After its lackluster premier, I didn’t have high hopes for
Classroom Crisis as it headed down the usual anime path of cute girls doing
nauseously cute things with no real drive or purpose, albeit in a science
fiction setting. Three episodes in, my low expectations have been happily
subverted as the show takes a refreshingly stark approach to the plight of Kaito
and his students.
Nagisa was really the only reason I stayed past the first
episode and thus far my attitude hasn’t really changed (Though the supporting
cast was given a shot in the arm this time around with the arrival of corporate accountant
“Angelina.”). Nagisa might be a cold, ambitious jerk but at least he
has firmly established wants and desires. The failing of most school-oriented
anime is that the characters rarely have anything that really drives them
outside of friendship and occasionally academics—an accurate portrayal of
adolescence, to be sure, but not ideal from a narrative standpoint. Three
episodes in, I barely know what most of the students want out of life. Kaito seems
to want to build a racing engine, but other than that I don’t have any reason
to care one way or the other about him or his crew. Instead, it’s Nagisa’s
corporate ambitions that drives the plot; he’s the lesser son in the corporate
dynasty who’s made the most of backwater postings to rise in the corporate
hierarchy in spite of his family’s as-yet-unexplained animosity. Say what you
want about his attitude, but at least he fights for what’s his.
As for the student side of things, I can’t say I have much sympathy
for Kaito or the students. A reality of working for a business—or any
organization, for that matter—is that you need to produce results, and all the
team gave the company was promises of future profits and an insanely expensive
test model (Which was promptly trashed by the Rei-expy Shirasaki.). They are
hard workers, to be sure, and probably didn’t deserve to have the rug pulled
out from under them so brutally, but the fact of life is that there’s no such
thing as a free lunch. Youthful aspirations or no youthful aspirations, A-TEC
was a financial black hole sustained only by Kaito’s exuberance and the former
chief’s indulgence. If the latest episode proved anything, it was that the
thrill of playing in a top-end laboratory was far more enticing than any sort
of technical aspirations. The fact that half the team quit out from under Kaito
after Angelina slashed their budget and moved them into an overgrown hangar
speaks volumes about exactly what sort of crew he was really running. So far,
Kaito is the only one on the student side worth caring about, and he’s quite a
slow learner when it comes to taking on Nagisa.
Classroom Crisis also seems to be throwing some corporate
intrigue into the mix as well. There's nothing ground breaking here, but it's the sort of thing I like and considering
the dull affair the premier seemed to be brewing the mere presence of an actual
plot is enough to keep me on the hook. There’s plenty of the usual anime
silliness (Angelina’s strange advances toward the underage Nagisa, Nagisa’s
shower scars that I’m sure indicate some touching and tragic backstory, etc.)
but there’s enough real character building and storytelling to make this one of
the more surprising shows this season.
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