Holy crap it’s already week three. This season’s extremely drawn-out preview schedule, along with my own vast wisdom in going on vacation directly after preview week, mean it’s taken me a quarter of the season to actually get any sort of handle on this season, and at this point I still haven’t really settled on a schedule. I’m almost certainly keeping up with Revue Starlight, My Hero Academia and Planet With are sticking around no matter what, but beyond that it’s basically open war between Angolmois, Banana Fish, Hanebado, and like three different reasonable comedies.

So far, Angolmois is the only one of that second set that I’ve actually caught up on, but it turns out I still had plenty to say about this week’s shows. Starting with the lovable dorks of class 1-A, let’s talk some shows and run this week down!

My Hero Academia ran through all the preliminary work for the hero license exam this week, a series of explanations and new rival introductions that was pretty much destined to be a little underwhelming in anime form. These sorts of dialogue-heavy setups rarely come off as energetically in anime as they do in prose, and the anime is in turn forced to lean a little more heavily on tepid gags like “the announcer is extremely overworked,” simply because the characters are “talking” for a much lengthier amount of time than when their explanations can be stuffed in word balloons. Fortunately, while much of this episode was essentially a beat-for-beat reenactment of purely functional manga material, 1-A’s brief rally in the wake of the “U.A. crush” at the end was a welcome demonstration of where this adaptation has really started to shine.

In the manga, the provisional license exam triumphed through individually stunning full page spreads – in animation, those spreads have been replaced by wonderfully fluid character flourishes, as Mina and Ochako and everyone else show off their new tricks. My Hero Academia’s adaptation has occasionally been hamstrung by extreme loyalty to the specific panels of its source material before, so I’m happy to see the show once again adding some personality and fresh, animation-specific visual ideas to its execution. This arc kicked ass in the manga, and I have every hope it’ll kick ass here too.

I also checked in on last week’s Boruto, given half my twitter feed spent the week frothing over its animation quality. Well, I can definitely confirm this episode’s froth-worthiness: the latest Boruto is one of the single most impressive feats of action animation I’ve seen in a damn long time, and easily within the highest echelon of TV anime execution. My housemate’s been keeping up with the franchise closely enough for me to have a pretty clear grasp of the stakes of this fight, but in truth, all the prep you really need for this one is knowing that Naruto and Sasuke are essentially living gods at this point, and this episode is a visual celebration of just how far they’ve come. Featuring a stunning mix of lightning-fast yet impactful choreography, neck-breaking perspective swings, and consistently inventive and ever-spiraling tactical twists, it brings what felt to me like a webgen-indebted fluidity to some of the most iconic warriors and powers in modern anime, dazzling again and again. Anime fights are rarely so impressive that they’re worth watching all by themselves, devoid of context – this one is, and you should watch it. God damn.

Unfortunately, this week’s Angolmois revealed that the first episode set an animation standard the show absolutely cannot maintain. This episode’s climactic battle was largely a mix of clumsy stills and mediocre CG, with the legitimate tactical intrigue and character drama feeling underserved by the visual execution. Narrative-wise, this episode held true to the iconic, no-frills storytelling of the premiere: this is the part where the stuffy generals ignore the clever young upstart, and march off to their heroic doom. That kind of storytelling is perfectly reasonable when your delivery is able to elevate your narrative, but when that delivery falters, you’re left with a generally lukewarm show. There were some nice color compositions and punchy individual lines this week (“let’s give them something they can put on a big fat scroll!”), but Angolmois is just too archetypal in its writing to survive on that alone. I’ll probably give it one more episode, since it feels like there’s a reasonable chance the show will at least excel when it comes to tactical intrigue, but Angolmois is on the bubble.

After the absurd visual non sequiturs and general bizarreness of Planet With’s premiere, I was surprised to find the show’s next two episodes so… almost normal? This is still a show about a giant humanoid cat and massive alien ships shaped like awkward children’s toys, but as far as shows with those base variables go, episodes two and three did a surprisingly effective job of making all these pieces fit into a pretty coherent scifi premise. We now know that Soya is from a planet that was destroyed by “the dragon,” that this dragon seems to be a force tied to “evolution through power,” and that Nebula’s forces disagree on whether hardline containment or subtle nudging is the correct response to a society that seems to embracing “evolution through power” over “evolution through love.” We now have some understanding of the motives of basically everyone except for the human heroes’ leader, and with half of the humans already de-powered, it seems like we’re almost at the point where the base dramatic setup will have to undergo its first major shift.

Planet With has been so generous in terms of its explanations that it’s actually suffered a bit in terms of its immediate drama, so I’m hoping this high-speed first act will eventually give way to something offering a little more breathing room. Mizukami shines when his bizarre characters are given the chance to idle around and really express themselves; I expect we’ll get there with this show, but we’re not there yet.

This was a pretty important week for Revue Starlight, but it felt like this episode essentially dragged out any questions as to its fundamental nature for at least one more week. The show’s first episode was able to soar entirely on the back of its phenomenal direction, animation, and evocative imagery – but with so much of its hand already revealed, along with the general inability of full-length productions to maintain the aesthetic splendor of their debuts, it fell to episode two to demonstrate whether Starlight could match its visual strengths to some engaging storytelling. Unfortunately, this episode’s characterization of its key players all felt a little archetypal, from Junna’s self-doubt regarding her natural talent to Karen’s single-minded “I want to perform Starlight together!” Hearing characters yell about “shine” at each other just doesn’t really mean anything, or prompt any sort of emotional response in the viewer – I need to either care about these girls specifically or be invested in the thematic underpinnings of their duals, and so far, neither the character writing nor symbolism are quite pulling their weight. Starlight continues to be one of the most unique and beautiful shows of the season, but I’ll need an emotional entry point to give that beauty some meaning in the near future.

Moving outside of anime entirely, I also spent this week finishing up the first season of Breaking Bad for my first time. Breaking Bad is one of the central pillars of modern “prestige television,” so I’ve been meaning to at least check it out for a while, and at this point I can definitely see the appeal. While the show’s first few episodes were sturdily plotted, fairly compelling in terms of cinematography, and pinned down by Bryan Cranston’s stunning lead performance, the combination of the show’s over-reliance on dangling cliffhangers, occasionally unconvincing dialogue, and Walter White’s fundamental monstrousness kept me at a certain distance. I’d assumed this was a show about a complex man being seduced by his worst instincts, but White is pretty much all “worst instincts” from the start – he’s deeply selfish, utterly unwilling to engage with his family, and completely infatuated with some cowboy masculine ideal that generally tends to express itself through either reckless self-destruction or infantile “I don’t wanna talk about my feelings” sulking.

Fortunately, while I don’t really give a shit about Walt as a person, now that he’s decided to become a supervillain he’s very entertaining to watch regardless. I expected Breaking Bad to stun with nuance, but its best material so far has generally leaned into the bombastic Scarfaceishness of this whole situation, and been totally thrilling for it. It’d be nice if the show weren’t so similarly seduced by whatever Walter is doing this for (a fact that seems clear in the incredibly unflattering dialogue it keeps saddling Skyler with), but if Cranston is gonna keep acting the shit out of this thing and the general story keeps escalating, I don’t even know if I necessarily need to care about these people.