Koro-sensei continues teaching his students at class 3-E. When teacher Karasuma gives flowers to Irina Jelavich for her birthday, she finds out that it was actually a gift conjured up by the class, and thus, in disappointment, joins the Reaper who captures the entire class in an underground bunker, hoping to lure and kill Koro-sensei there. The plan fails and the class is saved, while Jelavich appologizes. Student Kaede Kayano turns out to have tenctacles inside her neck because she wanted to kill Koro-sensei, blaming him for her sister's death. Koro-sensei then tells the class his story: he was Reaper's mentor, an assassin, and underwent a secret laboratory experiment that went out of control while they transformed him into a tenctacle-man with super powers. When a teacher was killed in the chaos, Koro-sensei woved to continue her path as a teacher. When the military seals off the entire place and is about to fire a deadly laser from the space station, the class agrees to let Nagisa kill Koro-sensei. 7 years later all the students found jobs, while Nagisa works as a teacher.
The 2nd season of the hyped anime series "Assassination Classroom" subtly moved away from comedy to lean more towards drama, ending in a very emotional finale. The entire plot seems to be a sort of wildly creative restructuring of some teacher-students genre cliches—it is "Great Teacher Onizuka" or "Dead Poets Society" mixed with a tentacle mutant and saving-the-world-plot, combining them into a bizarre story in which the end of the world depends on the 3-E students graduating, whereas the penultimate episode is an allegorical meditation on how teenagers symbolically have to kill their old (childhood) era in order to grow up and gain a new era of the future. The jokes are far less present this time around, making room for Koro-sensei teaching students life leassons, and guiding them into trying to find what they want to study. Still, one joke is comedy gold, and twists the "nosebleed" cliche as well: in episode 2.8, the busty Irina Jelavich—who was accustomed that every man around her is charmed by her looks—is saved by a shirtless Karasuma, who asks her if she is injured, and all we see is her face turning around and getting a "nosebleed" from seeing his muscles. This anime takes on a "collective characterization" of the entire classroom, nost just one character, though Nagisa stands out as a wonderful, sympathetic and pure person, though struggling with his assassination mission. Several episodes still fall into caricatures, though: 2.9 shows Nagisa's overcontrolling mother, who is a stereotype. Some good moments appear in this episode, anyway—one is when Nagisa imagines being chained by his mother who projects all her own wishes onto him ("I am not and never will be the hero of my own life. Not even close. It's her RPG, I'm just her playthrough."), the other is when the screenwriters at least gave her a decent moment when she tells Nagisa one bitter truth about studying at a specific college: "It's not what you know, but *who* you know." Despite several far-fetched (anti-matter contraptions) and unconnected ideas (Kaede has a twist in episode 2.13, only to later return to her old self, as if nothing happened), "Classroom" still has some flawed freshness that is better than flawless routine.
Grade:++
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