Hey folks, and welcome back to another week in review. The anime was the anime this week – one show triumphed with one of its best episodes, another show disappointed with one of its least impressive, and Planet With was as indescribably Planet With as ever. The success story this week was Revue Starlight, which illustrated a shocking revelation regarding the true nature of this competition through a beautifully realized tone piece, giving us an evocative glimpse into the headspace of Starlight’s most mysterious contender. Offering consistently striking layouts and a variety of dramatic reveals, it marked a major step up for the series in terms of narrative tension while also thrilling as its own self-contained vignette. I should probably reserve some of my gushing for the show’s own dedicated segment, though, so let’s hold off there and start with the runt of the weekly litter. It’s time to run this week down!

Goddamnit My Hero Academia, I literally just wrote an article about how gracefully you’ve managed to integrate anime-original content, and now you betray me with an entirely ungraceful digression from our ongoing narrative. Supremely awkward timing aside, this episode just wasn’t very good in its own right, though it had its pluses and minuses. It was clear that portions of this episode were simply designed to provide a narrative on-ramp to the recently released MHA film – of course, given this was already a total temporal leap backwards from the ongoing show, that material was less “graceful segue” and more “hey, we forgot to tell you but you should go see the film.”

As for this episode’s own material, the best part was once again just seeing the main team bicker and work together to overcome obstacles, cashing in on all the character and relationship development we’ve witnessed so far. The actual “case” here kinda sucked – the tension basically just died when it switched from a hostage situation to a murder mystery, and Deku’s “solution” relied on so many assumptions and contrivances that I was basically just giggling all through the last quarter. Like with the recent Yaoyorozu vignette, it seems this conflict was designed to resolve itself through animation-light conversations in order to better preserve studio resources; but when the dialogue accompanying those stills is this ridiculous, I’m not really left with much to invest in. All I can really say is I hope Bones are putting these off weeks to good use in terms of prepping for the upcoming season-end theatrics.

Fortunately, while My Hero Academia may have disappointed, this week’s Revue Starlight was likely my favorite episode of the show yet. Finally extending its focus to the soft-spoken Nana, we learned at last that the girls of the 99th class have essentially been performing for Nana specifically for some unknown number of years, as she seeks to recapture the honest joy she felt during their first performance. The show built to that revelation wonderfully, framing Nana as a spectating collector of precious moments from its first minutes onward, creating an unsettling atmosphere that verged naturally into genuine horror territory.

Exciting narrative concept aside, this episode’s greatest strength was its phenomenal control of atmosphere, conveyed through both the consistently alienating music and the absolutely gorgeous layouts. From the cold hallways and building exteriors to the blindness of the subterranean stage, all of this episode’s layouts worked hard to present an austere and imposing vision of this familiar school, offering beauty and melancholy in equal parts. You could feel Nana’s sense of emotional distance in the wide angles and obscured faces of these shots, as if she were staring down at a glass case of pinned butterflies. This episode was both a thrilling turn for Starlight overall and a major accomplishment in its own right, offering the most vivid character story yet for this ever-impressive production.

And standing solidly between this week’s two poles, Planet With was as wild, engaging, and often baffling as ever this week, offering what was likely the most overtly farcical episode of the show to date. Concepts like “these were phantom boobs!” felt worthy of some JoJo-style “menacing…” impact characters, while jokes like Beniko directly questioning how a single “woof” could translate into a long sentence embolized Planet With’s wonderfully ear for deadpan comedy. Planet With is genre-savvy, but its riffs on conventions never feel mean-spirited, tired, or perfunctory; gags like the Mysterious Love Rival rocketing out of a tree to interrupt a date aren’t just funny because they’re twists on the genre, they’re funny because they’re great setups and punchlines in their own right.

And of course, in the midst of all this lunacy, the actual narrative still surged forward through twists and battles and paradigm-shifting revelations at record pace. Soya’s final moment of cathartic, tearful release was easily one of the episode’s best moments – running through a battery of names and places we’d never gotten the chance to meet, his words lent a human specificity to the emptiness he’s been feeling all show long, and the sorrow of an empty revenge. Planet With’s always born significant tonal and dramatic debts to Evangelion, and its recent focus on Soya seeking a reason to fight feels simultaneously reflective of that show and loaded with new, Planet With-specific overtones. Always steal from the best!