You know, this did build hype for the movie when it was released... but now it just breaks narrative flow.
Hey everyone, hope you’re surviving
this last week until the US 2020 election. Vote the Boil out. But let’s forget
about the headaches of the real world for a while and talk about Anime.
Last time on My Hero Academia, the
second half of the Hero Provisional License exam began in earnest. The game
this round? The kids have to return to the field, but this time go through and
save injured civilians after a mock Villain attack. To assist in the realism is
HUC, the Help Us Company, a group of professional actors that specialize in
playing victims. Most of Class 1A work together to save civilians, while Bakugo
goes off on his own, but with Kirishima and Kaminari tailing him. Things go
reasonably well, aside for Uraraka still dealing with the fact she loves one of
her best friends, but then the curveball hits. The Hero and #3 of the “Looks
like a Villain” list, Gang Orca comes in posing as a villain, and he and his
squad of sidekicks are going to start wreaking havoc. I’d love to say that we’re
going to dive right into resolving this plot… but we’ve got some shameless self-promoting
to do first. Let’s get to it.
We open with a nondiegetic Izuku
and All Might (The characters currently exist outside their universe) addressing
we the Audience. Izuku is wondering why they’re doing this when they were in
the middle of a climactic battle for their licenses, but All Might laughs it
off. Izuku seems as indignant as I feel, but All Might is confident we’ll enjoy
this break in the story, and we should sit back, relax and take in this story
of saving people with love!
…
He’s full of crap, by the way. This
is just to promote the My Hero Academia movie, Two Heroes. But let’s try to enjoy
it.
We open on a title card telling us
that this story takes place at the end of July but just before the Training Camp
with the Wild Wild Pussycats. All Might joins Cementoss and Midnight in the
teachers lounge. The two other teachers show him that the local news is running
an All Might retrospective. It’s talking about his college days when he spent time
training abroad in the US with his friend and side kick David Shield. They use
scenes from the movie in the blurb, again, to promote the movie. All Might get’s
an Email, but Aizawa comes in and tells them to get ready for the special
class.
We get a quick blurb from Aizawa
about how Izuku and his classmates are here taking this extracurricular class
over summer break. Shockingly, the five other students he’s taking it with are
Bakugo, Iida, Todoroki, Uraraka and Tsu. The five most popular minor
characters? What are the odds? The other students will cycle in after them in small
groups. No, we don’t waste more time seeing the other groups. Aizawa explains that
the training class will be harder than regular classes. The simulation that they’ll
be doing is to save civilians, capture the villain, and will also be graded on
how they assess and handle the situation. He calls in the teachers, revealing
that All Might (whom does his usual run in excitedly entrance), Midnight,
Cementoss, and Present Mic will be helping.
They students are deployed into the
mock city that UA has… (oy, how do they pay for these?) The students start in an
alley near a jewelry store. Aizawa explains the scenario, that a villain broke
into the jewelry store but was interrupted when the police arrived, the villain
barricaded himself in the store with several hostages. The police are represented
by cardboard cut outs of all things. The students need to assess the situation,
protect the civilians, verify the number of and capture the villains. The
students begin. Bakugo has the first good idea and “suggests” (meaning orders)
Uraraka to float up above and get a visual on the Villain and his hostages.
Todoroki calls the jewelry store to distract the criminal as Uraraka does so. She
verifies that there’s one hostage taker (played by All Might) and three
hostages (played by Cementoss, Midnight and Present Mic). All Might over the
phone tells Todoroki that the heroes need to back off and let him slip away or
things will get ugly. The group wants to try to formulate a plan, but Bakugo
gets fed up with waiting and bum-rushes the jewelry store. He blasts through
the front door and demands the Villain surrender. Aizawa muses how his students
will handle the test’s curveball. What’s the curveball? The Villain is dead, a
massive wound in his chest and a bloody knife laying beside him. Who’s ready
for some investigative work?
Well, this situation certainly took a turn.
Tsu tickles All Might’s nose with
the ends of her hair, confirming he’s actually alive but play acting. Bakugo is
pissed this happened and demands to know what Uraraka saw, but her vision was
obscured by the smoke. Which just pisses Bakugo off more. They deduce whomever
killed the villain is still in the room, so they start interrogating the
hostages to see what they know. Cementoss is playing the Jewelry store
employee. He says that the Villain broke in, demanded jewels and then tied
Cementoss up once he got them. Midnight is playing a customer that walked in on
the robbery. She claimed to have not seen much, but confirms both men were
already tied up, and got tied up as well. Present Mic is an obnoxious musician
that was in the store shopping when the Villain busted in, he was tied up
first. Bakugo demands further answers, but nobody has anything. Because the
jewels are still in the shop and the witnesses claim not to have heard any
conversation between the Villain and anyone else, the students assume the Villain
was working alone. Iida comes back in from the back to confirm that all the
backdoors and windows are sealed so no one got out that way.
The students start trying to puzzle
out a strategy on how to figure this out. Tsu asks if they should bring the
cops in to handle things now the Villain has been taken out. Bakugo, pissed,
wants to torture the info out of them. Everyone objects to this. Bakugo,
though, notes Izuku’s face and asks the damned nerd what he’s figured out.
Izuku asks why the Villain barricaded himself in the store. The Employee says that
the cops pulled up as he was filling the bag, so he didn’t get a chance to run.
Claims he hadn’t called them, so a bystander must have. Izuku thinks that Midnight
must have called the cops, as she was the only witness to arrive after the robbery
started. He starts making some… logical leaps. He claims that Midnight knew the
Villain, knew he was going to rob the store, called the cops, and came to
confront him. The Villain must have been surprised to see her but tied her up
with the others when the cops arrived. He thinks that they were in love and
that Midnight had come to try and force him to change his ways… kay.
Izuku keeps the logical leaps going,
and thinks that because the jewels are still there and no one had a motive to
kill the Villain as the Heroes arrived, that he must have committed suicide. He
assumes the Villain did it to protect Midnight, so that she wouldn’t be
implicated in his crimes or something. That’s a Superman style leap in logic.
The kids are all tearing up at this story and Midnight’s, in my opinion, hammy
performance as the truth coming out. Aizawa calls the simulation and has the
teachers step out. As they leave, Cementoss tells Mic to maybe reel in his performance
for the next simulation. Dude was very over the top, just saying. Aizawa compliments
his students for their deductive work. He applauds Izuku’s rather insane leaps of
logic, as he somehow figured out the entire script that they’d prepared… but
they over looked something and earned no points. What was it? They didn’t
restrain All Might’s body… dude wasn’t dead, just faking it and ran off while
they were distracted. Literally, we cut over to him running down the street
like the Roadrunner. They’d assumed he was a corpse and didn’t tie him up.
Aizawa even points out that All Might tried to help, when Tsu tickled his nose.
That wasn’t him breaking character but signaling that he was still alive.
Everyone is depressed that they didn’t get any points for the test, and Bakugo
is freaking furious. His scream of fury shatters glass.
Back at the teacher’s lounge, All
Might is finally able to open his email. It’s from Melissa Shield, his former
sidekick and tech guru David’s daughter. She’s emailing her Uncle Might to
invite him to I Island for the big expo they host there, a surprise for her
father. Where I’m sure no horrible acts of villainy will occur.
What’s that? I’ve seen the movie
already?
…
Oh right. Yeah, this doesn’t go
well.
Set sail to I Island!
Anyway, All Might rushes to Izuku’s
house and asks Izuku if he wants to come along. He feels like since Izuku is
his official successor and he’s gotten some training under his belt, that he
wants to start teaching him the tricks of the trade, and maybe mingle a little
with top designers. Networking is important in all careers, it seems. Izuku enthusiastically
agrees, and All Might tells him to pack his things, as they need to move out ASAP.
… Who’s going to tell his mom? Whatever,
the episode ends and presumably picks up right where the movie begins.
We then end on the nondiegetic
Izuku and All Might again. They pat themselves on the back for this fun little
side story, and do their best to self-promote My Hero Academia: Two Heroes. And
to promise that next time we’ll get back to the Gang Orca battle. What fun.
Okay, so this is the first time that
My Hero Academia has had a filler episode that was a major departure from the plot
of current arc. Every bit of filler before this point was either extended
scenes from the manga (the other kids fights during the Sports Festival etc) or
things that could have happened during a time skip, (Tsu’s adventure fighting smugglers
on the high seas). This time, we broke entirely from the flow of the story to
jump backwards in time and set up the movie. Hm… as far as filler episode’s go,
it’s not terrible. The set up of the test was interesting and seeing the kids
try to do an investigation was cool. Sure, Izuku makes some MASSIVE leaps in
logic that just kind of worked out, but it was fun seeing the process and
seeing Midnight ham it up for her audience. My only real complaint is that it
did break up the flow of the Gang Orca fight. Like, surely this could have
aired after the battle with Gang Orca. This isn’t season finale material by any
stretch, but maybe put it between this end of the test and the next big fight,
maybe? It just seems like weird placement is all I’m saying. That said, I hope
they don’t make any other major story breaks any time soon. I like my anime-only
content short, sweet and fitting in the narrative flow. Next time, the heroes
in training face off against Gang Orca and his crew. This’ll be worth the wait,
I promise.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43236669
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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