Digimon Beatbreak #32 Quick Reaction
In this episode, Panjyamon dies. After befriending a woman named Maki. She handles it better than history would have you believe… yes, even while threatening to knife a baby.
One of Beatbreak’s secret weapons has been featuring a lot of adults as supporting characters. We got plenty out of the likes of Kyo and Klay even before learning about their pasts, but even the presence of Maki, Yosshi, and Kawarazaki fill out the world and make it feel like something more than children having an adventure while the hapless grownups twiddle their thumbs. The infrastructure may be a dumpster fire, but these characters are our best links to it. Every so often we do get the full stories, and it’s nice to delve into a character’s history and get something that isn’t about a five year old. However old Maki is in this flashback (we’re not asking the lady her age), she’s put a life together, already had a history with Digimon, and when Panjyamon shows up on her doorstop the reaction is something beyond “ooh, cool/cute/smokeshow monster, what adventures await us?” There’s instant melancholy, a feeling of inevitable heartbreak that she still allows to manifest and fall victim to. It also helps the episode build out the world in a way that’s been frustratingly lacking so far this arc.
The worldbuilding is important considering how little Glowing Dawn actually does here. They’re present, but it’s a pretty conventional bounty for all of them. The value comes in seeing how chaotic human-Digimon relations were before the Cleaner system, and how that introduced its own host of problems. We also see Maki’s early interactions with Kawarazaki, how she came by her life goals, and how that led her to Kyo. We’ll see how necessary it was that these blanks were filled in, but for now it’s nice that they are, and through a story with some emotional weight. It also ties directly to these Gift people, whom Beatbreak kinda forgot about for a few episodes despite them literally providing the name of the arc. We get better insight into how they operate, who they target, and the vast number of agents they have mindlessly offering their surveillance and battle support. The sheer number of agents they have and their lack of, well, agency, paint the organization in a different light than what we saw from Riku and Jokermon’s deranged-yet-sentient owner.
Having that many agents and presumably plenty of Digimon at their disposal does make for a clumsy ending, however. Yes, Fumamon’s taken care of, but that alone shouldn’t make Gift give up on eliminating Maki. They still know where she works! The only indication that Gift dropped the pursuit is in Miharu’s observation of Tomoro. Her interest in him as a Gift ally was telegraphed in the Jokermon affair and was a pretty obvious direction for the arc to go. It’s necessary for the overall story and his act of stopping Maki from killing the defeated Fumamon make it appropriate for this episode. It and Maki’s talk about her dreams tie in nicely with Tomoro reminding us of his in the previous episode. But for all the mechanical sense it makes, it’s a weird resolution for a mob to be threatening someone’s life and then just… quietly stop over vague aspirations about somebody else.
Initial Grade: A-
