The title of this episode is Village of the Holten, so at least we start the episode and know exactly who the creatures we met at the end of the last episode are. Our heroes still follow the robot who is vague about what he wants them to see, but they have no other clues as to where they are, so they think they might as well follow him.
Nevertheless, Nana can’t read minds due to the lack of a force field, so she warns Reg to look for something strange. After a short trip to admire a robot that has made a career out of making stone necklaces, we discover that the robot guiding our heroes around is called Majikaja.
What do our heroes discover?
It seems that Majikaja wanted to show our heroes a thriving farmers’ market, where makers and robots live side by side to sell and trade goods. At the farmers’ market, one of the creatures sells a piece of the diary Riko’s mother wrote in. With no money on them and having to trade to get the sheet of paper, the trio finds they can’t buy the drawing and have to run away from it. This is where the characters – and by extension the audience – learn about the Hollow’s life, their dreams and what they think of their visitors.
As you can probably guess, they all want to meet in peace and offer to let their visitors stay with them, though Riko politely declines them, as the goal of the series is still the goal of getting to the center of the Abyss. to go.
This follows with a scene where Majikaja ponders the value of life as creatures around them tear each other apart so they can exchange body parts for goods and services. It’s all very strange if we’re honest, and it’s one of those sequences that makes people wonder if they’re just getting too old for this stuff?
This feeling is heightened when the characters want to stay in an inn and end up eating green goo with bugs and bits of bread for dinner. Riko likes the taste until it gives her an upset stomach. Soon they won’t have to worry about bad food anymore, as the Hollows all gather around the main gate to try and stop a creature from entering their village. Reg volunteers to go to the front of the group to see the creature first only to discover that the girl is known as ‘The Princess of the Hollows’, and she is the young girl who joined the pilgrims on their travel in the first episode!
Can we finally move this ship?
It’s nice to see the Pilgrims return to the series and for us to see that they have arrived in the Golden City at the end of the first episode. That said… man sorry to say this but so far season 2 of Made in the abyss has been a painfully slow journey. This episode is arguably the worst offender of them all as it tries to build this new area of the world to pique the interest of the viewers, but it fails miserably. While the previous season spent quite a bit of time “discovering” new species, locations, and characters in the Abyss, it was done in a way that left viewers intrigued and excited by the process.
Remember our review of the first episode where we wondered if it would be suicide to share the journey with the pilgrims, when viewers who hadn’t seen the movie might not know who they are? As it turns out, not only are the Pilgrims vastly underused, but our main heroes have done little to get viewers excited about where this is all headed. They basically spend the entire episode shopping at a farmers market, only to get sick from eating bad food.
In the previous episode, they spent most of the time eating strange foods before looking for a lost item? Since when was? Made in the abyss so worried about our protagonist’s dinner? Other than the end of the twist, there was nothing here that was important or exciting enough to watch for nearly 25 minutes. Hopefully there will be some substantial development in the next episode as the second season of Made in the abyss starting to look like a ‘sophomore slump’, worse than most shows in recent memory.
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