Final? Thoughts – Planet With

I’m gonna be real, I feel like I’ve failed here.

And not in the sense that a show I was championing ended up making me never want to look at it again (yeah, I’m still not pleased about what happened to KADO) but in almost the reverse. I just do not understand the utterly rapturous praise heaped onto Planet With. I would say it was good, but hardly the best of the year or even the best of the season (though this season in general has been running pretty slim).

This show has never been able to capture me again the way its premiere did, and I’m just not sure why. It’s one of the most interesting, original productions I’ve ever seen with a writer I know is reliable, and yet I was just never able to fully invest in it. Was I just not in a good mood while watching? Was I not paying close enough attention? It’s totally beyond me, and I’m gonna take full responsibility for that and leave it entirely unscored even though I finished it. Maybe at some point I’ll be able to revisit it and see it through someone else’s eyes, but for now, I’m gonna chalk it up to a loss on my part.

Updated Impressions – Planet With

Coincidentally, both of the shows I’ve mentioned thus far hit major transitional points at the end of their sixth episode, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Planet With is kind of an enigma. It has a lot going for it, but certain elements are really harshing my buzz on it, and it feels a little like a decent Trigger ripoff.

And after FRANXX, that’s not the worst thing to be, but while the unique story (an interesting foil to My Hero Academia) and CG battles are totally holding up, the cast is feeling a little bit limp. Six episodes in, I don’t really care about anyone in particular, and there was a death in this episode I just didn’t have much of a reaction to. And that might have something to do with story structure.

See, Seven Senses finished its first act here. We’ve cleared the first story obstacle, but the primary tension is finding out why a dead character is alive again, and that hasn’t been totally resolved.

Planet With’s primary tension, however, was the gathering of the power sources of the Earthling cast, which resolves in this episode, and traditionally, that marks the end of the <i>second</i> act, so as far as plot structures go, we’re really hurrying things along, when third acts are not really known for being the right time to develop characters. Usually the third act is dedicated to the greater tension, in this case fighting the other aliens, but that makes the Earth cast kind of irrelevant, a huge waste for a group that just did not get much personality.

So, we’ll see if this one can pick itself back up again, I’m genuinely hopeful here.

Score so far: 6/10

Quick First Impressions – Planet With

I don’t think this was the best premiere I’ve seen yet this season, but it was definitely the one that most made me want to watch the next episode right this second.

Okay, there’s so much to unpack here, and I don’t want to spoil too much of it, so as vaguely as I can describe it, we have a boy who’s roommates might be evil, crazy UFO’s that look like lucky cat statues, ancient mechas that get invoked super-Sentai style, and it’s from the mind that brought you Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer. Watch it, and tell your friends, because the fact that not even 8,000 people have this on their MAL lists, yet Demon Lord is the fourth most popular show of the season, is a crime.