I’ve mentioned before that the shonen serial lives for the moment when all of the cast face the music at once. It’s the payoff for following the characters as they slowly develop, and it piles action scenes upon themetic resolutions thrillingly. Other genres can provide more meaning on a week to week basis, but the shonen gets to save up reserves of meaning and character familiarity then let rip in a succession of high drama set piece fantastics. Soul Eater waited 18 episodes for one of these bareknuckle hoedowns, and we can now gauge its ability to pull off the highpoint of shonen plot progression. To really get down and dirty.

It’s the start of the inevitable, and Soul Eater is pulling off the foreplay beautifully. Less emphasis on thematic issues today, I’m more interested in the structuring. This was an exciting episode, it worked as entertainment on its own account as well as raising the tension.

We start off by setting up the situation – new information about the demon god provides some pleasingly grotesque intrigue as the episode gets into gear at its own pace. After the talking, Blair comes in to provide some fun between Mr Shinigami and Stein’s speeches. Thankfully she does not proceed to take over the episode, and we cut to the chase. A chase where a new ally is announced with a joke, where Medusa pokes fun at Stein for talking tactics in front of her, where Spirit would dearly like to have seen his opponent naked.

It’s a mixture of goofiness and pastiche serving to liven up the first half of the episode. Black Star running ponderously with his arms stretched out is surely the best example of this. That bonkers stylised running is a seemingly popular affectation for the oriental warrior in anime – but it’s impossible not to laugh at it. Look at me, I’m a bird! No hands ma! Whoosh! Soul Eater is self-aware, but only on the way to playing its hand sincerely.

We see Maka getting stabbed. The good old, she fails, but oh no! It was just a fantasy! This cliché is delivered without the comic element. Every shonen show gets to pull this trick, it can work, it is exciting when it does. Soul Eater jokingly picks on the silly details then mostly plays the same cards. And yes, I fell for it (again) – because right now Maka doesn’t really rank high, and she was already confirmed as the slowest member. It’s the bit where we get to underestimate our hero, before she really gets to work, the same old structures played with a straight face.

Maka opens her eyes. That’s Soul Eater’s operative idea right now. The demon god was so afraid of the world he’d do anything to get more power. Maka is ready to face her death head on, to will herself forward at any cost. She’s ready to graduate. Time to win a fight now. And not just by pushing for 110% (like everybody else), but by being straight with herself. Not ever onwards, but ever truer. All this is referenced in a moment – not pushed to the fore of the episode, because this is still the set up and so far themes remain unresolved.

So then, the senior-level bad arses have their battle, the episode’s highpoint. It’s tricky to make this kind of moment work out right without falling into ludicrously lurid pyrotechnics. Soul Eater’s solution is to have its advanced powerhouses display tactically functional skills. There’s something arbitrary about effects like – ‘you now can’t move’, or ‘you now will have to move’. A sword blow won’t kill in shonen, but a spell that has an absolute affect gets the last word.

It’s intimidating, and different from the junior teams martial arts fights. Adults talk about sex, they play mind games and snarkily dissect one another’s illusions. The reaper will rip a mans skin off to make a cage – the senior-level isn’t made impressive by absurdly excessive displays but by a heightened sense of menace.

Medusa vs Stein is still a battle of ideas. Stein gets extra control over his soul because he’s working in a team. He and Spirit get banter. Medusa gets powerhouse spells alongside seduction, science, and rhetoric. Contrasting styles for contrasting personalities, with an awareness that the unhinged idea of teamwork practised by Stein really isn’t so far removed from Medusa’s egomania. And what action we get. Superb animation, bursts of speed, and solid impact in every move. It’s still a warm up though, because for the simultaneous showdown to work we have to have everything up in the air at once. The action payoff in ep19 is still loaded with expectation.

How do we make sure the rest of our crew still seem vital? Well Death The Kid just flies by Chrona – he’s not really on the stage yet. And Maka and Black Star proceed to engage in their own banter. Oh how I love killers backchat. Black Star pops up with the hilarious, kill you bitch line (Naruto, please take notes). Maka takes no shit. Holding a 5 foot scythe in front of somebody is not polite. The spike headed wonder then reminds us that he’s OK by giving way, and she walks straight into the impossible. It matters that we finish off with this scene and not with the fight. The episode ends by promising more action, not by suggesting the end to anything.

The themes are there, but they aren’t exactly exploding into the foreground. They just queue up to be dealt with. Yes, explosions queue. The situation is set up with clarity and wit, but there’s enough action to overcome our cynicism. Check those meta-jokes. Soul Eater is on the side of the cynics. It sits next to us, viewers of far too much nonsense. And it tells us that it can use its budget do the action better. That it knows what we find silly, but also that we only recognise those clichés because they originally came alongside things worth loving, formulae that still strike a nerve. That we still believe in facing down the impossible. It will still use these old formulae to tell us stuff, because beyond all that other crap there’s a set of dramatic mechanics that do work, and this is the work of real craftsmen.