(Welcome back, one and all, to Night Of The Loving Dead! I hope you enjoy the next couple of days worth of thoughts somewhere in the realm of 20,000 words about this show. It's the end of this project and we're finally transitioning into another. I really feel, creatively, like I'm on the cusp of that post-Symphogear regeneration. I've still got to write that part, but I feel like I'm reaching a new phase here on the blog. That's just for me in the present, though. For you, you get the me of the slight past writing about zombies. Let's hop into it and have fun, okay?)
So, what do we have to talk about, then? Another 12 episodes that once again put our girls on the back foot of their quest to "save Saga". The question of what exactly "saving Saga" entails is something else entirely, but let's keep on topic. We have re-iterations of some lessons learned in the last season, some entirely new revelations, and narrative collapse solutions so touching and heartfelt and utopic that they blow every other bit of zombie media away. Again. I can't wait to talk about all those, but first we have to set up the new status quo and some other stuff. So then. Order yourself another cup of coffee. It's on me this time, friend. Get comfy and let me tell you about Zombie Land Saga Revenge.
2.1: RIP, Our Unbroken Meteoric Rise To Stardom, And The Torches We've Held That Must Be Passed On!
Zombie Land Saga Revenge starts with what threatens to be a narrative collapse. We don't see any of the girls practicing or performing a show or anything, but what we do see is Ai clocking in to work at a dried squid plant, made up to be human but looking paler than usual. Even her coworkers comment that she looks sickly, but as the morning pep rally anthem for this dried squid plant plays, we get our opening credits and we see all the girls are working perfectly ordinary jobs. Oh dear God. What happened? Why aren't they idols? Why aren't they together? Did they split up? Well, no, thank God. They all still live under the same roof and are still friends, but now they're all working perfectly ordinary jobs? Well, as Sakura narrates, everything was riding high after the Arpino show from the end of Season 1. They had good press, they put out a CD, and on those high waves Kotaro booked them to play at a massive venue. Called the Ekimae Fudosan Stadium, or EFS for short, this was where Franchouchou were going to make an even bigger push towards superstardom and saving Saga and all that. What happened?
Big oof. So now the girls are saddled with a 30 million yen debt, stuck working perfectly ordinary jobs in a capitalist hellscape grind, and their manager and leader has been reduced to a deadbeat drunk with long hair and an unshaven face who spends his days on the other end of a bottle now. The girls are doing their own makeup in his absence, but it's not as good as Kotaro's, hence the pale and sickly look. So, here we are then. That's our new status quo for Zombie Land Saga Revenge. The girls, despite this crushing defeat, haven't given up. They're determined to work hard, both at their jobs and at getting back on stage and climbing back to where they were and beyond in the idol world. Sure, it may suck a little after the triumph of Arpino, but that's life. A series of highs and lows, and one has to ride the highs and climb out of the lows. It's a cycle, almost, but these girls are utopian zombies and they can get out of any scrape with their determination.
The titular revenge of the season's title is exactly this: the desire of the girls of Franchouchou to strike back, to reclaim their good luck which karmic destiny or just plain bad timing and planning took from them, and to play their songs again for a crowd. They even have a symbolic place for their first revenge strike planned. They're going to play at Geils, the heavy metal open mic club where Sakura and a group of six mindless zombies first headbanged and death metal screamed so so long ago. Sakura attempts to convince Kotaro to come along to see the show, to show him how there's still hope and a chance for them to save Saga, but Kotaro's a burned out drunk who's convinced he can't do anything to help them, and so the girls are on their own. As they take the stage at Geils, the only sympathetic folks in the crowd are those two metal fans from the very first episode who keep popping up here and there. Everyone else in this club couldn't give two shits about a dumb idol group performing and are just waiting for them to get off the stage. Kotaro, meanwhile, is drowning his sorrows in a glass of whiskey at a bar.
This is one of the many things I should have mentioned from Season 1, but didn't... and if I did, I'm just going to repeat myself. At one point near the end of Season 1, we saw Kotaro talking to an old bartender at a bar about Franchouchou, the old guy chomping on dried squid and mentioning Yugiri and how he owed her a lot for something that happened in the past. Dunno why I couldn't have said that last time, but that last section was like 4000 words long and I was feeling myself getting rambly. Anyway, we're going to need to know about that old guy for now and later. So, now you know about him. Kotaro the drunk is talking about his failure, and how there's a hard deadline on the Zombie Land Saga Project that's been utterly fucked by the EFS debacle. He's giving up. It can't be done. It just can't. In response, here's what our old bartender friend has to say.
Sometimes you just need that to break out of your funk. So it is that Kotaro runs his ass over to the Geils club, where Franchouchou is once again bombing and the metalheads have absolutely no interest in hearing an encore from them. In busts Kotaro calling and clapping for an encore, being his loud and brash self even as annoyed metalheads punch him in the face to shut him up. This incites a full-on brawl in the club, giving Franchouchou the chance they need to play their encore, their first sweet notes of revenge as they take their shot to strike back while everyone in this club is beating the shit out of each other. I guess you can call it a representation of what's going on in their souls as they fight back against their bad luck. There's even some applause once they finish, and the next day Kotaro's got a haircut and is ready to once again lead his zombie idols to the glory of saving Saga. Welcome back, Franchouchou. It's time for revenge. Let's attack aggressively.
So that's episode 1 of the second season. There's going to be a lot that happens in batches of twos or threes that you can really fit into thematic concerns that are going to make fun little blog posts out of in a bit. Last time, however, I skipped over a few episodes just because they were basically slapstick misadventures on the rise to stardom. I can't really do that this time. Before we leave this section, we're going to talk about a lesser theme running through two of the episodes. Episodes 2 and 5 deal with... hmm, how do I put it? They deal with two of the girls facing the changing landscape of the wider entertainment industry, and being forced to confront the fact that they're never going to grow physically older and gain maturity in that sense because they're zombies now. Now, one of them deals with that better than the other, given who they are, but there's still some crunchy and interesting stuff to talk about in both of these episodes. Of them, episode 2 is a favorite, so why don't we set the scene for it?
As part of the grand return to relevance again after their big bomb, the newly-reinvigorated Kotaro books Franchouchou onto a TV tourism show promoting Saga and its various attractions. They're being joined on said show by a man called White Ryu, a name which has Saki excited. White Ryu is a Saga rock star himself, and also host of a late-night radio show in Saga since 1992. So, you know, Saki knows of him from her living years. Though White Ryu is older now, having a bit of a saggy pompadour in his old age, he's still a lively and spirited individual who speaks from the heart. As the show puts it, his words are fuel for the soul and you feel them burning within yourself. The Franchouchou/White Ryu tourist segment goes well enough, albeit with a bit where White Ryu insists they climb a very tall set of shrine stairs to challenge themselves. No worries, the old guy's tuckered out all but they're all rewarded with an amazing view out to sea. At the end of the way, Saki can't help but share her admiration of Ryu in person before they depart, and it's here where Ryu reveals that he's retiring from his radio show soon. As he says though, don't sweat it: the answers you're looking for can still be found in Saga. Then he departs, and that news doesn't sit well with Saki. Later that night, she'll reminisce about a night long long ago. A night when she was still alive, a delinquent who thought the whole world was out to get her who had to fight hard to prove that she was here, that she existed. On that night, after beating the stuffing out of some more punks, she lay on riverside grass and contemplated things, when from a nearby radio owned by a late-night fisherman she hears...
The very next day, Saki met Reiko, her future best friend in life. Then she died, but she met Franchouchou... What would have happened to her if she hadn't heard those words, that guiding inspiration from the radio waves? Saki refuses to accept Ryu's retirement, and so accompanied by Sakura she bike rides at high speed to the radio station to barge in and tell him as much. Despite his radio techs' objections, Ryu lets them both live on the air with him and Saki lets all her feelings loose. There are too many people out there in Saga like she was back then, people who don't know what to do with themselves. People who need inspiration, a guiding voice, a place to turn to where they can belong. Ryu lets her know that that's just it. They need a place to turn to, not him specifically. He wasn't going to cancel the show outright. He was going to find a successor; someone with the passion and drive to manage it, to maintain this safe space over the airwaves for the lonely people of Saga who need it. Saki's just proved her passion and understanding of the importance of the show to Ryu, and so Ryu appoints her and the rest of Franchouchou as his successors. I'll have more to say about this in a second, but we have to break paragraph to talk about the ending here.
Oh yeah, the part where Saki says she loves Ryu. He simply tells her to look him up when they're older and have grown into fine women, and that sort of sets up the thing I was mentioning earlier. As Saki and Sakura lay on riverside grass together, like Saki did a quarter-century ago, she wonders if Reiko found a man like Ryu when she grew up. Of course, Saki's never going to grow up. Nor is the rest of Franchouchou, because they're all zombies and they're stuck like this forever. That elicits a good and proper crying session from Saki as well as Sakura, who's crying 'cause Saki is crying. It's one of the few times that the show really plays on the whole curse of immortality angle in such a microcosm way. It's poignant, to be sure, but the entire season isn't about to become existential grief on being cursed to live forever in a rotting body or anything fucked up like that. No, what I really love about this is the idea of the radio show.
There's something innately spiritual and serene about it that speaks to the whole idea of what "saving Saga" should represent. Ryu's show being specifically a late-night radio program that's there for the people who need it really speaks to me. It makes me think of the many nights I've spent in the back of a car, driving down a dark and lonely highway, with only a podcast or resonant song to guide me. In the same vein, Ryu's show gives out advice to the lonely folks of Saga who write in, and is there for those late-night people up in the twilight hours, a voice in the dark and a place specifically for them to share their feelings and to be heard. The fact that it could inspire Saki to find her place in the world, even after death, is something special. Now she and Franchouchou are taking up the torch, and it's a key victory in the eternal struggle of "saving Saga", whatever we define that as. It's a lovely episode, is what I'm saying, and the fact that our zombie girls can move and inspire people on that level as Ryu literally drives off into the sunset of some far-away desert mesa is quite moving to me.
Let's close this bit out by jumping ahead to talk about episode 5, as it taps into the same sort of notions of eternal bodily status and the greater Japanese media sphere for just a bit. Amusingly, it's also another Lily episode. I'm only just now realizing that we got to pair Saki and Lily together with shared thematic personal arcs last time as well. How about that? Episode 5, then, has Lily going onto a national TV program that's basically just a Japanese variant of America's Got Talent. You know the deal, perform your special talent, the panel of judges give you a pass or fail, and so on and so forth. Naturally such a story should have a rival for Lily to compete against, and we get an up-and-coming child actor named Light Oozora to play that role. Given that Lily has been dead for about 8 years or so at this point, Light is very clearly part of the next generation of Japanese child actors in comparison to Lily and her contemporaries. Unfortunately, as Sakura overhears before the competition, Light is also a bit of a stuck-up little bastard who only came down to Saga to compete because he assumed nobody actually talented lived all the way out in goddamned Kyushu so he could steamroll his way to a spot at the national competition level.
Even though he's not worried about a regional idol from Franchouchou, predictably things go just as you'd expect for a bit. Both Lily and Light end up as finalists, the winner moving on to the national level. Lily's plan is to sing a song called "Life", one which she sang with her father in her own life and one which her mother supposedly loved also. Lily goes to congratulate Light on making it this far, letting him know in her own way that she won't be an easy opponent and she's going to sparkle and twinkle on stage. To this, Light responds with some surprisingly (but nonetheless depressingly) adult cynicism:
Again that theme of eternal bodily statis comes up. Light has no idea of knowing that Lily never will get older, unlike him (and Lily even flashes back to her last moments of life when Light says that, of herself looking in the mirror and seeing signs of aging). If that wasn't enough to threaten some sort of crisis in Lily, how about Light going on first and performing the "Life" song before Lily? That'll totally undercut Lily's act, so she has to think on her feet. As Light sings his little heart out, moving the crowd to tears, Lily frantically works on revising her act. She talks to stagehands, she rewrites the sheet music for the house band on the fly, she grabs cans of spray paint and does last-minute costume modifications... all while Light gains a standing ovation from the weeping crowd, moved and shook by the surprisingly mature performance of this child prodigy. Lily has to follow that up, and what has she improvised in the space of a few minutes?
If you can't watch that video, I'll just say it: Lily has remixed the "Life" song into an upbeat jazzy tune, spray painted her outfit in bright pastels, and is Scatman Johnning her way across the stage with skeebeedoos and bababadaboes. It's up-tempo, it's energetic, and it's enough to get all sorts of kids, both in the crowd and watching at home, to jump up and dance along. Lily was never going to weep in existential distress at being an eternally youthful zombie. She's actually kind of vibing with being a sparkling and twinkling youthful shining star, and she always will. Even with that impressive performance, though, it's Light who wins the finals and gets to move on to the next leg of the show. Despite that, Light is reduced to a depressed mess hiding in the bathroom. Deep down, he laments that he never could have pulled off an improv performance as impressive as Lily did in like 5 minutes. Lily actually shows up to motivate him, though, and to metaphorically pass on the torch as Ryu did to Saki back a few episodes ago. She'll always be a twinkling star, like the rest of Franchouchou, and so her resolve is to become a super twinkling star that will help them reach their goals. She admits that Light's got something Lily could never have, and encourages him to live his dream of going on Broadway and maturing as an actor. Light, motivated, heads off into the sunset to live that dream after giving Lily a respectful fistbump, and the closing credits show that Lily's fun little freestyle jazz dance has become a meme online. What a way to twinkle.
It's an interesting set of episodes, these two. They raise the greater ramifications of "wait, holy shit, we're zombies, we're never going to physically age" in subtle ways and have two of the girls deal with that in different ways. Saki has a bit of a cry about it, whereas Lily is just sort of vibing with her ultimate fate and seems to be happy the way she is. Notably, the show isn't playing with the pathos of this in any other darker cynical way. To cite an example off the top of my head, the show isn't about to turn Lily into Kirsten Dunst from Interview With A Vampire or anything fucked up like that. Though, I will say, I did have a fear like that when first watching this season: in episode 1 Kotaro mentions to the bartender that there's a hard deadline on the Zombie Land Saga Project. There was a brief existential fear that he was alluding to the revival of our girls as zombies being temporary; that they had to become superstars who saved Saga before the necromancy wore off and they died again, for good. That's not where the show is going, thank God. The deadline, though... Good god, we'll deal with what I discovered about that later maybe.
Why don't we talk about Ai and Junko next time instead? Y'all know how much I adore Junko now, and I'll get to tell you about how her singing made me a sobbing mess.
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