Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Episode 4

After last week's episode allowed Akira and Kencho to reignite their bromance through the time-honored tradition of hanging dong with your best bud on the roof of a random office building while the hideous, gurgling screams of the undying fill the air, I was excited to see where the duo's adventures would take them next. I do not know why I didn't immediately guess, “Try to get laid at an impromptu mixer with a bunch of shell-shocked flight attendants in an underground mall,” but you know what? It's on brand, so I'll allow it. Alongside the suspiciously specific goal of “Wining and Dining a Flight Attendant,” Akira also needed to visit the electronics store to get an ultra-wide HDTV for his more gaming-adjacent goals. I'm sure we could make plenty of jokes about how that particular mindset might just perfectly explain why Akira has spent the last few years not finding any cuties to hook up with, but I will trust Kencho to take on that brotherly duty with due diligence sooner or later.

Either way, now that Kencho is on board with helping Akira fulfill their now-shared Bucket List of the dead, we've got plenty of opportunities for zom-com shenanigans that Zom 100 can indulge in, and I think the show does a solid job of taking advantage of them. The opening action scene is pretty great, for one, since Akira and Kencho's death-defying rebuke of yet another Zombie Trucker's dangerous driving is not only a fun slice of spectacle, the callback to Shizuka's introduction in Episode 2 gives us a much-needed moment of Akira demonstrating his growing levels of awareness and skill when it comes to surviving and thriving in a zombie wasteland.

The little zombie-movie dramedy that follows when the two just so happen to hunker down with a trio of flight attendants is also an interesting direction for the episode to take, even if I wouldn't blame anyone who checks out due to some of the more eye-rolling elements of the episode. It's no secret that Zom 100's gender representation has been a little imbalanced so far, since the only girl to not die horribly to weirdly sexualized zombie violence hasn't even been given a name yet, and the show doesn't exactly subvert expectations, here. Well, I guess you could maybe argue that brutally killing all of these innocent girls (and that one guy who was screwed from the start) is somewhat subversive to the show's hitherto happy-go-lucky tone, but also, I mean, c'mon. There was never any reality in which this story ended well for anyone but the two main characters since poor Reika, Maki, and Yukari don't have the good fortune to feature in either of the credits sequences.

Now, whether or not you think the show handled the inevitable tragedy of the flight attendants' death with any modicum of grace or tact will be a more personal matter. On the one hand, it's easy to find the show's frankly frat-boyish treatment of the girls kind of gross; both Akira and Kencho are so goddamned stupid and single-minded that they immediately begin treating this desperate survival situation as a hookup opportunity, and Kencho even succeeds at getting down and dirty before his one-night stand and her drunk co-worker is just immediately turned into zombie chow. The sweet-natured Yukari doesn't get it any better, since she makes the fatal mistake of telling Akira about all of her troubles and traumas in just such a way to perfectly motivate him to succeed in his dreams. She may as well have hung a steak around her neck and gone zombie crowd surfing straight toward the department of the store with the biggest and bloodiest refrigerators to stuff her corpse into.

To Zom 100's credit, though, it at least tries to inject some pathos into the proceedings, and I can't exactly fault the show for undercutting the tension with some very dumb comedy, since “finding moments of unexpected happiness and comradery amidst the zombie horror” is the whole point of the show. I guess maybe I'm just eager for Shizuka and the yet-to-be-introduced blonde gal from the OP and ED to become proper party members in this zombie survival quest. I won't go expecting the anime to become a feminist masterpiece simply by adding a couple of attractive waifus to the cast, but maybe we will at least be able to turn the Dumb Frat Boy Antics down a notch or two.

Rating:

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is currently streaming on Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Netflix.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.