This video is in no way representative of Beyond the Boundary. The show is not this exciting. I would stab a pregnant woman to watch the show from this fan video. The stuff in there did happen in the actual series, but the tone is way, way, way different.
I liked the show at first, but then after the first arc the story became episodic and you get stuff like the characters forming a pop idol band to defeat a monster obsessed with scantily clad girls and rhythmic motion set to insipid music. The opening shot of that particular episode is of female clothes covered in goo and scattered carelessly on the floor while squeaking sounds repeat in the background. It turns out the scene is in a shower and the sound is of a shampoo dispenser that’s run out of shampoo, but for like 20 seconds we’re clearly supposed to think the squeaking is that of a bed where teenage sexing is occurring. The question is why.
How is the story improved by this fake-out or how does the scene tickle our lower instincts? Because it’s actually not very sexy, so I’m not sure what it’s doing in this episode. Actually, I’m not sure why this episode exists to begin with. To get metastructural, maybe the episode is some kind of homage to cheapo commercial-delivery series from the 80s that would pad their episode count with this sort of nothing. I mean, I guess the episode is kind of funny, particularly the training montage which runs through the cliches of the musical group story in 60 seconds (vocal practice, band members rebelling against the overbearing leader, an emotional reconciliation in the rain, etc).
Ah, dammit, I’ve been giving this thing more thought than I wanted to. Curse you, grad school, I can never stop analyzing things now. Okay, my judgment at the show’s halfway point is that the show isn’t all that. It’s pleasant enough to veg to but if you see there’s only one copy of the DVDs at the library and there’s an old lady in your way, it’s not worth the trouble to shove her out of your way so you can grab the series before someone else can.
Actually, I’m making that my new rating system. “How many old ladies would you push down a flight of stairs to get your hands on this piece of pop culture?”