(AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX)

I had no idea Carol & the End of the World existed before I stumbled across it by accident on it’s Netflix page. Basically the show is about a giant planet that’s going to collide with Earth and kill everyone so…you know it seems at first a familiar place to start a show. We have seen so many post-apocalyptic shows by now and we like them but just watching Carol’s pilot episode made it clear this one different and not just on a technical level.

This is not a post-apocalyptic show, this is more accurately IMO a drama about a middle-aged woman trying to find purpose set in the backdrop of a world that knows it’s going to die. There is a warmth to the show despite of that however, because people know they’re going to die but not tomorrow or in the coming few months, they have therefore grown to accept and the whole humanity has decided to pass these 7 months in peace. Everyone is free to do whatever they wish, there are no jobs or bills or anything holding you down. There are huge pieces of graffiti on the wall saying “Live, Laugh, Love” and yet…for our protagonist Carol, there is nothing else that feels right except the normalcy she has grown up with.

It is a very experimental and subversive show, when you finish an episode you have no idea what the next episode is going to be about or even how it will be structured. This nature of the show is a little hard to get into at first, to me it was always on the worse side of “Filler or actually trying to say something?” and while my views eventually softened towards the show by the end of it, I still believe some of the earlier episodes or even chunks of the whole series could have been paced better. This subversive nature is something I enjoy but because of how unusually quiet the show is it makes it feel like nothing is happening and you’re just watching something…aimless and meaningless. Not a fan of it but thankfully it gets better when you start understanding what this show is trying to do which can take a different amount of episodes for everyone.

Another thing to get used to and the reason the show itself is very quiet at times is our protagonist Carol, she’s a middle-aged very very typical person. She doesn’t shout, react quickly and always speaks in a tone that is intentionally monotonous.

Aside from it’s narrative and plot shenanigans, what I really adored about carol & the end of the world is the beautifully crafted visuals, the backgrounds of the show look like as if they came straight out of a comic book and they’re so gorgeous and detailed. The animation has a lot of style and art to it as well, from how certain things are drawn to how the humans move and look like albeit it’s a very modern style which is thankfully still very expressive of the characters and makes them feel human.

The soundtrack is one of the best ever and along with it’s art style, it’s the one thing that the show keeps consistently well realized throughout the series. Often switching between classic music or electronic soft beats and introducing a pop rock song once in a while makes this show’s sound feel as if it’s a part of it’s world and it’s character.

Conclusion: Carol & the End of the World is one of the most subversive animated shows you’ll ever watch that treads a very fine line between “nothing is happening” and a beautiful, well written exploration of humanity and the depth of how we feel and cope with whatever situation we are and just the realness of it that it manages to capture so well.

8/10 Although it might be a very different experience for you, I highly enjoyed it and it’s worth recommending. I think it will be great to re-watch as well