I was about a quarter of the way through my latest review assignment when I mentioned to one of my office colleagues that I was watching an anime series called "Pumpkin Scissors." He cocked an eyebrow. "What the hell kind of name is 'Pumpkin Scissors'?" he asked. I shrugged. "They haven't explained it yet, if they're going to explain it at all," I replied.
 A few episodes later they did explain it, and I learned that it's the name a group of military officers have given to their unit. Apparently it refers from the way they like to use scissors to slice open pumpkins and feast on the sweet, sweet pumpkin brains inside. These, in turn, give the characters the zombie power to move really slow and have no worthwhile adventures.
Or something like that, I think. By episode eight my own brain had popped an escape hatch and fled. So I could be wrong about the derivation of the name "Pumpkin Scissors."
The series is set in a world that resembles 1930s Europe, where telephones, tanks, and automatic rifles are cutting-edge technology, though there is also a line in top-secret, genetic-style engineering that has created a small group of super-soldiers. Two countries—the Empire and a Republic—have ended a destructive, stalemated war, and the former at least is still suffering its ravages: widespread hunger, unemployment, disease, banditry, and social unrest between the lower classes and the nobility. So the Imperial Army has created a special section—Section Three, the aforementioned "Pumpkin Scissors"—for war relief missions. The section is so understaffed, however, that it is mostly confined to small missions, like coordinating with soup kitchens or running necessary supplies to hard-struck provinces. But they also investigate corruption cases, usually involving nobles, bureaucrats, or businessmen who have diverted war relief supplies.
The stories thus have a gritty, downbeat cast. In theory this gives Pumpkin Scissors a patina of reality: children starve, villagers are struck down by pestilence, unemployed men in shabby coats and cloth caps line up for meager bowls of soup, and hordes of mendicants hide in the capital city's sewer system. But it's all just a lot of stage-dressing for the usual war-anime clichés. So the Pumpkin Scissors team is led by the tiresome, humorlessly idealistic, brass-knuckle princess who spouts off about integrity and honor and justice at the drop of a dime; she's supported by the shy, bookish guy and the good-looking womanizer; the cheery, button-cute lady sergeant; the gruff, world-weary major who knows the byzantine ways of treachery and bureaucracy; and the mysterious hulking man of mystery with bizarre, never-explained superpowers. And they fight the usual gaggle of giggling psychos, slimy embezzlers, fatuous aristocrats, and masked conspirators. Frankly, I liked it better when it was called Glass Fleet and the stories were at least utterly insane.
 The only things that really set Pumpkin Scissors apart are its resolute refusal to ever tell a decent story and its tendency to take forever to plod through its thonkingly tedious narratives. In the first episode, the team has to fight a group of soldiers-turned-bandits who use a tank to extort food from a village. That's not a thumbnail of the plot: I've just told you the entire story, including most of the important details. So, the Pumpkin Scissors show up, briefly confront the bandits in a town square, and then ambush them in their mountain fortress. And that's pretty much all. There is no drama, no shape to the incidents, no character choices, and precious little even in the way of action. Instead, it's mostly people standing around saying portentous things and looking portentously at each other and then taking out guns and aiming them portentously at each other. In the seventh episode, the team has to break into a castle and dodge a lot of small-arms fire in order to get to a minor noble who has for some reason sequestered himself and some war-relief supplies inside. When, twenty-two minutes later, they succeed in doing just this, the episode ends with a thud. Again, the plot is just an obstacle course—get past the flying bullets—and the obstacle course itself isn't any fun to navigate since there isn't any action to speak of.
Things only get worse from there when the series decides to stretch these formless sausage-stories out as multi-parters. It all comes to a triumphantly inane climax with a six-part story during which Alice Malvin—that's the grim-jawed, twenty-something noblewoman who leads the Pumpkin Scissors team—gets trapped at a dinner party between a corrupt bureaucrat and a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants, and has to save herself and all her friends by challenging the former to a duel. Said duel, hilariously, takes up more than an hour of screen time as various people stop dead in the middle of it to deliver some of the most grimly boring speeches ever written. To get some idea of how crushingly dull this is, I have to ask you to imagine the Yoda-Palpatine lightsaber duel in Revenge of the Sith, but stretched out to an hour. Now stage the duel in the Senate chambers; subtract all the actual lightsaber dueling; and add in the Senate speeches from Attack of the Clones, playing in a repeating loop. Get the picture? In other words, it's just two people glaring at each other for nearly seventy minutes, while everyone else takes turns standing up to prattle angrily about what's wrong with the Empire, the nobility, the peasants, the army, and everything else they can think of. Alice's sisters even take time to talk about the way she gets her dress torn early in the fight. It's not a throwaway bit of dialogue, either: they get pretty damn worked up about it.
 All this might be worth a few pfennigs if anyone had an actual personality or said anything interesting. They don't, and they take forever to not say anything; this is the kind of show where someone will say something that is meant to be shocking, and another character will pause for a few seconds and then reply "Huhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?" And then the first person will repeat what they said, and the second person will chew this over for a good ten seconds and then say "Huhhhhhhhhhhhhhh???!!!" again. Don't be fooled by the occasional hints about dark conspiracies, possibly involving Alice's Adonis-like fiancé and certainly involving Corporal Randel Oland, the mountain-sized man who can take a tank shell to the face without blinking. These are twirled in front of the viewer like hypnotic coins before being dropped through a sewer grate and never retrieved. (Maybe these hints are supposed to get a payoff later on. The series ends with the threat of continuing into a second season, which will presumably include an 18-part episode in which Alice and her sisters, while being held hostage by a hot-dog vendor facing tax evasion charges and surrounded by an armored cavalry brigade, argue furiously for five hours over whether preferring nail clippers to an emery board represents solidarity with the working class or condescending class deviationism.) There is no dimension, no plausible depth or heft to the back stories or to the characters or to the competing factions. The businessmen are evil and the generals are fascistic and the aristocrats are foppish and the peasants are pitiable; and the heroes are noble and idealistic, or noble and worldly-wise, or noble and damaged, or noble and naïve. I Was a Male War Bride—a slapstick comedy set in occupied Germany, which puts Cary Grant in a dress, for God's sake—paints a more detailed and nuanced picture about what life amid post-war rubble is like.
 Production values are grim if not utterly impoverished. Promises of gunfights and swordplay go mostly unfulfilled, and what little we get is masked with editing to create the impression of a fight rather than actually illustrating it. Character designs are just another compendium of visual clichés, and the visuals, dominated as they are by grimy offices and filthy urban streets, hold no interest either. The musical score sounds like it came out of a can, and the voice work—and I don't mean this as a compliment—ably matches the dialogue: flat and monotonous when it isn't shrill and annoying. (It is also dreadfully inconsistent on accents: all these people come from the same country, but some talk like they're from Ohio; others like they're from Atlanta-by-way-of-Oxbridge; unt ztill ozzers are puttink ont ze Mitteleuropean act like zey ver in eine kleine Mel Brooks rrrrrrrremake off Der Third Mann.) Extras are non-existent.
I have no idea why FUNimation rescued this ADV-distributed title, because I have no idea who would like it. It's ugly, boring, clichéd drivel that is hard on the ear, hard on the eye, and hard on the brain. Action fans won't find any excitement; viewers interested in serious drama won't find the shadow of a ghost of a memory of it; and after the first few episodes even what little gun-p0rn there is disappears. Nothing about this series makes sense, starting with the title, and going downhill from there.
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