MASTER Keaton
a review by vostok
a review by vostok
Back around 5 years ago a friend tried to get me into comic books and our friendship almost ended after I ruinned a first edition that earned something called an Eisner award. It was through these awards that I first heard of Master Keaton, an episodic manga series by the same author as Monster which is apparently huge in Japan but similar to the Laughing Salesman never had much impact outside of it. So, being too lazy to read the manga I decided to check the widely ~~un~~popular anime adaptation expecting something alongside the lines of Monster but instead I got an insurance agent acting as James Bond in rural Europe. Honestly it's not as bad as it sounds.
If you come here looking for a plot there is none. Ok, there is some semblance of a plot, this is an episodic adventure series following the exploits of Taichi Keaton, an Englishman currently working as an insurance agent for Lloyd's Register with a degree in archeology and previous involvement as a survival instructor for the british army.
Episodes can be divided into four categories, Keaton solving simple insurance requests (Such as hostage situations), Keaton going commando and having to ruin someone's day over a dispute that has escalated way out of control, Keaton doing something related to preservation of history or archeology (His real passion), Keaton helping someone with their problems and episodes dedicated to Keaton's Daughter and/or the relationship with her and his family.
Out of these the latter two honestly bother me and originally I couldn't place the reason why. The episodes with her daughter are annoying, yes they all play the same with her commenting she wants for Keaton to get back with her mother and Keaton commenting he has no intention of doing such a thing as she is happy recieving alimony and living with Tyrone and he is happy travelling the world as an insurance agent. The real issue with these two categories is moralizing, both of them are full of really, really, deep moral lessons such as "Don't judge a book by its' cover", "Don't give up in the face of adversity", "Don't abandon your dreams", and "Don't kill yourself", which are drilled on in a very forceful manner in the episodes and often repeated over and over again like a bad running gag on a kids' show.
I'm sorry for acting in such a petulant manner for being taught some good ole morals, but I thought I was watching a seinen series with a target demographic of young adults that are about to enter the workforce, NOT FUCKING G. I. JOE
As for the rest they all suffer from a huge drawback, Keaton is a Gary Stu. He is an expert in every field known to mankind (Except women which is brought up CONSTANTLY), has a plot armor thicker than a german tank with everyone with a weapon or advantage around him starting to have brainfarts and forgeting to kill him and then when everything is done everyone likes to comment how great of a person he is and how great of a job he did.
The thing that makes and breaks the show then are two things, the support cast and the setting of the episode. This is a show that takes place in the 90's shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since there was not a whole lot going around the world at the time most of the episodes take place in Eastern Europe and other places or situations caused by said collapse.
With the exception of the main cast (Which sucks for the most part to be honest) the episodic cast varies greatly and with it so do the stories. Some episodes have great stories but terrible villains, some stories are awful but have great villains, some stories have no villains but feature a very interesting cast that keeps it moving along and some stories are just plain boring.
I think the point the author was trying to make was to try to appeal to everyone and in that regard I think he succeeded, if you were to tell me you watched all the show and you didn't enjoy a single episode I would not believe you, however the problem here is that if you came to me with a 10/10 score I would also not believe you making this a show that you will often see people given sevens left and right as there is something someone may enjoy but also something they will definetely not, hell maybe there's someone that watched this for the bullshit moral lessons that I hated.
~~G.I. Joe~~ Master Keaton was a really infuriating show to watch, when thinking of a score to give this review I could not think of one because of the constant fluctuation in quality and instead assigned each episode a score and then got the average of all scores put together with episodes rating as low as 15/100 and as high as 100/100 (Full list here); it has the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. It took me four years (FOUR YEARS) to clear it out of my watching list because the bad episodes were legitimately that bad.
If anyone for whatever reason plans to watch this show here are two basic rules:
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