want to go back and Orca… just sort of accepts that.
The attack continues, with Lykos rescuing Chakuro from the raving psychopath who is having the time of his life butchering people who actually react when they’re killed. Chakuro, for his part, is more or less in “Blue Screen of Death” mode, having essentially shut down with Sami dead in his arms. Finally, the enemy battleship, Skyros, appears, emerging from the sand because apparently it’s a submarine and can do that. Skyros reports the attack is called off for a time, and that Lykos is to be left on the Mud Whale in order to study its effects; they’ll return to finish the job when the time is right.
So, with that hanging over them, the people of Falaina try to put themselves back together. We get a mass funeral. Suou is also called upon to become mayor of the Mud Whale, due to the office being vacated by the demise of its previous holder. The Elders don’t intend for him to serve a very long term, though, since they’ve decided that the proper response to the threat of extermination by Orca’s forces is to say “Well, two can play at that game!” and sink the Mud Whale with all hands before the enemies return. Suou isn’t on board with the whole “just kill everybody ourselves” idea, so he gets thrown into prison.
Meanwhile, one of the weird kids who works for the council visits Chakuro. She uses her unexplained mystical powers to show him visions of his friends, including a last meeting with the spirit of Sami, who is able to say her goodbyes properly.
Now, I want to call out this scene, really this moment in this scene, in particular, because I am firmly of essentially three minds about it. On one hand, getting this supernatural closure in a show that’s not really otherwise big on ghosts or afterlives or what have you, to a certain degree, feels cheap. Especially coming for no particular reason when it does, it cheats us out of the opportunity to actually see Chakuro cope with the brutal death of someone who was very dear to him. I dare say it lets poor Sami be pretty much forgotten in favor of the non-existent chemistry with Lykos. On the other hand, the scene itself is handled pretty well. It feels like good catharsis, and in an odd turn for this show what the two say to each other when they have this last little magic moment to talk is just right and not too much yammering exposition. I think on the whole I do like it for what it is. But then there’s the third mind, which is why I wanted to highlight this so strongly: In this scene, we have a mysterious waif providing a magic vision allowing Chakuro to speak to the departed, and I want that to be remembered for a point I’ll get to later.
The little girl also provides the important information that the elders are planning to sink the Mud Whale, for some reason choosing Chakuro to help resist this. He goes into the depths of the Mud Whale with Lykos while Ouni, on his own, tries to do the same only to be intercepted by a sort of secret police operative called Shuan. Chakuro and Lykos make it to the heart of the ship where they find the Nous Falaina (a creature Chakuro didn’t know about), which unlike the previously seen Nous looks more like a hybrid of a tree and an elderly person in a rocking chair, with radiant multicolored foliage. The Elders are hurting Falaina, trying to kill it in order to sink the ship, but Chakuro stops them and the little girl appears, calling Falaina ‘mother’ and melding with the Nous in order to heal it, as apparently she and her sister are weird magic Nous-spawn of some sort? They’re not really explained but do sort of show up from here on whenever the show feels it needs some random magical powers to make things more shiny. With their attempt to sink the ship foiled, the Elders just sort of give up and let Suou take charge and get everyone prepared for the return of Skyros.
A plan is quickly drawn up – when Skyros attacks, the Mud Whale residents will have a chance to break the back of the enemy by boarding Skyros, reaching its depths, and killing off its Nous in order to sink the ship. Most of the other remaining citizens are quickly trained for defense while Chakuro, Lykos, Ouni, Ginshu (the nice guard lady) and Nibi (one of Ouni’s fairly unremarkable friends) are, along with some named extras, determined to be the away team with the mission to take down Skyros.
The next three episodes – seven, eight, and nine for those keeping score – are dedicated fully to the battle with Skyros.
This, in theory, wouldn’t be so bad. While just having lots of battles with harsh action and pastel-colored death all around as the main fare of the show is already a massive letdown compared to what the worldbuilding is like, if it’s worth doing then it should be worth doing well, and three episodes for a massive, climactic battle is about right. I brought up Railgun earlier and it takes her about three episodes to deal with major battles like Meltdowner, Accelerator, or Doppelganger. Other shows that are willing to have multi-episode battles will also use about as long for their big fights while maintaining a good pace. So as much as I have something of a distaste for it here, I tried to think about this movement in an objective sense. So, leaving out my massive feelings of disappointment on the matter, I have to report… it’s still a bad movement. The reason why is that out of those three episodes, the meat of two is largely wasted.
The first episode is actually alright… again, managing expectations for what the show is doing. A sandstorm kicks up, covering the broader scope of the battle from view, no doubt a boon for the defenders (possibly manufactured by Falaina or her children, but that’s hard to tell). The away team sneaks aboard Skyros, seemingly undetected, while the hastily armed and trained militia attempts to hold off the attackers. Those attackers, with the psychopath as the tip of the spear, cut deep into Falaina’s ranks, with said lunatic even killing one of the elder council and nearly killing Suou as well before Shuan (remember him?) intervenes. Aboard Skyros, things seem to be going too well. The party splits into a strike team and rear guard, only for the strike team to get caught out when the commander of Skyros (Orca’s right-hand man, not Orca himself) reveals that he guessed that just such a desperate end-run would be attempted. Some of the extras get killed, and it seems like the attack on Skyros is on the ropes.
Then the second episode wastes way, way too much time with the psychopath.
You note how I haven’t used this character’s name? He has one – Liontari – but he is to such a degree an archetype rather than a person that it didn’t really seem worthwhile to call him by name. And that can be alright; not every character needs to have a lot going on. Apparently the creators of Children of the Whales disagreed with that, though, as while we do progress the general fight on Falaina and the struggle in the depths of Skyros, Liontari gets an obscene amount of focus for someone who was basically an unsympathetic giggling murderer to add a little flavor to the otherwise silent, faceless attacking armies.
In this episode, we see said psycho’s background. Apparently, he’s incompatible with Nous, and thus got some sort of feedback when his emotions were offered up, causing him to be extra-emotional rather than emotionless. We get some rather poor attempts to get us to feel sorry for him by showing that he was ostracized and treated badly for being different and Suou (who was party to the flashback because… Falaina, I guess. The framing for this psychic mumbo jumbo is less than ideal, with mysterious glowing hands appearing all over the place, but there is at least something suggestive of what gave Chakuro his vision earlier) even invites him to lay down arms and join the people of the Mud Whale before Shuan quite rightly points out that nobody is going to welcome with open arms someone who reveled in slaughtering their friends and family, and presses the attack against Liontari. Though he ultimately disengages from Shuan (mostly because Suou tells him to hold back), Liontari is still mortally wounded. He staggers away, around the environs of the Mud Whale, having a (psychotic) internal monologue as he does. Finally, some of the trained kids come across him and shoot him full of arrows, at which point he finally staggers off the Mud Whale, falling head-first into the sea of sand thinking how he’d have liked to ‘play’ (based on all his previous scenes meaning ‘murder people’) even more than he was ultimately able.
Yeah, right here Liontari gets a bigger and more drawn-out death scene than most of the named protagonists who die in this show, and you know what’s even crazier? He’s not actually dead. I know he was stabbed brutally by Shuan, shot full of arrows, and tumbled head-first what should have been a lethal distance into the sands that are normally death to sink into, but he actually reappears later with no explanation given as to how he wasn’t dead at least three times over from injury, impact, and sand-drowning, making the attempt to give him a pity-evoking emotional death, as sloppy as that attempt was and as forced as it was given the character they chose to do it with, completely pointless due to the lack of, you know, death.
In Skyros, Ouni turns the tables on the ambush, and is recognized as the weird special thing he apparently is, which is called a “Daimonas” and never explained beyond the observable facts that they’re extra-powerful Thymia-users. This is where the third episode of the arc, and the second one that’s full of waste, really shows its stuff. As there were some movements in Skyros in the previous, there are some on Falaina this time, but what it’s time to talk about is the Skyros side.
Ouni fights back, and his friend Nibi (the one who wasn’t much of anything before this arc but is now getting some heavy extra focus, so he’s obviously kill fodder) jumps in to help. They take down one of the elite enemies, but the horde of foes around the Nous starts to get the upper hand until, surprise surprise, Nibi gets killed. This causes two things to happen. One is that Ouni has a psychic freakout, unleashing a torrent of Thymia that cuts both the enemies and the Skyros Nous to ribbons, making the mission a success and triggering what should be a quick escape since, as we established, Nous are load-bearing and the whole island-ship is going to be coming down.
The other thing that’s triggered is the bit I wanted to highlight the talk with Sami for. Ouni, now for basically no reason (completing the decay of these mystical visions from Chakuro’s, through the one in the previous episode, to now) receives a vision in which he speaks with the recently departed Nibi. Unlike Chakuro’s vision with Sami, which was short and sweet and really expressed something that needed to be said, this vision is none of those things.
First, as bad a character as Chakuro is, Ouni is even more wooden. While Chakuro is generic, I can at least get that he kind of liked Sami because we saw them interact and regard each other. We didn’t really get much out of Nibi and because Ouni is the brooding pretty boy type, we didn’t really see him interact all that much with the characters who were supposed to be his friends. So while there was barely enough emotional investment to say that Chakuro could kind of use that supernatural catharsis, the same can’t be said for Ouni.
Second, when Chakuro talked to the spirit of departed Sami, it was part of a moment that was clearly supposed to be a mystical experience, since was being brought to see someone he thought he knew as the supernatural herald of a being that is somewhere on the “divine” scale as far as his world is concerned. Ouni gets his vision… right about when there should be a desperate escape from a collapsing ship. It completely halts and distracts from the action, rather than utilizing the atmosphere that’s been built.
And third, this scene is slow as molasses and repetitive at that. Rather than a glimpse of a spirit or the figment of a life, Ouni finds himself in a desert where Nibi sails a small ship by him, saying his goodbyes and injunctions for Ouni to live on and keep going as his ship sinks tortuously slowly into the sand. Nibi says just about every line he’s got in him three times each, and drifts by the suddenly distraught Ouni, who doesn’t want to let Nibi go but can’t hold onto him. And we pretty much have to watch the entire glacial sinking, bit by bit, when its sometimes hard to even notice how much deeper the ship has gone.
And this is why I’m of a third mind on the scene with Sami – it sets up this awfully-paced, distracting, unnecessary mess later in the show.
In some ways, this scene is similar to other scenes I’ve talked about in the past: the “Solomon’s Wisdom” sequences from the Magi series. I mentioned that those were probably “Love it or hate it” turf: they typically offer good insight into a character and do tend to serve a purpose to the plot, but they also grind the show to a halt when they happen, much like this scene does. However, every Solomon’s Wisdom scene, even the worst timed and worst constructed (Cassim’s in my opinion, in case you were wondering) was leagues better in its intent and execution than this scene.
A big part of that is that when Solomon’s Wisdom is invoked, it does something. In the case of Cassim and Mogamett, it removes power from and allows the defeat of some dark force. Most of the others neutralize enemies as well, though perhaps in less direct ways, allowing the characters to gain something and move forward. The entire conversation with Nibi does… nothing. Nibi is never mentioned again, Ouni didn’t seem to need the push forward until he spontaneously did for some reason, nothing is learned, nothing is achieved, nobody really grows, and wasn’t there an escape sequence we should have been indulging in rather than this?
Eventually Nibi finally vanishes into the hereafter and Ouni leaves vision space to run like hell like he should have been doing, along with the other important or quasi-important characters who all survived the raid on Skyros. The Skyros soldiers on the Mud Whale see their ride/god shatter and sink into the sand and, en masse, decide to follow it, shambling to the edge and throwing themselves over into the Sea of Sand in what at least appears to be mass suicide, rather than accepting they’d have to live in a place that has emotions and stuff.
So that was Children of the Whales and… oh, right, there are three more episodes, silly me.
Yeah, as mishandled as it is, the battle against Skyros does really seem like it should have been the finale of the show. The only plot we had was the impending attempted extermination of Falaina, and especially with the pacing of this show in its first three quarters we don’t really have the time to sprout another significantly story line and give it anything even resembling the weight of the one we just finished, so what more is Children of the Whales going to do? Why doesn’t it just cut?
Well, I suppose that one episode of denouement would be appropriate… so how about three? That’s basically what the last three episodes of Children of the Whales are – an overly-extended cleanup of what has already happened and, along with it, a halfhearted introduction of stories and themes that would continue on if the show got a second season or you followed the Manga. It’s hardly the only show to leave a dangling hook for continuation, but most will spend a scene on that sort of stuff, not a sizable chunk of three episodes.
In some ways, these episodes are the second best sequence in Children of the Whales, after episodes 1 and 2 before the lame war arc swallowed what hope the show had, in that we get at least bits and pieces of world-building that’s creative or evokes some interesting ideas. But on the other hand these episodes are still massively unfit, and the world-building is kind of marred having to put up with fragmentary plots and teasers all over the place.
On the side of the Empire, we follow Orca, returned to the home island of his people. This is where it’s revealed that Liontari is inexplicably alive. He wants to go back to Falaina, for the fun murder, and Orca is willing to allow it. Much to Liontari’s horror though, he’s then conscripted into Orca’s jester squad (with some vague implication that’s also Orca’s harem or something like it). Orca then stands trial for the loss of Skyros, but manages to pin everything on his underling, the ship’s commander, as well as using the reveal that Ouni exists to excuse his failure and galvanize the imperial forces to, when able, hunt down Falaina once again. Along the way it’s revealed that Orca is some degree of special because he has been allowed to consume Nous meat, meaning that he has regained some of the emotions that were sacrificed as an imperial citizen. This seems to frighten some people, though not his secretary lady, who he takes as his fiancee.
And, while there are some interesting hints here, given the uneasy relationship between the imperial forces and Nous (they’re simultaneously gods and tools), this is the last we’ll see of any of them, so there’s not really a point.
On Falaina, some travelers arrive. They aren’t imperial, and come across about like the Europeans in a colonial-era travelogue: self-assured, haughty and superior, and enchanted by the fascinating savages they’ve found, those being our main characters. They do seem to offer some escape from the otherwise inevitable return of the Empire to finish everybody off, though, since they’d be allying with a force already able to stand up to the Empire. I suppose this is probably why the Empire wanted to finish Falaina off. Two other things are also brought up. For one, a trinket critter Chakuro has gained is able to act as a rudder for the Mud Whale, which was previously drifting without hope of control. For another, it’s finally revealed what the deal with Falaina’s marked is: instead of their emotions, the Nous consumes their lifespan (about two thirds of it, to give you an idea of how short Marked lives are) to grant them Thymia. This being made public causes some significant friction between agitators among the marked majority and the unmarked minority, but those tensions are (temporarily) defused by Suou while everybody gets the Mud Whale moving onto the next adventure.
Essentially, very little that’s brought up in these three episodes is actually resolved. I guess Orca’s trial is held in full, but whatever he’s plotting going forward is up in the air, how the society of the Mud Whale will change is up in the aid, what the deal with those strangers is going to be is up in the air… this really is just one big trailer for the continuation.
So that’s Children of the Whales and… it’s bad. The characters are flat, relying on what we’re told about them rather than how we experience them. The plot is a wreck; a rushed and incompetent “Seven Samurai” style arm-the-peaceful-villagers affair that’s bloated in its combat, invested in its weakest elements, and welded to an obnoxiously long tail. The pacing is truly awful, having no idea what deserves time and attention and what can be taken care of quickly, stopping and rushing in all the wrong places. The choices made are baffling, especially around Liontari being focused on and Lykos being fairly ignored and viewed from outside.
All in all, it’s worth a D.
Why a D and not a Fail? For all that it has those problems, the show looks good, it sounds good, its competently acted, its world-building is nice, it does at least touch on its big ideas… there are things that work here, and make Children of the Whales more watchable than it could be. I can’t recommend it – in fact, I really do recommend staying far away from this show – but all the same I can’t honestly say that as huge a letdown as Children of the Whales was, that it has nothing that works. Every now and again you’ll get a genuinely good scene or moment, which is a lot more than I can say for most of the shows I’ve failed. I’ve even said in the past (outside the bounds of this blog) that if a Season 2 came out, despite disliking season 1 so much, I’d watch it. I don’t feel that way anymore; there are too many better shows to concern myself with than a Season 2 of a bad one (though watching it for the purposes of review is another story). But that kind of statement does come from a genuine recognition that while Children of the Whales gets a lot more wrong that it gets right, what it gets right, it really does get right.
It’s one to avoid, but not one of the technically worst shows I’ve seen by a long shot.