The title for this episode is Village of the Hollows, so at least we begin the episode knowing exactly who the creatures we met at the end of the last episode are. Our heroes are still following the robot who is being vague about what he wants them to see, but they don’t have any other leads as to where they are, so they figure they might as well follow him.
Nevertheless, Nana can’t read any minds due to the lack of a force field, so she warns Reg to be on the lookout for anything strange. After a brief side trip to admire a robot who has made a career in creating stone necklaces, we find out that the robot leading our heroes around is named Majikaja.
What Do Our Heroes Discover?
It appears Majikaja wanted to show our heroes a thriving farmer’s market, where creators and robots live side by side to sell and trade goods. In the farmers market, one of the creatures is selling a piece of the journal Riko’s mom wrote in. Not having money on them and needing to barter to get the sheet of paper, the trio find themselves unable to buy the drawing and must walk away from it. This is where the characters – and, by extension, the audience – learns about the Hollow’s lives, their dreams, and what they think of their visitors.
As you can probably guess, they all want to meet in peace and offer to let their visitors stay with them, though Riko politely turns them down, as getting to the center of the Abyss is still the goal behind the series.
This follows with a scene in which Majikaja ruminates on the value of life all while creatures around them tear each other apart, so they can barter body parts for goods and services. It’s all very strange if we're being honest, and it’s one of those sequences that makes people wonder if they're just getting to be too old for this stuff?
This feeling is heightened when the characters want to stay in an inn and end up eating green goo with bugs and bread pieces for dinner. Riko likes the taste until it gives her an upset stomach. Soon they won’t need to worry about bad food as the Hollows all gather around the main gate to try and prevent some creature from entering their village. Reg volunteers to go to the front of the group to see the creature first only to discover that the girl is known as ‘The Princess of the Hollows,’ and she’s the young girl who joined the pilgrims on their journey in the first episode!
Can We Finally Move this Ship Along?
It’s nice to see the pilgrims return to the series and for us to see that they did arrive in the Golden City at the end of the first episode. That said…man, sorry to have to say this, but so far the second season of Made in Abyss has been a painfully slow journey. This episode may be the worst offender of them all, as it seeks to world-build this new area to drum up interest from the viewers, yet it fails miserably. While the previous season did spend a fair amount of time “discovering” new species, locations, and characters in the Abyss, it was done in a way that where viewers were intrigued and excited by the process.
Remember our review of the first episode where we wondered if it was going to be suicide to share the journey with the pilgrims when viewers who had not seen the movie might not know who they are? Turns out, the pilgrims are not only being greatly underutilized, but our main heroes have done little to warrant viewers getting excited about where all this is going. They basically spend the entire episode window shopping in a farmers’ market only to get sick from eating bad food.
In the previous episode, they spent the majority of the time…eating strange food before heading off to find a lost item? Since when was Made in Abyss so concerned about our protagonist’s dinner? Except for the twist ending, there was nothing here that was important or exciting enough to warrant watching this for almost 25 minutes. Hopefully, there will be substantial development of some kind in the next episode because the second season of Made in Abyss is starting to resemble a ‘sophomore slump’ worse than most shows in recent memory.