With the summer season entering its twilight hour, everything I’m watching began clearing its throat this week, mostly by taking care of various dramatic minibosses in order to prep for the finale. That resulted in a collection of episodes that weren’t really all that thrilling for their own sake, but still necessary in various ways, and littered with occasional small pleasures. Having each pulled off a sequence of jaw-dropping episodes in their recent history, both Revue Starlight and Planet With unfortunately ended up faltering in their most common ways this week; Revue Starlight through its sometimes shaky characterization and storytelling, and Planet With through its so-so visual execution. Neither of this season’s highlights are perfect shows, but they’re both relentlessly interesting shows, and even their missteps leave me with plenty to talk about. Let’s break down those complaints and more as we run down one more week in anime!

This week’s Revue Starlight finally ended the show’s string of utterly stunning episodes, offering a more conservative episode both in terms of visual accomplishment and narrative invention. This episode’s lengthy articulation of the actual narrative of their play felt a little overlong and underwhelming, and I didn’t feel like it really changed our understanding of either the story being told or Hikari and Karen’s relationship. On the other hand, this episode’s conclusion of Banana’s personal arc, and her defeat at Karen’s hands, felt strangely rushed.

After centering so much of episodes seven and eight’s drama on Banana’s time loop machinations, Karen’s win here didn’t really feel earned – it wasn’t the physical embodiment of some new character turn or anything, she just won her fight and that was that. Part of the issue might just be that Karen herself is one of Revue Starlight’s least interesting characters; her goal has always been pretty one-note, and she doesn’t really suffer from the weight of insecurity, inferiority, and all the other complexes that give her classmates some human texture. Later on, the outdoor conversation between Banana and Junna felt much more convincing, as Junna’s comforting words were given impact by our knowledge of her own insecurities.

On the whole, this episode felt like it almost squandered the dramatic potential of Banana’s antagonism, resolving her conflict without really deviating from its standard episode format. I certainly didn’t want Banana to be the actual antagonist of this show, but I figured her defiance would get a bit more screen time than this. I’m not really expecting incendiary thematic commentary from Revue Starlight, but I do hope the last act gives its generally engaging cast the triumphant, melodramatic moments they deserve.

This season’s episodes of My Hero Academia covering material that was so recently covered in the American manga releases meant I was once again left with an overarching “yep, these events sure did occur” impression from this week’s episode. I can’t really blame the anime staff this time; there’s just not all that much you can do to elevate largely expository conversations, or bald-faced transitions between action setpieces. It is interesting to note how the divergent pacing of the two mediums, as well as how anime episodes are constructed and released versus manga chapters, has been fairly unkind to the anime. What came across as a natural broadening of perspective in the manga, with each isolated vignette captured in its own dedicated chapter, comes across more as a lack of focus in animation, where we’re forced to stuff these narrative odds and ends into one larger episodic shell. Certain narrative choices just work better in some mediums than others, and I get the feeling we’ll continue to see pretty steep divisions in quality between “action-focused conflicts that animation can genuinely elevate” and much of Academia’s other stuff.

Speaking of adaptive limitations, this week’s Planet With felt like a weirdly instructive demonstration of just how completely mangaka Satoshi Mizukawa thinks more in terms of manga paneling than active animation. As always, the actual battle between Soya’s friends and the Sealing Faction was a fair bit less compelling than its buildup, and mostly just consisted of Soya and the Generallisimo trading off extremely large, obvious strikes. This sort of pose-to-pose fighting actually works pretty well in a manga format, but felt a little stiff in animation, Planet With’s fairly questionable CG aside. But as I said, Planet With’s actual fights have always been one of its biggest weaknesses – they generally just stand in as flashy visual illustrations of major thematic beats, and with the Sealing Faction having already been crushed in any sort of moral/thematic sense, this was basically just the victory fireworks. I’m not sure the world could have handled a Planet With that was as satisfying in terms of its visceral execution and overall animation as it is in terms of its storytelling and storyboarding, so I’m still pretty okay with the lopsided show we’ve got.