I’ve been begging Agents of the Four Seasons to get a move on with its story for weeks. I guess dropping a ballistic missile right on top of the characters’ heads is one way to go about doing that. Lest anyone get their hopes up too much, though, this is still Agents of the Four Seasons we’re talking about, here. Outside of that very literally explosive finale, the majority of “Dusk” has the Agents and their Guards doing the same thing they’ve been doing for most of the last seven weeks: talking about trauma, recapping what’s already happened, and dropping vague hints of exposition about the Insurgents.

First, I do have some positive marks to award for the episode. At first, I was ridiculously annoyed by the cutesy-poo tyke that is the Agent of Autumn, Nadeshiko, and her obsessive, almost creepy Guard, Rindo. Imagine my surprise, then, when Rindo immediately turned off his knight-in-shining-armor routine the minute he left Autumn to her own devices, and we discover that he’s a fairly down-to-Earth, no-nonsense bodyguard. Rindo’s friendship with the chatty technician who works at the decked-out compound where Nadeshiko is being kept is quite charming, too. It’s a shame that these likeable new characters don’t really get to do much other than pontificate about Sakura and Hinagiku’s trauma even more, because that well has truly been drained and paved over with cement at this point. Still, given that the Autumn Compound is what ends up getting exploded by that missile at the end of the episode, I guess I’m more invested in this wedge of the plot than whatever is going on with Rōsei and Itechō.

Speaking of “Rōsei and Itechō” and “not doing much of anything,” you’ll never guess what our favorite Agent and Guardian of Winter are up to this week. That’s right: They continue to sit around and chat about plot stuff that still hasn’t actually become relevant to the overall story. It doesn’t help that these two stoic loaves of bread are the least interesting members of the entire cast by a good margin, but I sure would love it if we could get some more scenes like the one where Rōsei used his ice powers to save that family who crashed their car. That was, you know, something that happened. It turns out that actually watching this guy protect people with his power is way more interesting than watching him mope about wanting to protect people with his power.

Really, even the spare breadcrumbs of lore that we do get are more frustrating than anything, at this point. When Itechō brings up that he’s worried about how strange the Insurgents are acting, I had to pause the episode and furiously add to my notes, “What does that even mean!?” Like blowing up eight-year-olds with weapons of mass destruction is definitely some kind of escalation, but we’re almost three-quarters of the way through this season, and we don’t even know what the creepy kidnapping Insurgent Lady and her goons are trying to accomplish. What do the Insurgents normally get up to, Itechō? What are their typical nefarious schemes of global destruction? Please, tell us. We’ve all been waiting very patiently.

Oh, Hinagiku and Sakura spend the whole episode at the gift shop. It’s positively riveting storytelling, I’ll tell you what. I was thinking about tacking on an extra half-star to reward Agents of the Four Seasons for bringing an ICBM into the equation, but the more I think about the pacing of the episode and the reveal of that plot device, the more irritated I become. It’s the cheapest kind of emotional manipulation to introduce a sickly-sweet child character who exists only to be blown up by terrorists, and I can’t even be sure that Agents of the Four Seasons is going to do anything meaningful with all that nonsense. For all I know, next week might be entirely dedicated to Hinagiku and Sakura spending another half-hour dealing with traumatic flashbacks and suspiciously platonic love confessions in that damned gift shop.

Episode Rating:

Agents of the Four Seasons: Dance of Spring is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.