Hellsing

A bit of production history for this one.  Hellsing is adapted from a manga of the same name… but specifically the first two volumes (with a smattering of material and notes from later I suspect).  Said manga ended up being 10 volumes.  So essentially in 2001 they produced about 6 episodes based on the existing material followed by an addition 7 including whatever nuggets Hirano deigned to give them with a more or less original story.



As such, not only does the story go off on a hell of a tangent and ignore some pretty clear “this will be important later” markers, the property it was adapted from was still quite early into its run for several episodes, and some bits that are tonally at odds even within the manga to that point ended up being adapted pretty faithfully because… well, that’s what they had to work with.

On which note, let’s start here.

Weakest Episode- Order 02: Club M.  The series starts off with a monster of the week vibe, which this one exemplifies with the young couple.  Monster of the week comes off as real weak when the monsters aren’t serving some larger villain openly, which they haven’t at this point, especially when said monsters are in fact the kind that theoretically have motivations.  Why did they become vampires, is there some meaning behind their killings for them, are we supposed to feel bad when they die because hey they were young and in love?  I dunno, apparently it wasn’t important, but a lot of attention was drawn to it so dismissing all that to focus on the main characters is weird.  Especially since part of the thrust was that Seras was clearly struggling with killing them!  So she was probably asking those same questions.

Now the remaining episodes of adapted material I actually like a fair bit, but what’s more interesting is how they decided to flesh out the rest of the run.  Since it would be a bit out of character for anyone in the cast to have a fight last more than two episodes, and making an original villain too important might make adapting later material (which I think they clearly expected they’d end up doing until literally the last minute, more on that later) awkward, so they instead took some heartfelt stabs at guessing the backstories of the characters from available information and fleshing those out with some more psychological episodes.  And I’m always a sucker for that.

Best Episode- Order 10: Master of Monster.  This one snuck up on me, because at the very start it seemed kinda cheap.  Oh, Integra’s in an “I lost all of the blood and need surgery” coma, let’s have tragic backstory.  But honestly… to this point in the series I didn’t care all that much about her.  She’s just kinda generic grumpy commissioner, except a lady, which is fine but she doesn’t really interact all that much with our POV character Seras so it lacks impact.  But baby Integra is adorable, and they manage in the one episode to lay out very quickly and effectively her path from precocious tween prodigy to hardass knight commanding the deadliest fighter on the planet over the course of about a day.  Her utter goddamned refusal to accept her uncle’s usurpation, or take the slightest bit of Alucard’s shit, is actually amazing when you give it context and put her in personal danger.

So while they tried to keep it a light touch, as noted they did add an original villain for the last few episodes.  He kinda works, albeit he’s not especially interesting or well developed.  But the last episode spends most of its running time with an epic battle between him and Alucard, and then literally splashes some title cards wrapping up the plotline (oh he was hired by a traitor from the Round Table, they were quietly executed, but oops also Integra was still arrested) then a ten second epilogue for an ambiguous ending.  And I have to think that, up until they had partially animated this episode, they thought they’d take a year or so, let Hirano get ahead, and then adapt more of the manga for a season two.  Then suddenly realized that was going to take several years for that to meaningfully happen, and instead gave up and wrapped up their original plotline and the series with it.  Instead, they revisited it several years later once the full manga was finished with a fully faithful and cleaned up edition.  An Ultimate edition if you will.

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Rating- 7/10.  In the end there’s not a lot of real hook here for me I find.  It was riding a pretty steady 6 until episode 10 in fact, but a few upticks are really all I need to go from “well it’s decent” to “yeah that was good”.