Truth be told, Assassination Classroom Second Season had me worried for a little while. Assassination Classroom's first season, while quite strong overall, started to go off on a tangent towards the end, wrapping things up with a showdown in an island resort that served little purpose other than to show how the students in class 3-E had developed as assassins. And the second season picks right up from where it left off; some slice of life antics and wacky assassination attempts on their monstrous teacher Koro-sensei lead into showdowns with assassins, such as last season’s edgy boy Itona and a face-shifting smiling man named The Grim Reaper, both of whom get an episode or two at best before they are inevitably pushed off the main stage, a minor diversion in our story.
But then something happens. A slice-of-life episode gone wrong introduces us to the mother of the head assassin of 3-E, our protagonist Nagisa, and we finally learn the somewhat troubling origin behind his female-styled hair. Soon the end-of-term exams returns as a mirror to the showdown in the middle of the first season, but instead of having a trite showdown against the elite 3-A students, we see the almighty president of the school brought low by his own scheme to crush the bottom-of-the-barrel 3-E and Koro-sensei once and for all, and his destruction comes packaged with a poignant statement about the pressures of the Japanese school system. Another calming episode is suddenly disturbed by a fragment of Koro-sensei’s past, and from there on out the show shifts into overdrive, mercilessly pressing on towards the inevitable conclusion of his life as a teacher and as a superhuman monster set to destroy the world. His story, and the emotional developments of all his students in the aftermath of it all, is masterfully handled. No longer can anyone accuse it of being Great Teacher Onizuka’s quirky shadow; even with the dead weight at the start of the season, it more than carves its niche out.
The comedic dynamic between Koro-sensei and the students of 3-E has always been the centerpiece of the show, but it was always one-way, with the students growing and maturing while Koro-sensei’s only real interaction was his comedic carefree attitude and the occasional need to outwit the students’ assassination attempts. With the heavy shift in the second half of this season, he is brought directly into the heart of the conflict, and the actions of his star students Nagisa and the genius schemer Karuma have direct influences on Koro-sensei’s life, his well-being, and his emotional state. The other students also begin to take more prominent roles, and while none are as pronounced as Nagisa and Karuma, there are snapshots where we see the other students bringing their particular skills and mentalities to the fray, often in a subtle or understated way that avoids the cliché of contriving a circumstance where they each sequentially employ their one defining characteristic. This is no more visible than in a mock battle held within 3-E, a fun but thrilling look at how the class dynamics work in a full-on war.
The direct friendship between Karuma and Nagisa also reaches new heights with the belated flashback on their camaraderie before Koro-sensei became their teacher. We learn why they were friends, and the subtle reasons which caused them to drift, only for it all to come to a head now that their lives are spent training for assassination. A later episode has them taking a trip together to the one place I never thought Assassination Classroom would go, and the mix of their friendship, coordination, and sheer madness in using their skills to sneak into the most remote government station ever built made for a great time.
But perhaps this time around, the emotional core resides solely with Koro-sensei himself. The incongruity of his demands on the world, to let him teach the bottom class in a local middle school and train them to kill him before he destroys the world at the end of the year, all makes perfect sense when we understand the background he comes from. It closely aligns itself with plenty of tropes, a boy meets girl story that leads to his development out of the emotionally empty shell of a man he previously was, mixing in a revenge story and an evil scientist watching from on high to boot. But the core emotions at play are viscerally real, and his development occurs almost without us noticing it, as he wears the same smile the entire arc, without stooping to melodrama. The conclusion seems a little too ready to absolve him of all the wrongdoings he has been accused of thus far in the series, but a callback to the two-bit Grim Reaper villain from the earlier episodes complicates his innocence, and further motivates painting him as someone who desires to teach. If he seemed too perfect as an instructor, despite him being a superhuman who should have no interest in teaching middle schoolers algebra and history, then his story knocks it out of the park.
And the lengths to which Assassination Classroom Second Season goes to make everything up until now feel justified and worthwhile is what makes it work so well as the closing to what the first season started. With a heavy focus on the class’ assassination skills the later arcs of the first season begin to feel less out of place, less like filler than like a prelude for what is to come. The happy, hectic days of the classroom start to develop a nostalgic feel now that everything is hurdling towards a final conclusion, both with Koro-sensei’s time limit and with graduation to send them all in different directions, to follow whatever walks of life the classroom has prepared them for. The dynamics between 3-E and the rest of the school are no longer a foil for our protagonists, but rather a statement about both sides and their place in the real world, not just in the fictional universe.
With the various flashbacks and character reveals the premise and setting are more than justified, but it goes beyond that. Seeing where the whole class ended up justifies us taking our time to watch close to fifty episodes of the rejects of life learning from a yellow tentacle creature in their small class building on the outskirts of society. It becomes another anime location to remember for years as shows come and go, a place of learning and growth contained in a small little microcosm on the outskirts of society at large. In retrospect, Assassination Classroom never needed to raise the stakes by having Koro-sensei threaten to destroy the world, aside from creating an emotionally complicated threat for the kids and the external weight of the world constantly hovering just over their heads. The isolation in which they learn and develop is a perfectly contained world, one that can fully convince us that the right mentor can be life-changing.