Kakushigoto is a great 11 episode comedy about a father, Kakushi Goto trying to keep a secret from his daughter Hime Goto that he is an erotic manga artist. For 11 straight episodes, everything about this show worked. The dynamics between every single one of the characters was hillarious, from all of Kakushi's assistants, his editor Tomaruin, and even Hime's teacher. For 11 episodes, the show was hilarious and wholesome. The first 11 episodes are a solid 8/10.

So at this point, you might have noticed that there aren't actually 11 episodes, but instead 12. That is because the last episode is so different from the rest of it, that it might as well be from a different show.

Before we can get into the absolute travesty that is the final episode, we need to first go over the segments at the beginning and the end. These segments are little snippets of what happens in the future. These segments to a great job at heightening the mystery of what happens in the future. As soon as I saw the first of these segments at the beginning of the first episode, I was intrigued as to how the show would build up to what seemed like a tragic future for Hime. However, for 11 episodes, it had absolutely no connection to the future segments. There was no build up to anything, and it only had a singular episode to deliver on its promise to tell us what in the world was going on in the future.

One of the basic rule of story telling is to "show, don't tell".

The final episode starts with so much exposition that it is insane. It all comes so fast in the first half of the last episode, that it is kind of hard to keep track of it all. There is so much information front-loaded in the first half of the episode that it could probably fill another cour. That is not an exaggeration. We get family drama, which is explained to a new character, that is Hime's half-brother who we never see again. We get what actually happened to Kakushi in the future. An explanation that is just told to us, and isn't exactly satisfying to hear. All of this information could have been presented naturally, perhaps through another cour? But no. The show speedruns exposition in the first half. This betrays the basic rules of writing.

The second half of the episode is more emotionally driven, with Kakushi and Hime reconnecting. This could've been a really emotionally resonant moment, but since it is built on the broken foundation of exposition, I can't really find myself caring about any of it.

By the end of the final episode, I just wondered what I just watched. The episode felt like a textbook example as to how to not do a finale to a show. However, the final episode is my biggest complaint about this show. The rest of it is a fun and cute comedy, but the ending really did make me feel like there really should've been more to actually flesh out the ideas that were presented in the last episode. Maybe if it didn't even try to do this heavily emotional plot, I would remember it very fondly. However, this show is like Icarus, who flew to close to sun. Now whenever I think of Kakushigoto in the future, it will probably be for very negative reasons.