Toma Kamijo: The First Avenger

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Last Order makes a full recovery, but Accelerator senses the large amount of Telesma generating from Bethlehem. Powered by his desire to protect Last Order, his black wings turn white and feathery and he gains a halo, allowing him to fly up and neutralize the energy…somehow. Later, he forces Academy City to no longer use the Misaka Network.

But his previous actions help thwart Fiamma’s failsafe as the island continues to crumble, his Holy Right’s power decreases and, because it’s the final episode and the end of an arc, Toma gets to punch him in the face while giving a speech, ending his threat. With Fiamma defeated, Toma gets him to one of the last working escape pods. Misaka and her clone finally get high enough to save him but he has to stay behind in order to help break up the island enough before it crashes. Toma also finally gets to confess to Index (through the device that controls her) that he has amnesia. Naturally she forgives him.

He then gets some direction from Stiyl on how to destroy the right areas to get the island to land in the ocean. Things seem to be on track until, out of FLIPPING NOWHERE, Gabriel/Misha shows back up to try doing…SOMETHING in the North Pole. So, Toma steers the island into her and punches her in the face but drowns and seemingly dies as a result.

Things are also not great with our other Level 0, as Hamazura, Takitsubo, and Mugino are surrounded by goons led by…some lady in a helmet, who they are supposed to be familiar with. She’s here to collect, but not Mugino, but Takitsubo, who has shown she has the potential to become the eighth Level 5 Epser. What showed that, the Parameter Index, also confirms that Hamazura was never given a proper chance by the system in the first place due to his low ability potential. They are then saved by the villagers they helped and Hamazura interrogates the woman for info on the Parameter Index.

Fiamma escapes his pod but is confronted by a surprisingly-right-side-up Aleister Crowley, who mutilates him and leaves him for dead for learning too much about Toma’s right arm. He’s then found by two people named Silvia and Ollerus, while Toma is found by a nameless girl from a Sorcerer society called Dawn-colored Sunlight. Also, World War 3 officially ends.

OUR TAKE

GOOD GOD that was a lot to cover. So much so that there were pieces I had to completely skip over, which is something I apparently have in common with the studio adapting this story because, as it turns out, they shredded this thing to hell. I’ll get into that more next week in the Season Review, but suffice to say this is did a lot more harm than good. I understand there’s a lot to get through, seeing how this is the end of not only the longest arc and the season, but also the culmination of the whole series up to this point, but that seems like more reason to go at a slower pace.

And as for this sticking the landing as a finale, I’d say a giant collapsing island crashing into the ocean is probably as apt a metaphor as you can get. The wrap up to Toma and Fiamma’s fight was pretty much par for the course in terms of how these things usually resolve, particularly in how Toma lands his finishing punch, while him Captain America-ing the island feels like part of the last level of a video game. The resolutions to the other subplots also feel pretty rushed, since they basically had to shuffle EVERYTHING in under the wire and even ADDED a scene or two to tease the next season (assuming it ever comes now). The cut corners from before also come back to bite them as certain moments like Gabriel suddenly coming back after she exploded or whoever the hell the helmet lady was supposed to be just end up begging more questions than providing answers.

That’s basically the big problem with this episode on its own. It’s meant to be a conclusion, but while the battles are over and the war is declared done with by the final scenes, it didn’t really feel like an ending. I don’t know where Accelerator was headed with those guys, what Hamazura and his group are going to do now, how Misaka is going to get home, or what happened to Index (who finally gets to have another proper speaking role in her own dang show after not having one for half the season, thank god!). Things are so unresolved that I’m almost expecting another episode to properly tie things up. Whatever character arcs that were supposed to be done with either finished before this or just…won’t, I guess. Luckily I still care enough about these characters to WANT to see them have a proper ending, but that just makes this all the more frustrating.

But hopefully looking at the season as a whole will help to highlight where it shined as much as where it dimmed.

Score 5/10