Undead Unluck

Episode 7

“Dream” is a perfectly serviceable half of an episode of Undead Unluck that unfortunately stretches itself to fill a half-hour timeslot. The sloppy editing and botched pacing involved made it that much easier to start fixating on all of the episode's flaws. It's almost a perfect setup for a cheap joke. In the story where the characters are fighting against the clocks that have been imprinted upon their flesh, Undead Unluck couldn't seem less interested in moving things along.

The episode begins with a recap from the narrator even though the plot of last week's episode is simple enough to be summarized in a single sentence: “The gang goes to a town in Nevada that has been overrun by zombies made by the UMA called ‘Spoil’, and Andy finds a zombie lady to marry for plot reasons.” A lengthy flashback to Spoil's arrival in Longing, NV, occurs immediately after reintroducing the sewer kids that Shen and Fuko ran into which only exists to explain that Andy's new zombie wife was the kids' chipper, marriage-obsessed teacher. Finally, just when it seems like the episode is going to start making some moves, the next few minutes of the episode are filled with confusing edits and even more flashbacks—sometimes to scenes from the other flashbacks from the same episode—which are all trying incredibly hard to get you to care about this one zombie lady who was also a nice teacher in life as she and her horde of local towns corpses rush headlong into a fruitless charge against Spoil.

It would have been a little dumb and cheesy even if “Dream” didn't feel like a half-finished homework assignment that a student rushed to submit mere minutes before the deadline; the bizarre editing just makes it all stand out much more. It also means that the plot of “Dream” doesn't even really begin to meaningfully advance from where we left off at the end of “Spoil” until the episode is over halfway done, which just kills any sense of tension or excitement that Undead Unluck was going for.

Once things do pick up, the episode improves greatly during the last few minutes of the episode. The action here isn't especially interesting, and none of our heroes have anything to do until the end of the episode. Fuko's inspiring and defiant speech about the power of dreams is the kind of dumb anime cheese that's genuinely fun when done right, but by the time my brain started to switch back on and notice that Undead Unluck was ready to be entertaining again, the credits were rolling. What a disappointment. Hopefully, all of this dilly-dallying will feel even the slightest bit worth it in retrospect when we get to see the true conclusion of the Spoil hunt soon.

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Undead Unluck is currently streaming on Hulu.

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.