The Rolling Girls

Episode 12

This week's Rolling Girls is up there among the worst-constructed episodes of anime I've seen. It didn't make me angry, as some previous shows have - there was nothing I found offensive, and nothing that really betrayed my prior expectations of the show. Its failures were entirely neutral, based in the structure and writing, a mess of character turns and abrupt arc endings that added up to so much less than the sum of its already questionable parts. This episode was atrocious.

It's hard to even describe the plot here - the events that happened were so disjointed that I'm not sure it'd be right to refer to this episode as having a “story” at all. The pirate queen Shima continued to be an antagonist this week, but her actual motivation was reduced to a couple vague lines about being abandoned in the midst of a whole lot of meaningless Stuff Happening. Both of those were common occurrences this week - motivation being handwaved in a few lines and empty Stuff Happening. Yukina probably got the worst of it, with her initial entrance into the show's plot being shakily explained as the result of trying to return Nozomi a lent coin, but Chiaya's memories of her friends also got brushed aside in the least emotionally charged or narratively relevant way possible. Anything that the show had been foreshadowing up until now received at most a half-scene of hurried explanation, with far too much of this episode dedicated to resolving an arc conflict focused on characters we still barely even knew.

There were a few lines from Shima's assistant Otomo about the trials of this time being a natural sort of test for humans. There were a couple motivational moments by the former Momi-han singer, who apparently gave Yukina some confidence in her drawing through a speech about committing to what you love that didn't really relate to any of the show's prior themes. There were several moments where I wondered if the show was actually aware of its own terrible writing, as characters openly wondered at what others were doing or how former enemies had become friends without a single scene of reconciliation. There was Chiaya getting back on her spaceship, and a brief goodbye complete with friends commenting that getting trapped on a spaceship was “so like her.” Was it? Was there something inherent in Chiaya's character that made her more spaceship-prone than any other given character? Sometimes it felt like characters were talking just to fill space.

I'd like to say this episode repeated last week's saving grace, where the lack of any emotional weight or narrative coherence was counteracted by the immediate appeal of the fight animation. But even the production took a dive this week - it was all stills and pans, with not one interesting battle to keep spirits high. It'd be hard for an episode that was largely about meaningless stuff happening to maintain much momentum anyway, but the production certainly didn't help - transitions were awkward, and scene cuts didn't really build energy. Aside from the usual stellar backgrounds and a nice insert song, this episode was an aesthetic wash.

It's sad to end on this, frankly. Rolling Girls only briefly entertained the possibility of being a great show, and was generally a mediocre and underwritten one defined by occasional highlights, but a strong ending would have done some work to leave a generally positive impression. This was not a strong ending - this was Rolling Girls' poor writing reaching up and strangling the production altogether. Rolling Girls wasn't great, but it deserved a better ending than this.

Rating: D

The Rolling Girls is currently streaming on Funimation.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.