English Dub Season Review: Hero Mask Season 2

When a show just totally misses the point.

Our Take:

I was hoping this would be an animated Kamen Rider. It was not.

I didn’t watch the first season, so I had to marathon both in order to get a proper look at this series. To be honest, it’s not a very good look.

Hero Mask is a futuristic cop show, where the police in question are set to hunt down some dangerous masks, which gives wearers supernatural abilities, such as healing severe injuries, bullet time, and increased physical endurance. However, the masks have a cost, rapidly aging the users until death when overused, and being an overall menace to society. The person responsible for funding the mask project died last season, so what’s there to do in season two? Well, it turns out that one of the founding scientists did succeed in perfecting a mask, by fusing it to his dying newborn daughter following a tragic accident. All paths converge in trying to find the daughter and her perfected mask.

James is a hardcore cop who starts out hardcore and ends hardcore. I felt this way last season, but it feels like James is fairly static. His wants and needs don’t change at all, and he doesn’t even question the way he does things. He is a bullheaded cop and does things for the greater good, but there has to be a time where he questions himself or wants to question himself. This makes him very weak as a lead, as it doesn’t feel like he has much at stake. To tell the truth, he probably doesn’t.

Also, it really did feel like they just ran out of ideas on what to do with some characters. Harry, for example, has been set up as James’ rival and a force to be reckoned with as Connor’s bodyguard. However, all his competence vanishes this season, as he is instantly sidelined by the new henchman following a failed kidnapping attempt, and then his girlfriend conveniently dies. He then commits suicide off-screen. This is a mishandling of a good antagonist, but also shows that they really didn’t know what to do with Harry, huh. Eh, just kill him off and ask questions later, because we need to focus on the real, less interesting threats. This season is rife with instances like this, where it honestly feels like they had no idea what to do with a majority of the carryover cast. Most of the time, characters are just there instead of being active, and that makes for a weaker show.

Season two still has not solved the show’s problem with women, where nearly all the women are written off to be fridged, or are only defined by the men in their lives. There might be a slight improvement in this season, but then you realize that’s because there’s pretty much only two women: the daughter and Monica. The daughter basically has no agency; is pretty much there to be kidnapped, used as a bargaining tool, and then later to heroically sacrifice herself for the greater good. Despite being the main character, she barely changes over the course of the show. Sure, she learns a lot about herself, but that doesn’t really seem to impact her as a person. There are plenty of times for her to change, even become more proactive, but no. She’s just passively letting herself be lead along until she can get more information. Great. At least Monica is there, and while I genuinely like Monica, it seems like she has the same issue as Sarah: they make her hyper-competent to mask the fact that they won’t put any effort into the other female characters. A shame.

While there was some interesting information regarding the creation of the masks, it mostly came too little too late. The climax was a pure mess, characters coming out of nowhere, random superpowers that some people just have now I guess, dull action sequences, the whole package. If you’re going to make me sit through an entire season, at least have the finale be on point. That shouldn’t be too hard to ask, right?

It’s not bad, but it’s even worse; it’s boring. The writing is extremely clumsy, the characters don’t change, and everything feels like this was written extremely last minute. At least there’s some entertainment value in comedically bad media, but this was just a slog to get through. And I had to watch two seasons of it.

Also, they really are basing a whole show on the evils of advanced technology without any sort of oversight, and has the police conduct most of their activities through an extremely advanced surveillance system, huh.