Pacific Rim: The Black’s second and final season is seven episodes long. It follows brother and sister Taylor and Hayley, in Australia where kaiju roams free, and it is dangerous to live. The season follows straight from the previous season with the big revelation of the boy. He will naturally be the focus of this season, with Hayley being very attached to him. Taylor is understandably much more hesitant. A few arguments later and the boy requires their attention while they continue with their course down to Sydney, now also joined by Mei.
While this is set in the Pacific Rim world, the tone and content is different to the movies. Kaiju’s aren’t only huge hulking monsters anymore, and jaegers, the giant robots to combat the kaiju’s, only show up sparingly. Instead, it focuses on human drama, which is nowhere near as fun and interesting. It doesn’t help that the show introduces too many weird concepts, such as groups living in harmony with the kaiju or cults that lean too hard on superstition.
There are scenes where it shows the sheer number of kaiju roaming around the land now that it has fallen. It is a hopeless desolate land, and it is a surprise that anyone can survive there. On the flip side, this shows more about the nature of the kaiju and… sometimes, it feels as if it contradicts the origins shown from the movies. The movies show that the kaiju’s were created to invade Earth but now that they have succeeded in some areas, the kaiju’s have evolved to the point of just being like animals that roam and reproduce, like any other anime on Earth, albeit just gigantic in size.
Hayley’s attachment to the boy is the main driver of a lot of the events and actions of the characters. Yet it is one of the weaker aspects of the show. It’s irrational and Hayley is too distracted by the boy to even function properly. If it wasn’t for sheer luck and that they are the main characters, they would have perished from her mistakes a long time ago.
There are some jaeger vs kaiju moments but like the second movie, the movements of these gigantic bodies are too fast. It doesn’t have the same deliberate heavy feel of the first movie, where it gives them mass and momentum. Here, it feels like typical anime fights where everyone is too fast with moves that are unrealistic to pull off. The AI within the jaeger has developed its own personality where it can be sarcastic and snarky when it wants to be, and not in a great way.
The scope of the show is too limited. While it is supposed to tell a smaller scaled story focusing on the siblings, the fact that it involves the sisters, who seem to have some special power over the kaiju, sets the tone too far apart. We never truly get a full answer on the boy and his own connections with the kaiju. All that is focused on is that the siblings are trying to avoid death while traveling down to Sydney. Everything just feels reactive with barely any quality storytelling or plot along the way.
The plot and the season as a whole are rushed. With only seven episodes this season, and fourteen overall for the whole story, there wasn’t much time to flesh things out. The sisters are underdeveloped, as is the boy. Things happen out of control and even the big climactic fight at the season finale wasn’t very exciting. It lacked the scale, the grandeur, and the heaviness of the original movie which it used to capture your attention. This is just an anime that doesn’t have any physical limitations.
Overall, the second season of Pacific Rim: The Black is average. It doesn’t expand the world of Pacific Rim in any meaningful way. In fact, it ruins the canon as it added too many weird oddities into the world. The kaiju we see here aren’t the same kaiju’s we know. They’ve changed, but not for the better. Focusing only on one jaeger and a pair of siblings as they struggle to make it across Australia turned out to be a lot more boring and limited than it sounded.
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