Promotional poster for Season 4 of Aggretsuko. | Photo / Netflix
WARNING: This review contains major spoilers for all five seasons Aggretsuko. Reader discretion is advised.
Throughout the past several years, Netflix has produced a number of interesting animated titles.
Some have gone on to strike a chord with audiences – Klaus, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Inside Job to name a few – and been considered for awards while some have come out to rather middling reviews – the biggest case being Big Mouth – yet gotten renewed despite their quality. Enter Aggretsuko, an odd little gem of a workplace dramedy from Sanrio, the creators of Hello Kitty. The series follows an anthropomorphic red panda named Retsuko, voiced by Erica Mendez (best known as the English voice of Ryuko from Kill la Kill), as she deals with terrible workplace culture and the stresses of modern adult life alongside her co-workers Fenneko and Haida.
I’ve covered the previous three seasons in their own article and thought the series, up to that point, was well worth your time even with my personal distaste for Season 2.
Unfortunately, with the two new seasons out now, the latter of which is the final season, my opinion of Aggretsuko has changed.
What started as a workplace dramedy has devolved into a plethora of convoluted subplots and drama that steered its focus away from Retsuko and onto her main “love interest” Haida. Retsuko has to fight for relevancy in her own show, and that is honestly a shame because I want to root for her more but she gets very little screen time that’s focused on her.
I digress, though. Seasons 4 and 5 are out now, so let’s dive into what they’re about.
Season 4 picks up where Season 3 ended off with Retsuko having moved on since her attack at the end of last season. She’s finally back to a somewhat normal office life away from the idol group OTMGirls but finds most of her relationships outside of work at a standstill, namely with Haida. The entire work dynamic shifts, however, when the previous CEO is hospitalized and his replacement Himuro, played by Trevor Devall, enacts changes to better suit his vision for the company. This includes firing Ton and putting Haida in his place as the new Accounting Director.
In hindsight, this season should have been a sign of things to come.
Retsuko is mostly out of focus for this season, with most of the screen time spent on showing the effects of Himuro’s changes on the company, especially how it affects Haida and Ton. It also shifts from workplace dramedy to more of a heist thriller when it is revealed Haida has been falsifying documents to make the company look better under Himuro’s time as CEO.
Overall, this season falls flat for a few reasons.
Namely, Haida isn’t a very compelling lead. His new position goes to his head easily and he even outright ignores Inui, someone he had a genuine connection with last season, if it means he can keep his public reputation. Inui deserved much better but instead got thrown under the bus so we could see the humdrum business relationship between Haida and Himuro flourish.
Secondly, for all that we see of Retsuko this season, she really has some strong possibilities for her character development but that time is never given to her properly. She is still the main character but it feels like any time spent with her is filler compared to whatever else is going on in the plot at the time.
It feels infuriating that the series wants me to root for Ton, who has been almost nothing but unsympathetic the entire series to most of its main cast. I will say that, at the very least, it feels refreshing to learn more about Ton’s life but ultimately it doesn’t save the season for me.
Then we move onto Season 5, released on February 16th, only a few weeks back at time of writing. According to Netflix, it is also the series’ final season.
If it’s the final season, they went out with a bang, right?
If Season 4 felt like an odd experiment, then Season 5 feels like they took that experiment and thought it was okay to build off of.
After quitting his job at the end of Season 4, Haida has changed, for better and for worse. On the one hand, he’s finally seeing Retsuko officially, putting an end to over four seasons’ worth of “will they, won’t they”. On the other hand, he quit his job in disgrace and has resorted to spending all of his time at home or in an Internet cafĆ© playing an MMORPG with his new online friends. He also has to deal with his family nagging down his back, especially as his brother Jiro, played by veteran voice actor Matthew Mercer, aims to run for election to the Japanese House of Representatives.
Now from that plot summary alone, there is an evident problem in this season: even less of a focus on Retsuko.
Retsuko’s role was already being shrunk by the time Season 4 wrapped up as the story focused more on Haida’s business relationship with Himuro. In this season, it’s even worse as she is essentially only around to be Haida’s girlfriend and/or safety net and very little else. She does get involved in the political issues established in the plot summary…in episode 7 out of a 10 episode final season. It feels like they sidelined an interesting character for the sake of exploring Haida even further, but this feels really rushed and like an unfitting end for this character.
On top of that, the whole season feels worthless to watch.
Six of the ten episodes are spent on Haida’s struggles after he loses his job. He gets a part-time job at a grocery store at the end of that arc and honestly that’s about all that has any weight to it. When we get into the more political and family-driven episodes later in the season, it feels like nothing pays off and it is a waste of the viewer’s time. Retsuko loses the election, Haida gets married to her without a full ceremony, and the series ends on a very cheesy and empty finale of the two going off to work.
What a dull way to end a series.
Though the series had a promising start, I personally feel Aggretsuko severely fumbled the ball in its last two seasons. The series felt less like it was focusing on the main character and how her relationship with Haida and her other co-workers developed and more like it was putting time and energy into Haida’s life for, at best, a mediocre product. Both the focus on Haida’s fraud in Season 4 and the forced political storyline in Season 5 really came out of nowhere and only pulled the series down further in my opinion. There are some small glimmers of hope in the series – in particular, I enjoyed Ton’s chance at redemption in Season 4 and the small bits of development for Retsuko and her family in Season 5 – but overall it feels like a misguided mess. The first three seasons are spectacular in my opinion and really use their main character well. The latter two get us to root for who is essentially an Internet definition of a nice guy despite how flat Haida’s character turns out to be on closer inspection.
Ergo, I give these two seasons a shared score of 4/10 and drop the series overall down to, at best, a 6.5/10.
All seasons of Aggretsuko are currently streaming on Netflix.
