English Dub Review: Zom 100 – Bucket List of the Dead “Bucket List of the Dead”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Akira revels in his new reality, not having to go to work ever again and drinking beer whenever he wants…except he’s out of beer. Upon reaching the convenience store, he meets Shizuka Mikazuki, who is only there for essential supplies and scolds him for risking danger just for beer. Akira thinks on this as he gets home and finds that his neighbors have been eaten by the zombies. Wanting to make the most of his life now, he commits to coming up with one hundred things he’ll do before the zombies get him. Meanwhile, Shizuka does her daily routine of working out and attempting to contact the outside world, but also wonders if she can’t find some way to still have some sort of fun while she’s stuck here.

OUR TAKE

We’re now fully immersed in the zombie apocalypse with just about everyone at risk of either turning to food or more zombies (aside from most likely the four protagonists, two of which we have yet to meet), so it’s interesting that Akira’s horrific nightmare is still being at his old job. Zombies in general are often metaphors for a bigger societal issues, like the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism, oppressive religious dogma, or the effects of a natural disaster or plague. They are an overwhelming force that characters usually have to find their way around at risk of death or losing their identity…and Akira is all good with that hanging around as long as he can kick back and have a few years. It’s hard to say where this interpretation of zombies or its meaning is going in just these two episodes, and it’s not like it’s portraying it as anything necessarily good (as seen with all the people killed last week or when Akira’s neighbors were killed), but it does seem to saying that the world the zombies have destroyed was a very flawed one. Akira’s situation now is a very precarious one, but it looks like it beats being a soulless worker drone that was practically a zombie anyway back in his old life.

And now, in meeting Shizuka, we have our first major alternative perspective to Akira’s approach. While he is still very much riding the high of being a free man in a world that isn’t crushing him with obligations, Shizuka is right that he can’t just risk his life for beer every time he runs out. Eventually, his luck is going to run out and his big new second chapter is likely going to be a very short one. So, it’s a neat choice that this brief interaction actually sparks some introspection in the both of them. Akira begins working on his titular bucket list, wanting to make the most of whatever time he has left before getting zombified, while Shizuka seems to start thinking of how she can start taking some risks of her own. Based on her set up that we get a glimpse of, she definitely has more room to be risky, but we’ll see what she makes of that when we check back in with her in a few episodes. In the meantime, we still have main characters to introduce, with one coming our way next episode.