English Dub Season Review: The Promised Neverland Season 2

The Promised Neverland was one of the biggest hits in anime back when its first season premiered, combining Death Note style chess game tactics with the precociousness of Rugrats, as it followed a group of young and smart orphans who slowly learn that they are being prepared to be fed to terrifying demons and decide to make a break for it. The first season focused on the three main kids, Emma, Norman, and Ray, who must plot their escape while keeping their plans secret from their caretaker Isabella. They make deals, hold their cards close, and learn more about the operations that are putting them and their friends in danger, eventually being able to finally make it out with most of them, vowing to come back to save the rest. After such a fantastic opening season and with so much of the beloved manga left to adapt, a follow up to this should have been primed to be just as good if not better.

What we got couldn’t be farther from that if they tried. The second season of The Promised Neverland is likely to go down as the biggest disappointment in anime of this year for a variety of reasons. It’s probably not going to be the worst anime of the year, but given that it had to follow up a beloved and critically acclaimed first go around, this one had the furthest to fall, and boy howdy did it fall hard. For some here to fore unexplained reason, it was decided to poll vault past several chapters and much anticipated story arcs from the manga, bafflingly at the original author’s request, in order to push the series into an anime original storyline that would then wrap up the series within this eleven episode season. I’ve seen some speculation that there could have been plans to have a third season or movie to give it a slightly better conclusion, but the backlash to how the first few episodes of the season were handled put the kabosh on that, which ended up leaving just about no one satisfied to the point that no one wanted to put their names on the writing for the last two episodes.

I did not go into this series from the manga like many did, and so I was able to view this adaptation on its own merits, which is what I think we should judge an adaptation on anyway. I really liked the first season like most did, and so I was looking forward to seeing more of the story that I had been told would be really cool. While I do regret that I will probably not see things like the beloved Goldy Pond arc in animation (at least not for a long time), I was still interested in seeing what they were going to do with these interesting characters now that they are outside of their old home. We certainly got to see them try to survive on their own and meet more of the demons, including those who actually want to help them defeat those who would eat them, but it ended up lacking a lot of the tactical and emotional intelligence that the first season did, even if it was by no means bad on its own. But then the last few episodes completely shat the bed by rushing a ton of things and not even animating a good portion of the final episode.

I’m probably not nearly as disappointed with this season as fans of the manga are, but even I can tell this was a total let down and it has subsequently burnt me out on checking out the manga for awhile. I do hope that fans of this series will get the adaptation they want and deserve at some point down the road and I’m more than willing to watch it if and when it does get made. My heart aches for the people who had to tirelessly scramble to make some sort of watchable product out of this trainwreck. Animation is a thankless enough business as it is, but I can’t imagine it’s any better when the thing you make is so loathed as this. I don’t know if we’ll ever truly know what happened with this major screw up but at the very least we’ll always have the first season, which acts as a good enough complete story on its own and will have to until we get some sort of “FMA Brotherhood” treatment out of this.