The Great Passage 01-11
Amusingly enough the subject matter of creating a dictionary was the big hook here for me, and from a production standpoint everything is really treated with the upmost care. Body language and posture breaths a lot of life into the interactions between character interactions. While the unspoken dialogue puts strong wind in the sails of
The Great Passage, words themselves seem to fail the series. Instead of delving into the minutia of dictionaries the series maintains a broader scope, letting its characters sit after a strong start to focus on time itself passing. A fine idea in itself but its themes, messages, and even visual imagery all feel overly simplistic for a show that will only ever appeal to a more mature audience. These are not poorly executed on from a production standpoint, but the imagery of crossing this vast ocean of words never left me with anything to think about. In my mind I found myself regularly thinking of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where similar imagery is much more complex to dissect in spite of the book being written for children. There Rushdie's ocean of words blends together into a continuous important mass of intertextuality, where new stories are informed by older ones in such a manner that everything is connected. And the Sea of Stories moves well beyond that with its topics and themes. By contrast
The Great Passage's imagery lacks a layered take, finding similar notes but never really cohering them into something beyond the unity that comes from information being passed down between generations. Its approach to even that topic feels remarkably limited. The ferris wheel, the expanse of a deep ocean, the ark like boat: really don't warrant more than a passing glance and never feel like they are appropriately expanded upon.
I would be less bothered by the show's thematic shortcomings if it pushed strong character arcs, but it picks up and drops in characters at will and none of the relationships here mature on screen in such a way that I could invest in them. The post timeskip introduction of Midori is one of the more egregious examples, and she never really develops into being a character that factors into the story in a way that feels emotionally or narratively powerful. Following the story of The Great Passage as a dictionary fails to satisfy in this hands off format as well. Its production is pushed far off screen, and in spite of all the rhetoric about how each dictionary is unique there was never any insight provided on what differentiated the title dictionary in question. What lesser used words did each individual character push to be included? Instead of getting informative production conflict the show weakly climaxed with its missing word scare. This is technically thematically effective in the far reaching unity found with part time workers, but it feels so impersonal and contrived. After the time skip the stage should be set for these characters to really shine but the story's uninteresting and somewhat unfocused message ballooned to push everything else to the wayside.
Ultimately the friction of this story is nebulous and external, whether that is overbearing publishers or missing words. This holistic cooperation is so saccharine that the end point of greater unity just doesn't carry much impact. The strong points of unspoken communication really shine through with the hidden relationship between Nishioka and his girlfriend in the PR department, where they dance around the fact that they are even together. Those quiet scenes of understanding feel fleeting and forgotten when stacked against the weight of production on what comes across as a characterless dictionary.
