Fall 2021 Summary – Weeks 11-12

Wooper: Merry Christmas, everyone! Whether you’re spending the holidays with family and friends or you’re All Alone on Christmas Eve, I have a gift for you: a brand new weekly recap post! It might not seem like much compared to our impending winter impressions or the upcoming 2021 Anime of the Year bonanza, but hey, at least I got you something. Happy reading, and I hope your December to January transition is a safe and healthy one.

Aggretsuko S4 – 1-5

This is the first time in four years that Retsuko has taken a backseat in her own show, and I’m not convinced it was the right call. She’s currently part of a romance subplot involving hesitant leading man Haida and a handful of co-workers who range from well-meaning to meddlesome. While Tsunoda the Love Expert’s lectures in the office AV room are chuckle-worthy, Haida’s indecisiveness is mostly just annoying, as he’s bailed on a dinner date with Retsuko and refused an invitation into her apartment despite being head over heels for her. The show takes plenty of opportunities to point out Retsuko’s impatience with his cold feet, making the date they went on in episode 5 feel more like a dream sequence than anything else; I’m still half-convinced that it took place in one of their imaginations. I think I’d have preferred Retsuko to play a more significant role in the season’s larger plot: the restructuring of her company by an ambitious new president named Himuro. He’s the sort of single-minded profit seeker who views the company’s accounting department as nonessential, which puts him into conflict with the star of the season: Director Ton. Who knew that three years after being introduced as the series’ primary antagonist, Ton’s fight to retain all of his employees amidst downsizing would make him a hero? The glimpses of his home life (especially those involving his hilarious twin daughters) have added a lot to his character, and I’m excited to see how Ton turns the tables on Himuro once I get through the rest of season 4.

Star Wars: Visions – 9

I have to imagine that “Akakiri,” the final installment in the Visions anthology, is many people’s least favorite due to its hazy storytelling and unorthodox character designs. Personally, I enjoyed it for both of those reasons and a handful of others. Akakiri was just as eclectic as you’d expect an Eunyoung Choi episode to be, with prominent conga drums and masked spear-wielding warriors contributing to a tribal vibe. The characters were drawn in a western style; Jedi protagonist Tsubaki looked like something out of a Tartakovsky cartoon, while field guides Kamahachi and Senshu’s unruly hair and bulging eyes complimented their initially standoffish personalities. Their mission to sneak Tsubaki and Princess Misa into the royal palace was highly abbreviated, but they’re such a lively pair that their reunion after an offscreen separation warmed my heart. Unfortunately, their role in the story was reduced once it reached its climax: a negotiation between Tsubaki and Misa’s aunt Masago, a Sith Lord. Lightsabers do factor into Akakiri at various points, but it’s far less in thrall to their appeal than Visions’ other material. The question of whether Tsubaki will pledge his allegiance to Masago in exchange for Misa’s life completely overshadows the action scenes – as a matter of fact, Tsubaki’s careless use of his lightsaber is what forces him into that position. A daring yet unsatisfying ending prevents me from labeling this my favorite episode, but I’d place it solidly within the anthology’s better half.

Super Crooks – 8-10

Super Crooks has hit the soft reset button with just three episodes left to go, leaving me to wonder why I just watched a heist plot unfold for so long only for it to reach a dead end. Count Orlok, the villain who hired Carmine’s crew to retrieve his helmet, was killed off just moments after his introduction, meaning our main characters’ mission ended in failure. But it was the kind of failure with very few consequences – the villainous duo that foiled their plan left the entire crew alive, and neither blackballed them from their criminal network nor attempted to bring any of them into the fold. In the wake of this disappointing but hardly ruinous failure, Johnny returned to a life of petty crime, got caught by The Praetorian yet again, and served a second term in Supermax Prison. Hardly anything has changed since he was released in episode 2 – his relationship with Kasey is much rockier after leaving her at the altar (perhaps the most unbelievable cliche in this unbelievable show), but she’ll surely be joining him for another one of Carmine’s heists in short order. In addition to its frustrating lack of forward progress, Super Crooks’ direction was spotty across these three episodes, inserting flashbacks to Kasey and Carmine’s pasts where they didn’t seem to fit and relying on coincidence in every scene having to do with Orlok’s helmet. The upcoming final episodes might tell a great self-contained story, but there’s no way they’ll retroactively redeem their predecessors.

Komi-san wa, Komyushou desu – 9-10

Komi-san recently got a second season announcement for 2022, but I’m not sure I’ll be watching, as I doubt its shelf life will cover a total of 24 episodes. The premise is already wearing on me, an issue that episode 9 exacerbated by basing all four of its segments on Komi’s anxiety-driven muteness. The opening chapter, wherein she failed to place an order with a Subway cashier, was just a reskinned version of the time she failed to place an order with a Starbucks cashier. None of the scenes that followed were quite so derivative, but neither were they particularly clever; the show didn’t even leverage Tadano’s polar bear costume for comedy because it was so fixated on Komi’s repeated failures to say words. Thankfully, episode 10 was a little better, or maybe that’s just my affection for Sports Day episodes talking – the series made good use of the chance to get all Komi’s new friends together in one place and reflect on the progress she’s made. A new inclusion in that group of friends is the sporty Netsuno, whose constant measurement of the characters’ personality-based “temperatures” was a decent concept (better than what most of the other gag characters are saddled with, anyway). Later, a trip to a group photo booth kept multiple characters together to minimize the impact of Komi’s silence, which I think should be the standard going forward – that is, unless there’s a particularly good Tadano/Komi scene that needs adapting. Hopefully the series is timed such that we’ll get one during the season finale next week.