Train to the End of the World – Episode 07

Episode Synopsis:

The remaining girls infiltrate the zombie horde to rescue Shizuru, but the queen is skeptical. When their ruse breaks down, they’ll need more than violence to defeat the undead.

Episode Review:

This is an odd show.

I’m definitely appreciating the… restraint(?) being shown when opportunities for fanservice present themselves, as with Akira’s mushroom issue. It feels like the only reason that there was even one panty shot in this episode was that it would have been terribly unwieldy to otherwise communicate how the zombie “queen” (who is not native to the neighborhood) accidentally discovered that arousing the zombies caused them to explode (having mismanaged her skirt on the way out of a corner store bathroom after the 7G incident, which seems to have only turned the locals). The writers know who the audience they want is, I suppose, and are courting them instead with references to retro video games and obscure foreign novels.

I like when an anime (or any media) prompts me to look something up, though it often leads to stranger questions than what the original reference was, like how Akira knows Lady Chatterly’s Lover well enough to quote it from memory, considering that it was, at one point, banned in Japan (and many other places) for obscenity (public domain now, though!). Neither that passage nor the bawdy song that the girls break out in the final confrontation seem to be super-explicit, at least.

The show’s main staple seems to the be wide range of banter amongst the main cast, from chummy to acerbic. I continue to be amused by the assortment of minor misunderstandings and bickering that suffuse the spaces between story beats. This episode has a bonus minigame of Spot-the-Shiritori, which is where I try to determine whether a character is stuttering the first syllable of their line because they’re under stress, or because it was the last spoken syllable of the preceding line and they’re trying to chain off of it. It’s tricky to do on the first pass due to simultaneously parsing the English subtitles, but I think I’m batting above 500 (maybe it’s because I tend to watch slice-of-life stuff, but it keeps showing up, so it must be a pretty popular pastime over there).

Speaking of story: the zombie queen warns the group that Ikebukuro has a queen of its own – Yoka did appear in the background of a recent photograph without mention, but I trust the Conservation of Detail principle suggesting that we’ll be seeing a familiar face…

Summary:

What can I say? I’m a sucker for a story about a handful of girls and their pet traversing a twisted mockery of human civilization in their plant-harboring train car.
… *cough*

P.S.: Did you know that the Japanese onomatopoeia for the clickety-clack sound trains make (when they go over the gaps left between rails to account for thermal expansion) is gatan-goton?

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