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I know, watching two shows concurrently? It’s almost like I wanted to be an actual anime journalist. I picked up Eden of the East mostly on Japanator’s recommendation, which pretty much consisted of “LOLDONGS.” So you know, I had to get in on that.

Sadly, this is not some kind of adaptation of the Steinbeck novel. This is not a towering epic about life in the American west. I don’t even know why you’d think that, as this series is about an Eden which is in the east whereas Steinbeck’s novel focus on some location to the east of said Eden. No, this first episode, more than anything else, tells us that Japanese women are way too trusting of streakers. If Saki, our Japanese tourist friend, had been an American woman, she would have maced and tasered Akira’s naked ass the moment he walked up to her (waving a gun no less). To have it go down any other way would be frankly absurd.

And yet that’s not what happens at all. Saki gives Akira her jacket (which contains her passport) and he runs off. The rest of the episode shows her chasing after him to retrieve the passport. Then Akira offers to go to Japan with Saki, because hey that’s a good idea. Random naked people you meet in front of the White House are totally fine travel companions, right? Meanwhile we see Akira has a large cache of automatic weapons, ammo, and fake passports, and has a fancy cell phone that connects to a lady who tells him he’s a savior and had his memory wiped.

This is yet another case of first episode syndrome. I think the best way to start off a first episode is in media res. To draw an unfair comparison to American television, just look at the stunning first episode of Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. “33” endures as one of the best episodes of the series because it skips the getting-to-know-you exposition and just goes balls out into a great, tense thriller. Whether you saw the miniseries is irrelevant, the episode stands on its own. The characters and setting emerge out of the story.

Eden of the East is not unique among anime in taking a bottom-up approach, laying the groundwork of the plot and characters before making an interesting story out of them. Sometimes, it leads to great results like Trigun or Cowboy Bebop. It still doesn’t change the fact that this treatment of first episodes can get really goddamn boring.

Tags: Eden of the East, Higashi no Eden, Super Serial