Occult Academy

Despite the ubiquity of the idea, it's pretty rare that something's ending genuinely completely tanks it. Usually at worst, endings leave themes or plot points unresolved, which makes them unsatisfying. This rarity makes Occult Academy's absolute traincrash in its final three episodes all the more astounding and almost impressive in its sudden derailment of what made the prior 10 at all worth watching.

If you wonder why I'm leading with that, it's because OA's ending really does retroactively corrupt the viewing experience to that degree. Let's get the good points out of the way, because they do exist and in fact are almost plentiful in the first two thirds of the series; Maya, our protagonist, is not a particularly deep character, but for the show's first part she manages to be magnetic by sheer force of personality, and plays off her supporting cast extremely well, and there is an ongoing implication that the school's vice principal (and her bodyguard, a knockoff of Gomez from Birdy The Mighty) might be up to something sinister. The show's first ten episodes nominally revolve around the presence of time traveler Fumiaki and the hunt for something called the Nostradamus Key, an artifact that must be retrieved before a certain date, or the world will end. In actuality, they're fairly self-contained, small story arcs usually lasting one or two episodes. These center around all kinds of unusual phenomena, from attacks by mothman-like creatures to supporting character Kozue having an induced near-death experience and it altering her personality. The highlight of these--and it's not even close--is the last, centering on a ghost girl named Akari being finally put to rest after having frozen to death as a child. This arc, comprising episodes 9 and 10, is genuinely moving, and had the show ended here--without ever resolving its background plot--OA would probably be sitting somewhere atop a 70-odd, like many shows I and many other people have seen that are solid and have a few highlight episodes, but aren't anything groundbreaking.

Then, like a trio of kicks to the stomach, come episodes 11, 12, and unlucky 13. Each of these is bad enough on its own but combined, they form a full-on assault on every existing point the show had in its favor. This begins with Fumiaki's sort-of girlfriend Mikaze, a genuinely sweet girl who was part of an ongoing B-plot, namely that she was causing Fumiaki to split his time helping Maya find the Nostradamus Key. This was a conflict, yes, but it was never presented as a major one, and there is zero hint that Mikaze herself is anything but well-meaning and possibly a bit ditzy. Episode 11 begins with her attempting to outright seduce Fumiaki to kill Maya, and appears to reveal that she is part of some sort of cult who wants Maya dead and the titular academy destroyed. This is the first of many, many ill-thought-out plot twists that embody all the worst preconceived notions about the device. The very worst Shyamalan film has never packed a one-two as bad as "Mikaze is part of a cult! No actually she's an actual evil sorceress controlling the cult!" These revelations come so quickly after each other--and in the midst of so many others--that they rapidly lose even pure shock factor, "what the fuck?!"s rapidly fading into dejected "ughs" as the episodes roll on, and then start to drag on. The "sinister" vice principal is revealed to be a white mage (read: magical girl straight out of Nanoha, despite being in her 30s), Maya's father's notebook is revealed to be a magical talisman. The vice principal's bodyguard is a demon who can transform into a winged panther. It just goes on and on like this, piling idiotic left turn onto idiotic left turn until it starts chasing its own narrative tail.

The real insidious bit here is not these problems, which are obvious upon even a cursory viewing, but the fact that they rob Maya of so much of her agency. Maya, as said earlier, is not a terribly deep protagonist, and she doesn't even fit--even in the early part of the series--the conventional definition of "strong female character". She's not very nuanced and most of the conflict in the story revolves around her dead father (spoiler: at the end of the series it is revealed that he is in fact, not dead), but for the story's first two-thirds she has oomph. She's physically capable, she drops monsters left and right with the help of axes, crossbows (more than once!), and even simple sticks, she's loud and uncompromising, and in general is in charge. These twists make her a pawn of Mikaze's cult, then the vice principal, and then, finally, in what is undeniably the worst of these, Fumiaki. At the end of episode 13, in a final punch to the jaw, it's revealed that Maya and a young incarnation of Fumiaki from the present instead of the future, despite a fairly big age difference, end up getting together. That they could not leave well enough alone even this sickeningly overdone cliché, as rich in simple boringness as it is heteronormative "and he gets the girl" bullshit, is the final nail in the coffin for what is a terrible, terrible ending to a show that begins so well.

I rarely am so vulgar and so referential to my own scoring in my anilist reviews. I try to maintain a pseudo-professional tone and to talk about what shows do right or at least do interestingly. But in Occult Academy all of that is overridden by one of the worst ending arcs I've ever seen in the medium. I sometimes end reviews with a recommendation. Instead, I will end this one with quite the opposite. Unless you plan to stop at the end of episode 10, stay far, far away from Occult Academy.