It was a long grinding slog, but finally, mercifully, thankfully TAMNI is done! At least season 1 that is. The final episode wasn’t bad, but was pretty much a microcosm of everything good and bad with the show.

The good

• Biri-biri and Kuroko. These two irresistable, spin-off featured lolis. While I may not have liked TAMNI very much, I’m really looking forward to the Railgun spinoff… I think.

• The cast of characters. They were all generally likeable, albeit often introduced then forgotten for long stretches of time (including Index), and prone to incredible stupidity at inconvenient moments. Even Touma wasn’t a bad character – when he was keeping his mouth shut. Otherwise, you’re apt to hear him get all self-righteous about a cheese sandwich. I still can’t get his 10 minute speeches to Kanzaki and Stiyl out of my memory. ARGH.

• The humor. TAMNI would be much more watchable if it dropped its false-seriousness and just embraced itself as a supernatural slice of life, because that’s when it’s most enjoyable.

• Animation and design. The show looked sharp and the characters looked great from the beginning and the quality was pretty consistent all season long

The meh

• The action. Pretty solid when they let it rip, but that never really happened, because fights would often get bogged down by long, stupid speeches.

The bad

• The dialogue. Take a look at the screenshots above. WTF are they even saying? Then imagine 10-15 minutes an episode of this garbage.
• The story. 24 episodes in and I still don’t know what the hell is going on. I have a vague recollection of some major plot centered around Index, but that arc ended like 20 episodes ago.
• The pacing. Like I mentioned above, potentially exciting scenes would be sucked of all life and vitality once some self-righteous jackass started going on some soliloquy. And it wasn’t always Touma either. Kanzaki and Stiyl were pretty egregious offenders too. And most major villains as well. Higurashi had less torture than what the TAMNI writing/directing team put us through.
• A second season. Are you KIDDING ME!? Yeah, I do want to know what the story is supposed to be about. No, I’m not sure I can put up with another season of Touma’s caterwauling.

Final verdict?

Somewhere between a 5-6 out of 10. Rounding up, let’s say it’s a 6. Characters and light-hearted moments kept me engaged. Story and dialogue made me put my head through a window every week. Admittedly, I either got used to the atrocity or the pacing actually improved slightly, towards the end of the show, thus the bump up to 6.

Railgun? Yes, please!

Season 2? Uh, let me get back to you on that.

I feel like I can say the same things about TAMNI every week. For example, this week:

1.) Index moe overload.

2.) Yes, a good 8 minutes of magicians and espers talking about important things, like you know, baking tips and all that good stuff:

3.) And an intriguing ending that makes me think something cool’s going to happen next week:

The pacing was slightly better this week, but that’s not saying much. They still broke the middle of the show in half, with a very uninspiring 5 minute discussion between Touma and Stiyl. I’m not saying that they didn’t advance the story some, but there’s got to be a more interesting way to do so than to have these long stretches of dialogue between relatively boring characters. There’s no chemistry between Stiyl and Touma. I find that because Touma’s such a boring character himself (and long-windedly self righteous), if he’s not engaging with a someone who’s off the wall, it just drags the show down. Hopefully it improves over the season.

I did like the introduction of Aisa, the Shrine Maiden or Vampire killer or whatever she is. The 100 yen scene between her and Touma cracked me up. Hopefully she gives the show a little extra oomph.

So for the first 15 minutes of the episode, it was basically Index going berserk…

Probably because while Touma was giving her the hand, he still managed to spend about 10 minutes of that time chastising Kanzaki and Stiyl about what terrible friends they were. Apparently, because 25 minutes of lecturing to Kanzaki in episode 4 wasn’t enough.

Then apparently Touma ran the marathon to end all 5-yard marathons in taking a good 10 minutes to run across a tiny apartment room to knock out Index.

And that was the end. All 25 minutes of Index goodness.

Well, no, not really. But it felt like it. I have to say I’m becoming increasingly disappointed with the writing of the show. The animation, the visuals look fantastic. But the pacing of the show is wacked, and the writing hasn’t been very interesting. Even the big action scenes get bogged down by too much unnecessary dialogue.

However, the episode did redeem itself in two ways:

The first was getting lovable Index back. The show is just much better when it’s not weighing itself down with the seriousness of its pseudo-symbolic story. WMD Index < Kawaii Index.

The second was Touma’s memory loss. Kudos on the initial red herring they threw out when Touma faked his non-memory loss. I was thinking they copped out when he said he was fine, but was actually surprised when they revealed that he was just relaying what he’d been told and in fact had indeed lost his memory. This should make things more interesting. I also hope the memory loss applies to Touma’s gift for lecturing.