Island represents for me one of the two death flags for anime, and if you start to notice them, you may be able to save yourself the time and energy I find myself wasting in pursuit of criticism. The first, not represented here, but I am sure I will get there eventually, is that the anime you are watching is based on a light novel. Generally, this is a sign that the plot is not going to be satisfying because it is designed to entice you into reading the LN. There are exceptions of course, but in the main, I find this is true.

The second is that the show you are watching is from the science-fiction genre (but not a mecha show). Enter Island.

Disclosure: according to AniList, I watched Island over the course of four months, but I watched the last half or so probably within the last week and a half or so. A binge session may result in a different experience… I doubt it though.

In as spoiler-free a summary as possible: a man (Setsuna) wakes up on beach with no memory of who he is other than his name and the name of the girl who finds him later (Rinne) and the fact that he needs to 1) save someone and 2) kill someone, and he believes he has come from the future. Pretty “simple” as far as typical anime contrived plots go, but then we must layer on the B-Z plots. Everyone has personal problems needed resolved, the titular island is wary of strangers (we hear this a lot, but only one person every raises any issues regarding this), Rinne has a mysterious past of her own, and there is a mysterious sickness that affects some of the town’s population. The series revolves around Setsuna dealing with the mysteries both within and without his control.

For the first ¾ of the show, I’m on board. It is exploring the (inter)personal relationships of our four main characters and has a surprisingly laid-bare romance that is refreshing in a normally cloistered medium. I had even forgotten it was a sci-fi show until… the sci-fi jumped out and slapped me in the face.

Here’s the thing about science fiction in anime, and perhaps in all media, I don’t know: it is frequently too light on the science. I remember the same feeling in Kiznaiver and Dimension W (to name a few off the top of my head) where the story develops to a point and is interesting, but there comes a point where the writer or someone doesn’t know how to make the science make sense…. So they don’t. Whatever needs to happen happens, usually in the waning few episodes and the story ends.

I got on board with the romance, the setting, all of that, in Island, but once the science entered the picture, with less than half the run to go, it proceeded to crap both the bed and itself. The change in tone and pace is abrupt. The series had been fairly slow, but it takes a violent left turn and never looks back. The result is a science-fiction anime that hand-waves past the science and a romance anime that jarringly shifts and refocuses in the closing minutes in such a way that leaves the viewer (or at least me) confused and rethinking all the decisions that preceded that moment.

A thematically-unrelated shift could be seen a short while ago in the How I Met Your Mother finale, if you watched that. I won’t spoil HIMYM here, but if you are familiar, the jarring last act switcheroo is reminiscent here in ways that go well beyond the normal “best girl loses” troupe of previous romances in anime.

In short, I suppose, Island is an okay show. It doesn’t look bad or sound bad, and 95% of the story is okay, but that last 5% is enough to spoil the whole affair. Maybe, just maybe, if the science had had more room to breathe, and there was less time spent on plots going no where (Karen getting married? Who cares. Soot Blight Syndrome? Not important. Why don’t they like outsiders? Who knows?), Island could have been good. Instead, it feels incredibly mismanaged and inconsistent.

Should my sister watch this anime? No. Whatever goodness that is in it is spoiled in the end like finding a worm in the last bite of your apple.