Pop Team Epic Season 2

Episodes 11-12

I had plans, y'all. Grand plans. For this final set of Pop Team Epic reviews, I was going to take you on a comprehensive tour of every last twist and turn of this whole daggum season; it was going to be the kind of stupidly in-depth and verbose retrospective that would cement my rightful legacy as an utterly self-indulgent windbag who regularly inflicts word-count induced PTSD on my wonderful editors.

Then, as luck would have it, my brand new computer decided to crap its pants and completely bork itself, meaning that hours of work (and so, so many screenshots) are now lost to the limbo of my unresponsive hard drives. So it goes.

To hell with it, though! Maybe it was a sign from the Pop-ish Gods that my approach was folly to begin with, because after all, if I had gone with my original plan, I might not have given this season finale its proper due, and only a broken and desperate sociopath would dare disrespect Shōta Aoi's magnum opus, Endless L.O.V.E.. It is what makes this, the second season finale of anime's greatest extended shitpost, the King Shit of Dookie Mountain.

As I wrote all the way back in my Preview Guide writeup for this series, Endless L.O.V.E. is the greatest tokusatsu action series ever made, and this grand conclusion to Shouta's Saga surpasses anything that Super Sentai, Kamen Rider or Ultraman have ever produced. Die mad, Shin Godzilla. Garo can straight up eat my farts. Do any of those crap series feature the beautifully batting lashes of cinema's greatest star, Shōta Aoi? Do any of them give us not one, but two Nakamuras, each of whom is played and or/voiced by two different Yuichi Nakamuras? Do any of them create a multiversal canon that instantly explains the existence of every version of Popuko and Pipimi to ever exist?

The answer is no, of course not, because only one man has had the foresight and the brilliance to take the very potential of fiction itself and drag it, kicking and screaming, into the realm of perfection. That man is Shōta Aoi. I'm just going to say it: Kevin Feige better be shaking in his boots, since that montage of dozens of cardboard cutout Popukos and Pipimis wailing on Nishikawa accomplished more in two minutes than the MCU has done in, like, twenty goddamn movies.

I won't pretend that reviewing Pop Team Epic has been easy on me. I've suffered numerous psychotic breakdowns. I continue to be haunted by Evil Dolls and Cursed Video Tapes. Every single time I see peas or people flipping the bird, I black out for at least thirty minutes and wake up covered in blood that I suspect may not be my own. But for this? It's all been worth it. I don't just mean the crippling psychological trauma or irreparable damage to my career prospects, either; I mean all of it. History. Civilization. Art. The whole shebang. It's been leading up to this. Even if Elon Musk manages to melt the entire internet tomorrow and Earth is finally swallowed up by the sea, we as a species can at least embrace our inevitable destruction with the knowledge that we did. We won. Pop out your spines and dance.

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Pop Team Epic Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.