There was no reason to expect we would ever get a sequel to Panty and Stocking. It's been fifteen years since this crass, unabashedly filthy bomb of sex, swearing and Hollywood references first crashed into the world, a lightning-in-a-bottle show if there ever was one. Even if the rights were somehow wrestled out of Gainax's decaying corpse, the anime landscape is in such a different place today. Studios are more capitalist than ever, focused on appealing to the most people and ever-broadening their appeal with mass-market consumer products. What space does today's world have for a show with enough F-bombs to make South Park cringe and the balls to make an entire Saving Private Ryan parody out of talking semen? What space does today's safe, shrink-wrapped market have for something so audacious and anarchic? The world Panty and Stocking was born into no longer exists. The thought of it somehow coming back in this drastically different environment... it might as well be a pipe dream.

And yet, against all odds, it happened. Hiroyuki Imaishi and his pals at Trigger have dragged the fallen angels out of retirement for another carousel of debauchery and rebellious attitude. The bitches are back, baby!

It's just a shame it ended up such a dud.

Look, it's not like I want to be the bearer of bad news here. The original Panty and Stocking is a classic for a reason, one of the most batshit creative experiments in the industry that used its filthiness not just as the basis for some truly all-time jokes, but as a statement on sexuality itself and the importance of pushing against what's considered "acceptable" to the masses. I'm as far from the target audience for this kind of humor as I can be, and it still won me over hook, line and sinker. It's proof that being raunchy as hell doesn't mean you can't also be artistic and meaningful about it. But this new season? It's the worst kind of half-assed sequel, the kind you'd expect them to crap out a couple years after the first season to keep the brand recognition strong while completely forgetting what made it great in the first place. It's a hollow echo of past glories with half the creativity, half the heart, and none of the point the original was trying to make. By the time it was over, I was shocked how little I enjoyed it. How did a show this special turn into something so dull and meaningless?

It's not like the show's been radically altered, either. New Panty and Stocking still has the same format as the original: each episode is split into a couple shorter segments, in the style of the American cartoons it's parodying. Each segment is its own little adventure where Panty and Stocking get mixed up with some situation, usually involving sex, with animation styles shifting wildly from segment to segment for the individual creators to express their own vision. The major difference is now, the angel bitches are rooming with Scanty and Kneesocks, the rule-obsessed demons from season 1, so they get swept up in the shenanigans too. And later on, we get a new antagonist pair in that same vein, a pair of angel boys for a change who speak exclusively in terminally online Gen-Z slang (they're the best part of the season for real, no cap). But structurally, this is very much the same show it was fifteen years ago with the same sense of humor and wildly anarchic artistic variety. So why isn't it working anymore?

An obvious culprit to point to would be the dub, OG Panty and Stocking's dub is truly iconic, a creatively unhinged script that wrings solid gold from every filthy line (Stocking on a guy she finds hot: "I would totally have his abortion!"), delivered by Jamie Marchi and Monica Rial at the absolute height of their powers. In an ideal world, we could've gotten the same cast and scriptwriter to carry that energy into season 2. But for whatever reason, there's a new crew now, and they just... don't have the juice. Lines of dialogue endlessly re-iterate the same information with no personality beyond yelling "FUCK!" and "BITCH!" at the camera a million times. Yes, this is a filthy show, but there's a difference between the sheer gonzo delight the original dub took in embracing its absurdity and just swearing a bunch. Every line feels like the most literal, unimaginative translation possible, no thought given to how language flows differently in English or how natural these words sound coming out of English-speakers mouths. And while most of the new cast finds their footing with their characters eventually, Panty's actress is... bad. She's just bad! She can't make a single line of dialogue sound natural! Everything she says is stilted and off, and between that and the perfunctory translation the jokes just do not land anymore. The OG show made me cackle on a regular basis: I can barely recall a single time the sequel got me harder than a light chuckle.

But it's not fair to judge a show too much by its dub, even for a series as defined by its dub as Panty and Stocking. Unfortunately, there are plenty of issues that even a dub on par with the original would struggle to fix. Remember how the OG show split every episode in two, so you got two twelve-minute segments per episode? Well, for some reason, lots of episodes in New PSG split into three, with two segments of six minutes and one of twelve minutes. And hoooooooooo boy, six minutes is not enough to tell any kind of coherent story. So many of these extra-short bits barely even feel finished: there's a premise established and a start to the action, but then we cut right to the climax with no development in the middle. Sometimes we don't even get a proper resolution! It just cuts off at a random point! I realize it's been a long time since most of us watched the original, but OG PSG had, like, stories, you know? Coherent beginnings, middles and ends to all of its bits? It didn't waste time of these half-formed ideas that don't last long enough to matter.

Granted, it's not like most of the full-length skits feel like they matter much either. For as many different styles and ideas as this show explores, there's a shocking lack of impact to most of this season's offerings. Hell, for a show called Panty and Stocking, we barely spend any time with Panty and Stocking as a duo. So much time is dedicated to the demon sisters, or Brief, or Garterbelt, or even the dogs, that the two titular characters, the ones who's chemistry and personality made this show, feel like little more than strangers to each other. And it's not like the demon sisters are fun or interesting enough to justify all the space they take up; even by the end, they're still painfully one-note. Instead, we have to do the shitty sequel thing where we roll back all the first season's character development and have Panty and Brief's relationship reset to less than zero despite the bond they supposedly formed, so geek-boy spends all season screeching like a [redacted] over wanting to get into Panty's panties despite the fact they already had sex and bonded over it! Why is he suddenly acting like the Flanderized parody of himself? Why is Panty suddenly being so cruel and dismissive toward him like they didn't save the world together? It's like the first season never happened to them! It's garbage and I hate it!

Most of all, though, it just feels so dated. Every other segment is a way-too-on-the-nose parody of some movie or another, all relying so much on reference porn (pun intended) that if you don't know what it's spoofing, you don't get the joke. The legendary Semen D-Day battle from the original didn't rely on you having watched Saving Private Ryan to understand it; you could still delight at the insanity of a bunch of sperm cells fighting a desperate battle to summit Mount Coochie with nonstop sex puns in every line of dialogue. The same can't be said for the sequel bizarre riffs on The Thing, Being John Malkovich, and a million other meaningless reference points. There's even another sperm segment, trading Private Ryan for- of all things- the Fast and Furious movies, a framework that gives the sex jokes nothing to play off of and barely even makes sense as a parody. The WW2 stuff was hilarious because it was treating the act of cumming with the gravitas of a grisly war movie; what comedic contrast is there in a bad Vin Diesel impression? It's like a symbol for this entire failed project, an empty reference banking on nostalgia for the original without understanding the joke the original was making in the first place.

Yes, there are things I like about New Panty and Stocking. Its best moments comes when it really stretches the boundaries and does something entirely new; there's a lengthy homage to 60s superhero cartoons that perfectly parodies the style, and it's got at least half of the best jokes in the season. And like I said, the Gen-Z brainrot angel boys are pretty excellent. But those moments of freshness are few and far between, suffocated by a series already run dry of ideas and unable to escape its own shadow. The original Panty and Stocking was a lightning bolt from the blue; this sequel is little more than a clammy static discharge left in its wake. And somehow it has the gall to end on another stupid cliffhanger promising even more sequels. Hiroyuki Imaishi, if you're somehow reading this review, take my advice: don't bother. Save your energy for new ideas that haven't already been wrung dry. Cause there's nothing left to be gained from parading around this empty husk of a once-great show in hope a few more dregs can be squeezed from it before it crumbles to dust.