The final volume is just as bad as the previous ones. But honestly, that's a good thing, because it could have been much, much worse.â¨â¨
Creative Staff
Writer/Artist: Shiro Ihara
Translation: Christine Schilling
Adaptation: Christine Schilling
What They Say
In a strange turn of events, it comes out that Lapan's first true love was Alice's own mother! Christmas Eve finds Lapan dressing the gang up in the usual parade of skimpy outfits, but the pervy party is cut short when back-to-back battles with a brainwashed Mad Hatter and the exiled shinigami controlling him get underway. With casualties on both sides, Alice uncharacteristically takes control of the situation and defeats Ume's brother, who arrives seeking revenge. Another Tsurukame member shows up to forgive both exiled shinigami and welcome them back to the (ahem) bosom of both the Chairman and the shinigami world. But what about Alice's body? And her quest for love? Does the answer really lie in Lapan's groping hands?
The Review!
It's almost Christmas and Alice has still not returned to her skeleton body. Turns out, Tsurukame Corp. has been holding up her out-of-body experience and is keeping her from returning to Lapan. Since this is the final volume and the previous three have only made the palest attempts to hold together a cohesive story, the events of this fourth volume move at a quick pace in an attempt to cobble together something worthy of a climax. So in no time whatsoever we are told that the reason Alice is being held up is that it is convenient for Tsurukame Corp. After all, Regina is a problem, and Lapan is a problem, and since the only person that can control Lapan is Alice, with her out of the picture, then Tsurukame can more easily dispatch their two biggest problems. It's a conspiracy. And it's completely wasted since Alice is returned to her body not ten pages later. But not before a large chunk of exposition, of course; Alice wants to know who Reina is and why Lapan would have called her that in the previous volume - so Chief Baba tells her the whole story.
Turns out Reina was a girl that Lapan was in love with on Earth who looked almost exactly like Alice. He saved her from a shibito and they actually had something of a relationship, but they couldn't stay together because they are of two different worlds. Reina eventually gets married and has a little girl and even though he can't be with her, Lapan keeps tabs on her all the time. When Reina is scheduled to die in a bus accident, Lapan goes to Earth in his true form and keeps the bus from killing her. But since he was in his true form, when Reina saw his, she lost her soul. Of course. And also of course: Reina's little girl is Alice. When Alice gets back in her body, she tells everyone about the lady who was keeping her hostage. Then they all go shopping.
Time skips to Christmas, they are all going to have a party, and Lapan uses the opportunity to get all of the girls into one of his fetishized costumes. After the party they all run into Regina in a church that is far too large and European to have ever existed in Japan and the rest of the book is them fighting. There are some violent parts, lots of empty sentiment, and the whole things is wrapped up with an all-too-characteristic deus ex machina. And just so no one is left hanging: Alice gets her body back and Ume finds someone who looks just like Lapan so he can take their body and he and Alice can finally get together. They kiss. It ends.
Now that the series is over, I'm still of the opinion that this is one of the worst manga available, but at least it's not the worst manga available. I get the feeling that by this volume, Ihara was just as ready to be done with Alice on Deadlines as I was. He didn't do anything to improve the series with its final breath, but he at least kept it from completely falling off a cliff. There is something that sort of resembles direction with this volume: unlike the previous books that incessantly jump from one scenario to another, this one only really jumps once. And actually, almost two-thirds of the book is the final confrontation, which was pretty necessary so that Ihara could at least play lip service toward finishing up some of the plot concerns that he had been so dutifully introducing and never addressing. This, I feel, is common with a lot of final volumes of series that aren't all that well thought out. It's as if there's a checklist of things to mention before it's too late that an unfocused creator has to go though since they squandered their narrative over however many previous volumes.
So since there is something that resembles direction here, you can say there is there is also something that might resemble closure. And that's what keeps volume four from being a train wreck. Worse manga have just ended where they felt like or just introduced something in the final volume so that they could have a fight and then completely ignore everything that came before. At least Ihara takes the time to go through the checklist. It doesn't make Alice on Deadlines good in any way, but it gets the job done.
In the end, Alice on Deadlines is a terrible series, one that I wouldn't recommend to anyone for any reason, but I enjoyed hating it, and that's worth something.
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