It’s hard to believe that Aggretsuko has been running strong for five whole years now, let alone that it’s finally coming to an end. It’s been a bumpy ride, especially as the series struggled through some growing pains once it ran out of basic office job scenarios for Retsuko to death-metal scream her way through and started involving our heroine in increasingly wacky and implausible misadventures. I thought last season’s return to Retsuko’s day job was a solid return to form, even if Haida’s quasi-heel-turn made for some very frustrating character developments along the way. This year, though, Haida is out of a job entirely. While Retsuko has committed to being Haida’s girlfriend after all this time, the focus for much of the season is squarely on the pair’s relationship developing alongside Haida’s efforts to finally get his shit together. Given how mixed Aggretsuko‘s attempts at romantic melodrama can be, my biggest concern going into this series’ final season was whether it would be able to make our last adventure with these loveable and perpetually exhausted characters feel satisfying and fun.
I am very pleased to report that the show is at least successful for the most part! Haida may still be a bit of an idiot, but his idiocy feels much more grounded and relatable this year, and it’s hard not to empathize with a guy who at least has valid reasons to feel cynical and defeatist about reentering the Japanese workforce. As Retsuko herself fully admits, most people can’t stand their jobs. Still, it’s something that you have to do to get by in this fundamentally dehumanizing and hostile capitalist hellscape we call the 2020s. As Haida struggles with the threat of homelessness, the completely indifferent and demoralizing job application process, and the general struggle of trying to figure out what he even wants his adult life to be, I found myself rooting for him as hard as I was back in the glory days of Season 1, which was a very refreshing place to compared to last year.
As you might have noticed, given all of the focus I’ve paid to Haida’s character arc, Retsuko’s side of the story takes a surprising back seat for the first half of Season 5. This at least partially makes sense, given that so much of the previous four seasons have been about her getting her own life together. Now that she’s in the position of being a relatively well-adjusted thirtysomething, she spends a lot of the season helping Haida play catch-up. Honestly, my Western sensibilities have always had me wishing for a much more overtly romantic and “dramatic” version of the Retsuko/Haida love story. Still, I honestly came to appreciate the much more low-key (and very Japanese) depiction of the pair’s growth this season. We need more rom-coms that show adults coming to grips with what it means to really share your life with someone, including all the inane little details like how to deal with a partner’s gross hygiene habits. Aggretsuko gave me that kind of love story in its final season, and I can’t complain too much about that.
What I can complain about, though, is how the back third or so of the season still ends up feeling rushed, despite even going with a double-length finale, which is something this series has always struggled with. A specific turn of events finally pushes Retsuko to the frontlines of her show again, but it’s wild and requires more time to properly set up than what the show has to work with. At the very least, Retsuko’s final career swerve does a good job of tying together a lot of previous threads from past seasons (the OTMGirls and Hyoudou make a return!), not to mention oodles of social commentary regarding Japan’s current political climate, and it somehow manages to make Ton, of all characters, the MVP cast member of the season. The show has to make some really big leaps to get us to its (admittedly cute and cozy) ending, though, and I’m not sure if it all comes together well enough to justify the mad scramble. Hell, maybe the most significant development of Retsuko’s life comes and goes in a montage so quickly that you might miss it if you blink at the wrong moment.
Aggretsuko‘s final season stands among the best that the series has to offer when it comes to giving us insight into what life in modern Japan is like as a person (or a panda) that is just trying to make it through the day-to-day grind. It’s as messy and inconsistent as its past seasons in places, but I think it brings the stories of Retsuko, Haida, and several other characters to (mostly) satisfying conclusions. I sure do hope we can at least get another Holiday Special or two with these loveable dorks sometime down the road. Still, if this is truly the last time we’ll get to board the morning train to work with Retsuko and the crew, then I’ll be missing these critters a hell of a lot, and I wish them nothing but the best in whatever adventures life has in store for them next.
