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Nearly ten years ago, the Assassination Classroom anime began airing in a burst of gunfire, knives, and tentacles as 28 students were faced with an impossible task – kill their otherworldly teacher before the year is up to save the world. It is a weird premise, but a decade later, I’m here to tell you that Assassination Classroom is more than just tentacle jokes and wacky attempts at violence. It hides one of anime’s most perfect bittersweet endings and an all-time great dubbing performance from Sonny Strait, so I’m using this week’s Popverse Jump to celebrate it.

Admittedly, I have a soft spot in my heart for Assassination Classroom. I first watched it while traveling across Japan back in 2018, catching up on episodes in hotels and on trains as my wife and I visited the country. It was the perfect blend of action, comedy, and just the right amount of romance to help us power through the jetlag and keep us excited for what the following day would bring. However, we weren’t ready for how emotionally devastating the final episode would be.

If you haven’t seen it, Assassination Classroom follows a group of students who either don’t conform to the school’s strict standards or have fallen behind their peers academically. Their teacher, Koro-sensei, is a superpowered tentacle creature who recently destroyed most of the moon and has threatened to do the same to the Earth if the students cannot kill him by the end of the academic year. Between assassination attempts by the students, Koro-sensei goes to work being one of the best mentors in anime history, teaching his students to not just pass their exams but to be the best versions of themselves they can be.

There are twists along the way, including the strange origins of Koro-sensei, the real reason he intends to destroy the Earth, and each of the students’ reasons for being in class 3-E in the first place. The anime featured a shockingly good dub cast, with Lindsay Seidel (Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia), Monica Rial (Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt and Dragon Ball), and Austin Tindle (Tokyo Ghoul and Kaguya-sama: Love is War) putting in great performances as the human protagonists. 

However, it is Sonny Strait who delivers some of the best acting of his career as the mildly deranged yet infinitely lovable Koro-sensei. Scenes require Strait to shift from goofy to serious to downright heartbreaking in rapid succession. His entire range is on display here and it is worth watching just for that. In a career that has included memorable characters like One Piece’s Usopp and Dragon Ball’s Krillin, Koro-sensei is still my favorite Sonny Strait role and it isn’t even close.

It all leads up to an ending that, as I said, broke my damn heart the first time I watched it. The opening of Assassination Classroom promises that the kids will have to kill their teacher. Over the series, they get closer to him and learn from him, but the evitable outcome is looming over them all the entire time. Sure, there probably would be ways to avoid it – finding a way to prevent the destruction of Earth or even return Koro-sensei to his human form, but it would have felt narratively cheap. Like a copout that didn’t deliver in the end. It can't be called Assassination Classroom without a death at the end.

Instead, the class does the deed in a beautiful scene that hits all the right notes. Despite the epic stakes (Earth is just a few minutes from exploding at this point), the act is intimate and painful to watch. Because sometimes doing the right thing hurts more than you can stand but you still have to do it. And sometimes saying goodbye is tough but necessary. Each member of Class 3-E takes a piece of Koro-sensei with them and becomes the best version of themselves, which is all their teacher ever wanted in the first place.

A decade later, Assassination Classroom remains an all-time great Shonen series, with the right mix of comedy, action, and heart to make it worth a rewatch or a first viewing if you missed it the first time around. The caliber of the dub and the fact they nail the ending in such a perfect way helps make it an anime I can recommend without reservation. 

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