English Dub Review: Helck “The Chosen Path”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Helck and Vermilio finally join the battle, with Helck directly confronting Rafaed, the man who saved him and his brother years ago.

OUR TAKE

Well, here we are, six months of following this show later and we’re finally one episode from the end. I don’t wanna repeat myself too much on what’s been bugging me a lot, in this case the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to resolve everything in this conflict by the next episode, but it really is something to behold with how poorly this was handled. We’ve spent so much friggin time on seeing these two wander around random places and then just as much on a flashback arc just to have next to no time for the big battle it was all meant to be setting up. This week’s episode would’ve been fine for, say, a twentieth episode of a season this length, or even a twenty second if this were a twenty six episode show, but it’s not. We’ve got ONE EPISODE LEFT. BASICALLY TWENTY MINUTES OF CONTENT LEFT. TO WRAP UP AND CONCLUDE EVERYTHING. It’s just not happening. And whoops, there I go repeating myself, but it’s unfortunately something we can’t avoid when the time has been so mismanaged. But I might as well go ahead and throw in some positives since there was considerable development here.

Even if I don’t think it should’ve taken this long, the flashback arc did at least better establish Helck’s relationship to humanity and why he wants to destroy them, but it also fleshed out who he knew at the time, and the only ones among them that weren’t transformed were evil people like Rafaed or his daughter who is still trying to reunite with Helck. So him finally battling Rafaed is a long time coming and feels like a big payoff…if it had a few more episodes. Likewise, we finally have the Awakened human with the helmet showing up who is gonna turn out to be Alicia, so we can have all the drama and grief around that, even though, and I can’t stress this enough, there’s just no time for it to be handled in the best way it could. But we’re finally getting it at least, so we can have SOMETHING to look forward to. Unfortunately, just about everything feels like it has set this show’s finale to fail, and while I take no pleasure in that, I’ll cover it just the same next week, as we discuss the season, and possibly series, finale of Helck. May god help us all.