WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Promised Neverland Season 2, Episode 8, now streaming on Funimation and Hulu.
At the very least, stuff actually happens in The Promised Neverland Season 2, Episode 8, which is more than you can say of most episodes this season. On the positive side, this episode has action, character growth and some strong horror imagery. On the negative side, it's still rushed and confusing. Episode 8 essentially crams three episodes' worth of content into one, and the episode's big climax centers around an embarrassing rip-off of Batman v Superman's much-mocked "Martha" scene.
Episode 8 starts with a natural follow-up to Episode 7's cliffhanger, showing Norman's adoption by Peter Ratri, his time as part of the Lambda experiments and his destruction of the facility. This sequence is filled with creepy images of human experimentation, but it all blows by very fast and with little explanation. The fellow experiments, who become Norman's followers, get zero development either. The way the anime shows this part of Norman's life is slightly better than just passing over it with exposition, but it's still a failure at actually dramatizing it effectively.
The second part of Episode 8 concerns Emma, Ray, Don and Gilda searching for Sonju and Mujika in the forest. This sequence throws in a chase against the same demon which chased them in the season premiere, but this time Ray is able to hit one of its eyes with an arrow before Mujika and Sonju save the day and decapitate it. In the manga, it was just Don and Gilda, who were accompanied on this quest and eventually betrayed by Norman's subordinates, Jin and Hayato -- characters who do not exist in the anime.
Though the kids' mission is successful, it turns out Norman did not keep his end of the bargain. He's already set off explosions in the city and is releasing the poison that makes demons degenerate. This sequence is probably the scariest and most effective The Promised Neverland has been all season, with Norman's genocidal plot succeeding and proving so horrific that he can't possibly defend it. The specific moment where Norman comes to regret his actions, however, turns accidentally comical due to its Batman v Superman similarities.
Norman sees a child demon beginning to degenerate and an older demon calling out the child's name: "Emma." Hearing this demon has the same name as his old friend suddenly snaps Norman into empathizing with the demons. It's basically the exact same scene as when Batman and Superman stop fighting because they realize that both of their moms are named "Martha."
Making matters more confusing is that it seems the older demon's blood is able to heal the child. This would seem to imply he's another one of the "evil-blooded," making Sonju and Mujika a lot less special and possibly less necessary to the overall plot. The Promised Neverland Season 2 just keeps making one questionable choice after another, and two-thirds of the way through, it's certain to go down as one of the year's biggest anime disappointments.
New episodes of The Promised Neverland premiere Thursdays on Funimation and Hulu.
