We’re getting to the climax of this heated religious battle and well… I won’t beat around the bush in saying that I thought that this episode was pretty disappointing. Yeah, there were some cool things and nice battles that happened, but we’ve come 12 episodes and I just couldn’t find myself invested in what anyone was fighting for. That paired with the incredibly fast pacing of the series just did not go over for me very well.
Aside from the unknown deities coming down from the sky, this episode primarily focused on Jegal Taek and his obsession with being a winner. It’s a pretty classic backstory, but I just don’t know how to feel about it. Up until now, he’s definitely been a pretty mean spirited and all-around irredeemable character. Even with his backstory of being sold off by his mom… I don’t know if I’m supposed to feel sorry for him or they’re using it to further show how skewed his point of view is. Plus, even though he’s pretty much destroyed everyone he’s fought so far, or at the very least come out as victorious, to me, he doesn’t seem like the biggest threat out there. Perhaps I’m wrong, but if he does turn out to be the final boss of this season… why didn’t we get to spend more time seeing what sort of scheming he was up to? Up until the end of last week’s episode I genuinely thought that team Seoul would just take him on in the finals, have a good fight and move on like they’ve been doing. Perhaps it’s my bad for discrediting him so early… But on another note, he doesn’t really seem to be involved with Nox or the Mujin gang, so what’s his stake in getting the key and whatever power it holds? Is it really just to be a winner?
With Jegal keeping the gang pretty occupied, I’ll turn my attention to Nox vs Mujin and his crowd. There is still an apocalyptic scenario happening across the city and Mujin’s really struggling from keeping whatever emerged from the sky from coming down. Thankfully, we get the Grandfather here to avenge his grandson (who was corrupted in the previous episode & ultimately died) by proving to be even more OP than anyone else we’ve seen so far. At least from what I gathered, he was able to dispose of that threat pretty quickly, but is that it of Nox? If they could have been taken out that easily… why didn’t we try it before? And don’t even get me started on the nuclear missiles. I’m not really surprised that the USA army was going to attack the area where everything was going down…. but what was the point in including that? Was it just to increase the severity of the situation? If that’s so, I guess they are successful, but man it really seems like I had another side to keep tabs on.
I think… my main frustration of this episode really just comes from everything coming together. Typically, I would be pretty excited for that to happen because we finally get see what everyone and everything has been building up towards… but with the amount of content and characters that we’ve been introduced to so far, this episode just made it painfully obvious that there were a lot of gaps. A lot of characters that we’ve barely had a change to meet and understand and motivations that have just been pushed aside. With all that being said though, I do find enjoyment of just watching everyone fight. So, even though I was disappointed in this episode, it wasn’t totally frustrating.
I feel kind of bad letting out all my frustrations on this episode, but I feel like I’ve been holding out for so long about a lot of these characters and motivations that I’ve given up hope for a lot of things along the way. That being said, I am really excited to see the finale of the season because I have a feeling, they aren’t going to hold anything back and give us something truly spectacular. And if not, well? All I ask for is a good final battle.
