May 28, 2024
"Train to the End of the World" is a whimsical show that very much felt like it had a lot of promise at the start.
Even now, 9 episodes into the show, it still feels like it intends to build to something big.
However, the show sadly also has quite a few problems that undermine its own whimsical and saney tone, and which makes it hard for me to call the show little more than "Fine" in quality.
As the synopsis for the show explains, the show is about an alternate version of our world that has been transformed into a whimsical-but-dangerous wonderworld filled with oddities and
...
strange phenomena. In this world, a group of girls take control of a train so that they might travel this "wonderscape" and find a lost friend of theirs. As they ride the train from stop to stop, they experience one weird and dangerous encounter after another, seeing what has occurred to the citizens of this altered world. Furthermore, as the plot progresses, the girls slowly learn more and more about the dark secrets behind how-and-why the world has come to be as it is.
Now, this premise sounds like a really fun and technically quite simply structured adventure. The show offers the viewers a sorta "monster of the week"-style story (but with a focus on one or more oddities rather than monsters as such). This is however where problems start to show with the series. The pacing of the show is generally quite fast, which I acknowledge doesn't have to be a bad thing, but in the case of "Train to the End of the World" it constantly feels like the show is rushing itself from one conversation to another or from one oddity to the next. The show almost never allows itself to settle and truly explore its odd ideas. And when the show occasionally does try to take its time with a scenario, it often does this with some of the least wacky of its ideas (such as spending two episodes on a town of tiny people).
This really "rushing pacing" also frequently hurts the show's emotionally complex scenes. The show very clearly wants to be something more than just a wacky adventure, and thus it often attempts to have deeper scenes, especially in flashbacks to before the "end of the world---if you will." And these scenes are indeed also some of the times when the show shines the brightest, but even still, they are rarely allowed much room to breathe before we have to rush on to the next scene----be it serious or silly.
Thus, if people will forgive me a reference to a show outside of anime for a moment, it feels like "Train to the End of the World" is trying to be something akin to the show "Adventure Time," a show that masterfully balances both serious and silly scenarios. However, it is also a far longer show than "Train to the End of the World" is, so I can't help but wonder if the problem deep down simply is that the show is too short? Would it have benefited from having a 24-or-so episode run? It is hard to say.
In conclusion, "Train to the End of the World" is not a bad show in the slightest, but it is a "busy" and "messy" that seems to struggle with where to put its focus and time, a lot of the time. The show has had a lot of promise since its beginning, something that it has struggled to live up to during the majority of its runtime, but even still it does still seem to be building towards an interesting ending. However, even if the show manages to stick-the-landing, viewed as a whole, I would still only consider it a decent experience.
I hope these thoughts have been helpful to any potential reader.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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