Don't you just hate it when an anime series only gets good right at the very end?
Death Parade turned out to be worth the ride, though I wish it had been that way from the beginning.
Warning: Spoilers for the entire series.
When you die, if you're chosen for a particular kind of judgment, you are sent to a very strange bar, tended by a very strange bartender.
The emotionless white-haired Decim will pour you a drink, and then invite you to play a game.
The games range from billiards to darts to Twister to cards, to many other kinds of games. But there's a catch. If you lose, you get sent to the void. If you win, you are sent to be reincarnated, a do-over as a new human being.
Death Parade, in its beginning episodes, seems a pointless exercise in sadism. Under the extreme stress of the game, the two chosen to play inevitably become angry, panicked, depressed and hopeless as they recall the bitter circumstances of their lives. As one character says, their "darkness" is drawn out by playing the game, thus enabling the arbiter - in this case, Decim - to issue his judgment on the two humans with accuracy.
I said "humans." Did I mention that Decim isn't human?
Decim, like all arbiters in this afterlife world, is a created being. He looks human but isn't. He has no emotions, which for some reason his creator figured was best for judging human beings.
Decim's partner behind the bar is a female human, known only as "the black-haired woman."
The black-haired woman has no memory at first of who she was in her human lifetime, or why she's Decim's partner. Throughout the series, we see the black-haired woman becoming increasingly disturbed over the games.
In this 12-episode series, it's not until episodes 9-10 that the point of the series becomes clear. The two people being judged in this two-episode mini-arc are a young man who killed his sister's rapist, and a veteran detective, a world-weary middle-aged man who took revenge against his wife's killer and other violent criminals.
By now, the black-haired woman has had it up to here with the blank-faced Decim and his easy pronouncements on who gets a second chance at life and who, regrettably, doesn't make the grade. The extremes to which the young man and middle-aged detective are pushed in Decim's game cause the two to erupt in violence at the end of the arc. The black-haired woman screams at Decim that what he's doing with the games isn't judgment; it's just bringing up the agony these people suffered in their lives all over again for no good reason at all.
Decim is shocked. The next episode finds him questioning his purpose, while the black-haired woman starts to regain her memories.
In life, she was a young woman named Chiyuki, a successful figure skater until she received a knee injury. Despairing after being told she'd never skate again, she committed suicide.
The final episode shows Decim offering Chiyuki a chance to live again as herself, not reincarnated as a new human being with a new identity. But she must allow Decim to take another person's life in return. Although Chiyuki is shown her mother's grief following her suicide and is tempted momentarily, she refuses Decim's bargain. Which is good, since - he never had that power to begin with. He only made the offer as a test for Chiyuki and, in a way, for himself.
At the end, Chiyuki chooses to accept what she did and all the consequences that flowed from it, and to be reincarnated in a new identity. And Decim finds that he now can feel emotions, having grown through Chiyuki's unintentional lesson for him - that he must feel what humans feel, in order to rightly judge them.
The mini-arc with the young man and the detective was extremely powerful, with gut-wrenching scenes that wrung the emotions out of you. It was a great dramatic moment when Chiyuki finally lost it with Decim. I wasn't expecting it, though it was the moment the whole series had been leading to.
Death Parade has the same flaws that many one-cour series have: an unexplained backstory (why are humans being judged in a bar?), underdeveloped main characters, too many unnecessary side characters. But the one common one-cour fail this series does not have is the "good premise, unexecuted finish" one. The final four episodes of Death Parade made for a stunning and memorable finish. One only wishes the quality of the end had been present in the entire series.
I almost stopped watching Death Parade halfway through, tiring of the sadism of the games and the mysteries surrounding Chiyuki and the other characters. The build to Decim's crisis and Chiyuki's human backstory could have started much earlier in the series. As it is, I'm very glad I finished Death Parade. But I might just as easily not have.
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