Gatchaman Crowds: Embrace

What on earth was going on to leave this on the cutting room floor?

Gatchaman Crowds is a show with an almost comical amount of flaws, but by far the biggest was the finale. The story, already on a long nosedive since the first act, finally hit rock bottom and dug just a bit deeper. Everything built up was waved away, and the few remaining threads of interest cut short. The last few minutes, especially, were a new height in aggravating bafflement.

No wonder then, that exactly those last few minutes are what Embrace fills out. I won't assume anything about the production, whether it was not ... being able to get a double-length timeslot, or some pacing disagreement, but whatever the case the version of Episode 12 that aired was the wrong one. I can't give Embrace too much credit, after all it didn't fix the rest of the show's problems, but it did fix the one most significant.

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The bulk of the new footage in Embrace covers an additional confrontation with Berg Katze, interposed around the final scenes of Gatchaman Crowds. While I don't want to spoil the ending of the series proper, it doesn't make a lick of sense. Embrace successfully rectifies this, by way of adding a proper climax to the story, rather than what was in the aired version. Aside from a few more, calmer scenes to close off the rest of the characters' stories, that is about all that is added.

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And I am at an absolute loss as to why this wasn't the aired version. Not only is it far more fitting as a conclusion, removing the additional footage leaves a ridiculously huge plot hole. I would say that Embrace is not just the better version of Episode 12, but the real version.

Gatchaman Crowds itself is still a very poor show, but at least this alternative finale makes it a tiny bit less so.