Death Parade Episode 5: Death Performance Review

Even Decim, who has the power of reincarnation and damnation resting squarely in his hands, and can absolutelywreck people with strings, has superiors who send the equivalent of secret shoppers to make sure he’s doing a good job. And, just like real secret shoppers, they’re antisocial husks of human beings who hate children.

But for how well it delivers on stories of flawed people being put in strenuous situations, Death Parade has a nasty habit of withholding plot-important information until the most relevant possible moment. It’s not a bad approach, since frontloading information is a fuck-awful practice, but it only works if it lays a trail of investment bread crumbs for the audience to greedily gnaw on like investment-starved mice. Death Parade dedicates a significant chunk of this episode to a probable analogue to Onna’s past, and the overarching field of arbitration, without contextualizing either in a way that

It’s important to keep in mind that this opinion will only hold true if the series refuses to fix its problems by the end. If Death Parade is doing what I think it’s doing, then I can say it has me intrigued, at least in theory. The concept of an afterlife that’s struggling to adapt to the demands of a changing world is interesting, as is Onna’s potential as a catalyst for that change. It’s just being too opaque at the moment to actually get the point across, while shedding what little light it sees fit on matters that aren’t terribly engrossing. It hasn’t made me care enough about Onna’s past, or other people in the field of arbitration, to want more of either. I can appreciate that it wants to add some scope to the proceedings, but this isn’t the best way to go about it.

Decim remains the closest thing that Death Parade has to a successful means of gauging development, with his questionable morality and acknowledged mistakes serving as reasons for Onna to step in and have some semblance of being useful. After last week being so stellar, this was a disappointing follow-up that tries to build on a foundation that’s not at all up to code. But, as always, at least Decim is still moe, for all of his faults. That’s something I can always cling to.