Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma - The Fifth Plate is the fifth and final season that’s based on the manga series. It is 13 episodes long and finishes off the story of Soma of his time at Totsuki Academy, and his journey to become the top chef of the academy and beyond. After the end of the fourth season with Soma almost achieving his goal, you might wonder what’s next, what else is going to happen that’s going to take another thirteen episodes? Well, the answer is of course, another competition, where Soma will be competing against many others, not just those from Totsuki, and try to win it.
The opening episodes are quite lighthearted. It follows the day to day events of the students and their various assessments. This is combined with the fun of youth, as the friends work together, argue against each other and just generally have fun. Since the story has built up a substantial cast that we’re familiar, it can feel somewhat nostalgic. However, we can’t forget the antagonist of this season, who is a newly introduced character that seems to have something against Soma.
The new characters introduced are wackier and more out there than normal. Whereas the series used to try to limited the eccentricities of its characters, it had gradually loosened it up whereby now, we have “chefs” who were outrageous costumes, with roles that parallel the crime lords in other genres. It doesn’t even try to make it plausible anymore, with chainsaws, claws, syringes and other unconventional items used in the kitchen. Cooking is serious business and the events that happen in this season shows it.
The bulk of the season takes place in another tournament style setting, and the pacing is really fast in order to cover the events within the thirteen episodes. Matches rarely take more than one episode, and plenty of matches are skipped straight to the results. This is even more abbreviated than the third and fourth seasons. It feels like it favors the wackiness more than the cooking techniques used to win, which feels in contrast to before where it would go into painstaking detail.
As the final episode, it settles the feud between Soma and Erina. While the previous season made great strides in healing the rift between the two, this season effectively unravels everything. It’s disappointing that Erina goes back to her cold self, becoming arrogant and self-absorbed, effectively mellowing in her own misery. Yes, this sets up the scene for Soma to come in and save the day but it makes Erina unlikable and reverses all the character development that she had. Then comes the revelation that whole series focuses around Erina, and she’s not really strong enough for that kind of role. This also has the detrimental effect of sidelining a lot of the other characters, including Takumi and Megumi, whom both had a focus in the beginning but quickly disappears back into the cast of supporting characters whose only role is to cheer Soma on.
Soma is portrayed as model chef. After facing off chefs one after another who had lost their way, Soma shows them what cooking means to him. It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling, and he manages to carry it with a straight face. You can’t help but feel positive seeing Soma walk through his own difficult path, and finding a way forward, enjoying what he does. Unfortunately though, if you felt unsatisfied about some of the character threads in previous seasons, then they attempted to expand on it here, but failing by cutting it short.
Being the ending for the series as a whole, the finale tries to wrap everything up. As mentioned earlier, it retcons the motives behind several characters into one that involves Erina, and can feel like a bit of a copout. We also never got to see Soma truly reach the top like he had declared. It can feel unsatisfying in how idealistic it is, with all the characters being redeemed and living a happily ever after. Then there’s Soma’s and Erina’s relationship which depends on whether you think they end up being a good pair or not. All in all, it can feel divisive.
Overall, Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma - The Fifth Plate wraps up the series as a whole, and it’s been a long journey, and yet looking back, they dragged out the earlier parts and then rushed through the later parts, so it can feel uneven as a whole. This fifth and final season rushes things too fast so it doesn’t allow the viewer to actually invest into the situation before it is resolved already. That being said, it’s still sad when you reach the end and realise that there are no more episodes coming. Personally, the end of the fourth season felt more like a proper ending than this fifth season.
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