24: Darling In The Franxx Episode

Here’s the long, hard truth: Episode 24 is a beautiful disaster. Let’s start with what works, because A-1 Pictures and Trigger didn’t phone in the craft .

Here’s a long, critical review of Darling in the FranXX Episode 24, written for someone who’s just finished the series and is trying to process the finale. Ambition Without Altitude: Why Episode 24 Crumbled Under Its Own Weight

The tone is all over the place. One moment, we are having a quiet, philosophical conversation about memories. The next, we are watching a 200-foot-tall Zero Two fist-fight a planet. Then, we cut to a wedding. Then, Hiro and Zero Two literally evaporate into stardust. The episode has no breathing room. It’s moving so fast to cover the plot that it forgets to let the audience feel anything besides confusion. The Ugly (The Thematic Betrayal) Here is my biggest gripe with Episode 24: it betrays the show’s best theme.

The first ten minutes, before the plot descends into chaos, are genuinely affecting. Hiro and Zero Two’s souls drifting through space, their memories unraveling like film reels, is a stunningly directed sequence. The shot of young Hiro reaching out to the picture book, juxtaposed with Zero Two’s hand fading, lands an emotional punch that the rest of the episode fails to support. You can feel the animators fighting for their lives to make you cry. Darling in the FranXX Episode 24

2.5/5 (Generous)

If you loved the show for the emotional core of Hiro and Zero Two, you might cry at the ending. That’s valid. The feeling is there, even if the writing isn’t.

But if you loved the show for its nuanced take on humanity, growing up, and the pain of connection? Episode 24 is a betrayal. It’s a reminder that the writers had no idea how to land the plane, so they blew up the airport, turned the plane into a flower, and hoped you wouldn’t notice the wreckage. Here’s the long, hard truth: Episode 24 is

The episode understands its central thesis—that love transcends form, memory, and even death. The image of the Strelitzia True Apus blooming into a giant, cosmic Zero Two is pure, unfiltered Trigger. It’s ridiculous, excessive, and for a single frame, it recaptures the manic joy of Episode 1.

Watching Darling in the FranXX Episode 24 is a uniquely exhausting experience. Not because it’s offensively bad in a School Days way, but because it’s the final, agonizing sigh of a show that once promised so much. After 23 episodes of meandering identity crises—from horny teen mecha to post-apocalyptic dystopia to cosmic space opera—the finale tries to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be a tearjerker, a philosophical treatise on love, and a triumphant victory lap, all while frantically backpedaling from the narrative cliff it jumped off five episodes prior.

Hiro and Zero Two fuse to become the ultimate weapon, burning themselves out to destroy the VIRM homeworld. This should be gut-wrenching. Instead, it’s confusing. Why do they have to stay behind? Why can’t the bomb be remote? The show invents a “you’ll disappear if you use this power” rule in the literal last ten minutes. Consequently, the death feels less like tragic destiny and more like a contrived way to force the epilogue. Compare this to Gurren Lagann ’s ending, where the sacrifice has weight and consequence; here, it feels like the writers painted themselves into a corner. Ambition Without Altitude: Why Episode 24 Crumbled Under

The time-skip ending—showing the reincarnated Hiro and Zero Two as children under the new, blooming tree—is thematically correct. They are no longer “monsters” or “parasites.” They are just two kids who will meet again. In a vacuum, it’s a lovely, bittersweet capstone. The Bad (The Structural Collapse) Now for the rubble.

Watch the final montage on YouTube. Mute it after the tree blooms. Pretend the reincarnated kids walk away and live a normal life. That’s the ending the show deserved.

Hiro and Zero Two don’t “pilot” the final mech. They become it. Their individuality is erased. The show argues that the ultimate form of love is losing yourself completely—becoming a weapon of mass destruction. That’s not romance; that’s ego death. It’s the opposite of what made their relationship work in the beach episode (where they just enjoyed being kids). The finale glorifies a codependent suicide pact dressed in super robot armor. Darling in the FranXX Episode 24 is a beautiful lie. It looks gorgeous when you turn off your brain and let the swelling orchestral score wash over you. But the moment you poke at the plot—ask “why did VIRM exist?” or “what happened to the plantation adults?” or “did the Nines just die off-screen?”—the entire thing dissolves into pink dust.

Remember Ichigo? Goro? Mitsuru and Kokoro? In Episode 24, they are relegated to a Greek chorus in cockpits. They scream “Hiro!” a lot and fire generic missiles. After 23 episodes of relationship drama, their entire resolution is “we watch the main couple die and then we go repopulate the Earth.” Futoshi doesn’t get a line of closure. Zorome’s existential crisis about adults is never resolved. The show spent hours on soap opera dynamics only to abandon them for space lasers.

VIRM is introduced in Episode 20 and defeated in Episode 24. That is four episodes for a “god-like alien collective” that wants to erase individuality. They have no personality, no motivation beyond “thoughts bad, hive mind good.” Episode 24 turns the climax into a generic space battle against purple CGI blobs. We went from a chilling human-on-human drama about breeding and obsolescence (the APE/Klaxosaur conflict) to shooting lasers at space ghosts . The show swapped a scalpel for a nuke and missed the target.