Reviewing Death Parade feels like an ironic and strangely fitting parody of itself. Here is a work that clearly exists for its own sake, to tell its story and no one else’s. At times it showed itself to be very wise and to have a good understanding of its own purpose; at other times it got so wrapped up in telling its story that it took ridiculous flights of fancy, pushing its morals to the level of preaching. The latter takes over in the end, leading to a premature ending that doesn't correctly reflect the best points the show has to offer. And if you replace “show” with “human”, this is precisely how Death Parade judges humanity. How interesting. If the show had made these points more plausible and enjoyable I would chalk it up to purposefully making the style reflect the content. As is I'll chalk it up to coincidence instead.
Loosely based on the setting of the OVA Death Billiards, we travel to a bar in purgatory, run by the mysterious bartender Decim and his assistant <redacted> as they judge the dead through games designed to force them to confront the darkness in their hearts. I say loosely based because although Death Billiards had this identical setup, the purpose was completely different. In 24 minutes, Death Billiards told the story of a single judgment, and played it like a mystery story. We are kept in suspense with the people being judged, seeing completely unknown sights all around and wondering what brought us there. Even to the end, we are left with dozens of questions. Who goes to heaven? Who goes to hell? And what are the arbiters thinking the entire time?
The key to the suspense is that we are humans, far more capable of empathizing with the humans in the story than the arbiters. One job of Death Parade, therefore, is to help us understand who the arbiters are, and where their judgments come from. In the first episode, although we are given a judgment in the same manner as Death Billiards, we spend far more time with the arbiters than with the players, with no ambiguities left at the end. It was a smart choice to not try for any of the impact of the OVA, as the show isn't destined to be about suspense.
Likewise for the choice of catalyst, the human assistant to Decim who has far more misgivings and confusion about the judgment process than Decim seems capable of. The key question in a show where a central character like Decim slowly begins to break his endless cycle of judging humanity is “well why now?” Such revelations and shocks to the norm can easily come across as contrived without a sufficiently abnormal event catalyzing everything. And as a show about who is qualified to judge human life, choosing to have a human witness judgment alongside an emotionless doll seems to be a perfectly reasonable way to set the gears of change in motion. I find the reasons behind this event to be somewhat unconvincing, but they were enough to start everything, and that is fine with me.
What I am not quite so fine with are the lack of reasons behind how it all falls apart. Reviewing Death Parade is entirely difficult because the philosophical worth of the show is determined by its conclusion, which I have no intentions of spoiling. One thing I can say is the simple observation that the arbiters are incredibly human-like for all the fuss of them being emotionless dolls. They laugh and tease one another, get angry, have a penchant for drinking. In the hilarious opening they strike group poses and dance under a disco ball. They look exactly like humans. Why do they have to look like humans? To not unsettle the customers at the bar? The only real rationality behind making their character designs human betrays the show’s intentions to complicate their supposed lack of emotions.
The other tough thing coming from the OVA is that having the humans play games against one another (games where the outcome is completely irrelevant) loses some traction as a method. In the OVA it was a way to keep us in suspense as well, and I suppose the reasoning is to make people come into competition and conflict with one another to pull out their worse natures, but there seem to be few times where the show actually brings this connection between competition and human nature into play. The use of the game seems more like paying homage to the source material than a necessary mechanic.
With that said, Death Parade is fantastic at portraying real human struggle and conflict of emotions, and each pair of characters receives as much depth as can be packed in in the span of one short game. The absolutely stunning lighting and careful use of music combine with the progressive flashback style to make a fantastically real impact on us, giving depth and character to people we have only known for twenty minutes and will never see again. This is where judgment has to happen; in the span of an hour or two, with no prior knowledge of the people involved and no chance of ever seeing them again. No time is wasted during the judgment episodes, and this is truly where the heart of the struggle to pass judgment is shown.
And that is a very interesting question: what does it mean to pass judgment onto a human life? What does their life mean? All of these are incredibly subjective; what does human life mean to the person who lived it versus someone who weighs it against the other seven billion lives being lead every day? Death Parade asks the right questions, and chooses not to answer every one. This is another way in which the show occasionally displays maturity: by creating characters who ask such abstract questions, you make them unable to come up with a definitive answer themselves, only opinions. The way Death Parade makes its hypotheses on these questions is by showing it through the events that transpire, not the “revelations” that characters come through.
At least for the most part. The ending, very open in some ways and closed in others, comes extremely close to going back on all its careful construction by having Decim and the other arbiters consciously touting a new philosophy, one that runs contrary to the way they have existed up until then, and indeed contrary to their existence itself. I would even say that a few lines cross that boundary entirely. As the difficulties of having a human arbiter come to a head, we get a series of clever and moving flashbacks and events that start to bridge the chasm of dolls truly understanding human life. But what reason do the arbiters have to bridge that chasm at all? The fact is that they are perfect for their job because they can objectively understand just enough to make a fair judgment of one person against billions of others. The central question seems to be why the arbiters exist at all. Good question: they exist because the show put them there. In creating the arbiters a certain way, Death Parade has locked in on the purpose of questioning its own fictional devices rather than the real judgments that humans make of each other every day. Death Parade makes for pretty fantastic fiction, and incorporates messages and portrayals of the real world that have good depth. Where the two intersect, however, seems to miss the standard of both.