The Promised Neverland Season 2 First Impressions

“If you need my help, come to visit me. I am at point B06-32.”

It can be a little odd writing a First Impressions review for a show that has already had previous seasons. Sometimes it feels warranted due to a change in production, like with One-Punch Man, and sometimes it feels necessary due to a lengthy delay in-between seasons like with Chihayafuru or Log Horizon. However, The Promised Neverland doesn’t have any of those issues. Instead, the factor that calls for analysis is that the show is entering into the manga’s second arc, which is a very different beast from what was adapted in the first season. So, going into this episode, the question is how well the show adapts this material given that the story has begun to move away from the cat-and-mouse dynamics that characterized the first season. Frankly, CloverWorks doesn’t do a bad job with this first episode, but some of the issues I had with the original season are still present and are apparent from early on.

If you somehow stumbled into this review of The Promised Neverland’s second season without any familiarity with the franchise… Welcome! The Promised Neverland is a cheerful story about children living together in an orphanage in the countryside. Ignore the screenshots I have here and go watch it. As for everyone else, season 2 picks up almost exactly where we left off previously… Actually it picks up in medias res with the children fleeing from a massive beast, but after the opening, it picks up right where we left off. The children of Grace Field House are working their way through the forest surrounding the farm, and we get some exploration of certain narrative seeds that were planted back in season 1, specifically the books of William Minerva and the pen which Sister Krone left to Norman. This is where the show stumbles as very little time is spent reintroducing these concepts and their presentation is truncated in a manner that fails to address questions that were covered by the source material. Why did Rey bring the book The Adventures of Ugo with him? Well, it’s because the book was a peculiar outlier amongst the Minerva books, but the episode doesn’t bring that up. When did Emma discover the secret of the pen? She learned of it while she was recovering from her broken leg, but the episode doesn’t bring that up. The manga wasn’t afraid to take its time in this new section of the story. Rey made an off-hand reference to the snakes of Alvaperina trap, but a direct encounter with that trap was what alerted the children to the allegorical nature of Minerva’s guidebook in the manga. It seems clear why the production staff wanted to speed through these details. They likely wanted the episode to end on a specific cliffhanger, but that mad rush to get to that point made everything feel a little off.

CloverWorks’ production remains consistent with their work from the first season. If there is one aspect that they surprised me with, it was how they represented the slightly-off, otherworldly quality of the forest. The peculiar creatures and plants almost provide a sense that someone had mixed a dose of Miyazaki into our survival horror or perhaps a dollop of Made in Abyss, and that comes through really clearly in this episode. I also love the new OP. The music itself isn’t as strong or memorable as the first season’s now iconic “Touch Off”, but the visuals make up for the discrepancy. They’re very striking and stick in my mind in a way that the visuals from the first season’s OP didn’t. There is some CG used for the creature we first see at the beginning of the episode. It’s noticeable, but my main problem with that scene is how dark it is. The lighting feels inconsistent and it makes the entire chase that occurs a bit difficult to look at because you don’t instinctively know where to focus your eyes. The first season didn’t rely much on action, so it remains to be seen how well the staff adjusts to this more kinetic story arc. It’s possible that the chase was an outlier, but it proved to be my least favorite part of the episode.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• I haven’t actually finished reading the manga, but I did get to the end of this second arc.
• By my estimate, this single episode covered a full 8 chapters of the manga. The average for the previous season was approximately 3 chapters per episode. You can feel the content being forcibly packed into this episode.
• In the manga, the children took a bit longer to adapt to the bizarre environment of the forest, as, based on the books they read of the outside, they were expecting a normal environment than what they encountered. Again, the anime hand waves this by having one of the children almost instantly notice the allegory of The Adventures of Ugo, sacrificing pacing in the process.
• After having just recently discussed Otherside Picnic‘s unconventional use of an in medias res opening, it was actually a little startling to see such a traditional implementation of that narrative device here. Neverland‘s use of it fits my description of how the trope is most often deployed to a T.