FLCL: Progressive is a Shallow Imitation of the Original

​When FLCL appeared in the early 2000s, the sci-fi backed coming-of-age story touched many an adolescent heart around the world. The show's cult following would spend the next decade professing their love in infinitely many ways, but a sequel? There was no need for a sequel. FLCL accomplished everything it set out to in a very tightly produced six episodes, and that was that. Fast-forward to 2018: FLCL: Progressive, the first of two sequels, has just finished airing - and it's not good.

​The following contains spoilers for FLCL: Progressive.

Much like FLCL, Progressive follows a young student unequipped for the pain of adolescence. Unfortunately, that's about as far as it gets. Rather than treat the sci-fi action saga as simple background noise for the growth of deep and multi-faceted characters, the Progressive team has seen fit to bring Haruko's hunt for the big red magic bird to the forefront. Hidomi and the other students whose names I can't remember never get a chance to grow up because they're too busy dealing with Medical Mechanica and bass guitar bats and getting hit with vehicles to produce bumps on their heads. That's right - Progressive treats those supporting elements as the ancillary backbone of the series and looks no further.

Haruko is back, swinging her bass guitar around and using children to get to Atomsk. Amarao is back (except this time it's his son Masurao), trying to prevent Haruko from doing that thing she's doing. There's robots and self-driving magic cars and a girl with a flower pot and, and, and... It's just a big mess of sci-fi high concepts trying to build on the lore of FLCL while completely missing the point. None of the characters get any real growth. In fact, by the end of the series they're all exactly where they started. The awkward school kids are awkwardly pining over one another, Haruko is flying off into the sunset to chase down Atomsk once again, and nobody has learned a thing.

If Progressive had tried to own up to being an epic sci-fi story of space pirates and robots and bass guitar fights, the show might have been an enjoyable action story, but they couldn't even get that right. The lore of the original, being a background setpiece for an actual story which had nothing to do with big red space birds, was never meant to be a foundation for anything like this. All of the returning elements fall flat as the show struggles to understand why those elements were there in the first place.

If you're wondering the names of any of the characters who aren't Haruko, don't bother. None of them were written beyond existing as a vessel for Haruko's quest for power, none of them feel like actual people within the world of FLCL. If anything, the entire show feels like Haruko herself wrote it: "This is how I used a bunch of kids to get the magic bird power I wanted!" In the end, Haruko successfully ingested the power of Atomsk only to realize that she can't physically handle it. Her response? Oh well, time to go try again. Haruko admits that she'll never learn, and that the fact that she has no hope of ever succeeding is what makes her want to keep going in the first place. The entire season serves as evidence that Haruko cannot and will not ever change; in fact, it's the driving force behind every episode. Instead of running with that as a narrative, though, Progressive is still too deeply engrossed in its sci-fi action to pay any attention when a poignant character observation is made.

Everywhere you look, there are threads of a good season. Haruko's characterization represents adults who get too caught up in themselves to realize or care that they're hurting the people around them, kids included.  Progressive could have doubled down on that idea, but it didn't. Everyone in the show is hiding something from someone else, but none of them ever have to deal with the repercussions of their lies because the big space bird is more important. Nobody ever gets to develop as a person because stylish guitar fighting is more fun to look at. The main characters instead jump from the beginning to the end of their respective arcs with no buildup.

The one saving grace of Progressive is the return of alternative rock legends The Pillows for the soundtrack. Unfortunately, their music is thrown in haphazardly without any real consideration for tone. Beloved pieces like Thank You, My Twilight and Last Dinosaur are present only for some sad nostalgia factor and feel totally out of place in this empty shell of a series. At least it's getting them to tour in the US, though. I can't complain about that.

FLCL: Progressive suffers from bad writing, uninspired character design, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what FLCL represents. What we got instead is missed opportunities and wasted potential.

FLCL: Alternative will air on September 8th, and looks to be a much more promising project.

​- Rose