Honestly, I’m pretty lukewarm about this arc. People are going to jump to conclusions and be like, “Oh, so you think it’s bad? Why do you think it’s bad? It’s not bad! It’s great!” Look, I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying I’m not excited. This is not what I get up every Monday morning for (nevermind the fact that the writeups always go up a day later). So right off the bat, Dimple tells Mob that those charred bodies can’t possibly belong to his family. We’ll find out later that spirit doesn’t actually know this, but hey, a rampaging, out-of-control Mob is no good for anybody. The kid’s still pretty pissed, though. One thing leads to another, and he eventually stumbles upon a gathering of former Claw members and Arataka. In fact, they’ve appointed him their new leader. Crazy, huh? No matter how high the stakes are, our friendly, neighborhood charlatan always manages to stumble forward into success. But to make a long story short, these chumps have realized the errors of their ways. Unfortunately, it’s like with the mafia. Do you really think bad guys would just let you leave without any consequences? Of course not. Plus, the situation is actually much, much worse than that.
In the second half of the episode, Claw’s leader Suzuki Toichiro begins to put his world domination plans into motion. He believes that he’s raised a large enough army, so it’s time to do the typical supervillain thing, i.e. hijack the airwaves, make an ominous proclamation to the entire world, blah blah blah. Even the prime minister gets kidnapped, because that’s just what you do. I’m kinda surprised by these developments, but at the same time, I’m kinda not. I mean, it’s not like we’re bumping into Claw for the very first time. We’ve dealt with his son in the past. Plus, when you have espers with such destructive powers at their fingertips, you’re bound to run into a megalomaniac sooner or later. You’re bound to run into your bog standard power-hungry villain who wants to install “a new world order” just because he thinks he’s hot stuff. If you think about it, these folks aren’t all that different from mutants. Nevertheless, I was having a good time enjoying the relative “mundaneness” of the series, if you will. I was having a good time watching Mob grow up before my very eyes. All of a sudden, I now have an escalating situation that feels straight out of a series like My Hero Academia. Shrug, what can I say?
At first, it appears as though everything won’t go smoothly for Toichiro and Claw. Within their ranks, there are a few individuals planning to destroy the organization from within. Nevertheless, when they try to kickoff their little insurrection, they quickly meet their match and more in the fearsome “Ultimate 5,” the so-called upper echelon of Claw. In other words, like your typical shounen, we basically got an introduction to the super badasses that our heroes will have to fight through in order to confront Toichiro. At one point, Teruki tries to prevent the prime minister from being abducted, but like the insurrectionists, he’s outmatched and outgunned. The last half of the episode is essentially one long demonstration of how large these guys’ “power levels” are. This way, we can get hyped for future battles. Big numbers, people. Big, big numbers. We even get the trope where the quirky dude (some hikikomori with an umbrella) is probably the strongest of them all. And sure, this is all well-executed. It’s even done with Mob Psycho 100‘s flair, so nothing here is boring. Ever since we were introduced to Claw in the first season, I always knew we had to resolve that plot thread eventually. Nevertheless, I’m just not enthused. I’m not excited to watch this arc unfold.
At the moment, Mob is currently in a deep sleep. Can you blame him? His emotions have been running on high ever since he thought his family was murdered. He has to be exhausted. At the same time, however, putting Mob to sleep is a very typical shounen move when you consider the context. It’s your “Goku running back from the afterlife” move. Soon, the bad guys will attack, and it’s obvious that the former members of Claw will be no match for them. So we’ll see some “desperate” situation in which the good guys hang on by a thread until Mob finally wakes up and saves them all. Along with this, I’m also reminded of all the other weaknesses inherent to the shounen genre. For instance, there are plenty of girls in this party. But between Mob, Toichiro, Sho, Ritsu, and the Ultimate 5, it seems as though the major actors will be one big boys only club. I guess what separates Mob from, say, Deku from MHA has always been a rather thin line. When he gets all pissed off, his bowl cut gets all heroically spiky. He certainly looks the part, doesn’t he? Mob even starts barking out trite lines at his opponents. Oh well. They want to end the season on a bang, and I guess this is how you do that.