Šokugeki no Sóma - Food Wars! The Fifth Plate

Even among the readers of manga series, the BLUE arc is a very unpopular part of Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma, and after watching this anime series I can understand a lot of their criticisms. The last season brings the whole anime series to a head, when the best chef in the school, who for a long time has been secretly honing his skills, is defeated. Peace and quiet return when an existential threat to the school is averted. So, what is next? A villain appears out of absolutely nowhere, has a pretty decent introduction to the show, and defeats the one person the main male protagonist could not defeat, which automatically puts him at the top of the food chain, and then they throw in a not-so-believable shadowy organization that threatens the direction of the global culinary industry is headed - they just needed to come up with a threat that seemed bigger than before. All of a sudden, the screenwriters throw Mr. Saiba's strange objective, which comes out of nowhere into the story to give it some emotional depth, and it falls a bit flat. Add the typical tournament arc, give the villain a completely ridiculous superpower, and make it all level up again. Then we add a "mama" drama, a bunch of weird characters from that mysterious organization who turn up only to disappear again and are forgettable characters that just seem to get in the way. Finally, the anime series which we thought was about Soma actually becomes a soap opera about the Nakiri family, with another very strange twist that gives one of the villain's motivations another, highly ridiculous, dimension. It is a real mess of a show that does not exactly hold together. It is perhaps the realization that while the Star Wars saga was a soap opera about the Skywalker clan, this is a soap opera about the Nakiri family and the character it is named after actually being our very own Han Solo, and this final season is actually the new trilogy from the Disney! It is a disappointing hodge-podge of a show where the screenwriters did not really know how to execute their myriad ideas. The whole anime series should have probably finished at the end of the previous season. Everything is sillier, more absurd, over the top, and the stakes are artificially driven higher although occasionally some bits are good. It is basically a load of leftovers from a delicious dinner that is still somehow edible and could still be enough for a lunch on the weekend even if it is certainly not going to be a spectacular gourmet experience... 6/10. (29/09/2020)