It took everyone by surprise at first. Shock from being turned into weird animals, as well as anger and utter despair.”

I’ve started writing this first sentence about a half dozen times, but it’s hard to know how to break the ice when talking about Train to the End of the World. It’s one of the most thoroughly odd shows I’ve seen in a while, and it might be worth checking out for that reason alone. Still, trying to analyze something so deliberately strange can be difficult, because it feels like every criticism comes with a freight car full of clarifications or speculations.

I think the core of my issues with this show is that the tone is inconsistent. As I said, given the show aims to be odd, it invites the question of whether inconsistency of tone is actually a flaw or just a property of the work, but we’ll dive into that later. I’m starting to worry I’ll burn myself out on this show by overthinking the premiere, but in truth, I enjoyed it, and it’s definitely going on my shortlist of ones to follow this season. If you like absurdist dramas with a few darker edges, then I think you might find something uniquely rewarding in Train to the End of the World. 

Now, when I say Train to the End has a tonal issue, it can be traced back to the start of the episode. The premise of this series is that an initiation of a new type of data network triggered… essentially Weirdmageddon from Gravity Falls. The laws of physics and reality were warped and distorted beyond recognition. However, one might assume the world prior to that point has some established sense of normality, but the only sampling we get involves a teenage girl walking through a subway station, triggering a prize alarm, being picked up in an owl shaped container by a drone, carried to the top of a skyscraper, and invited to push the button to launch this new 7G network. Somehow, in a show that features a town of talking animals, stories of humans turning into trees, and a delivery service pulled from Mad Max: Fury Road, it’s the scenes from prior to the apocalypse that are most baffling.

Once the show is properly underway and civilization has properly collapsed, the tone settles down. We’re introduced to the town of Agano, two years after the 7G launch collapsed civilization, where anyone from the town over the age of 21 years and three months turns into an animal. They retain their intelligence and ability to communicate, but the still-human children fear the population might lose those qualities over time.

While the tone of the show remains largely energetic and offbeat, there is an undercurrent of unease, and the show does a good job of capturing that element with its visuals. Of the four girls living in the town, one in particular, Shizuru, has been obsessed with finding out what happened to their friend Yoka, who went missing after the 7G incident. When a clue finally falls in their lap, the four of them depart on an adventure with the intention of using an abandoned passenger train car to navigate their distorted world.

Despite the haywire tone of this premiere, I’m fascinated with where the show might go. This is an anime original, and it hits a niche genre of weirdness that I, as a fan of Twin Peaks, Fringe, Gravity Falls, and Control, especially appreciate. I do worry that EMT Squared isn’t a studio known for high-end series, though they surprised me some with I’m Quitting Heroing (because I didn’t get as sick of it as I expected). If we’re lucky, this will be a departure for the studio. This is the first time the director, Tsutomu Mizushima, has worked with the studio. So maybe this is a good sign, but I’m maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism. The animation is decent enough.

Train to the End uses a bit of moe aesthetic, potentially to create a juxtaposition with the implied horrors. So far, the show has done a good job playing with that dichotomy. One of my favorite moments in the episode was when Shizuru was walking down a street, and for a split-second she sees a couple taking a walk together as humans, only to take a second glance and see them as a pair of animals.

The OP seems to be aiming for a similar dissonance to the bulk of the episode. It’s a seemingly chill track with some odd 8-bit and vocal distortion effects that keep the listener off balance. It’s hard to guess whether the show is aiming to go for full horror, but there is something unsettling to that OP. The ED is visually simpler, but I prefer the track a bit more. It seems to be leaning into the haunting qualities of an abandoned train working its way down darkened tracks.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• I think some people have been comparing this to Gakou Gurashi!, or School-Live! in English. I don’t entirely agree with the comparison, but I understand and I can’t deny it crossed my mind. Still, School-Live!’s dissonance was used to set up big recontextualizing rug pulls and to explore the shattered psychology of its lead, while Train to the End seems to be using the sense of discordance to reflect the unpredictability and nonlogical nature of the world its characters now inhabit. 
• Part of me was becoming increasingly curious what score I gave I’m Quitting Heroing. I was confident, but not positive, that I gave it a 3 out of 5, but we lost the score on the older reviews when the site moved to a new template. To satisfy my curiosity, I checked it out on the Wayback Machine and confirmed I was right.
• This show’s atmosphere also reminds me of Otherside Picnic, but that comparison isn’t as kind as the other ones I listed in this review, even if it was another 3 out of 5.
• When they started the 7G system at the start the art went wild and… let’s just say in the back of my mind the thought, “I think it’s a Banksy,” popped up.

Train to the End of the World has me a little more excited than I should be. There are many ways this show could go wrong, but I enjoyed the first episode despite its uneven pacing and tone. If you’re a fan of weird tonally dissonant franchises, then it’ll probably be worth your time to sample this one. Hopefully, it will be worth sticking with it until the final stop.

Score: 3.5/5