The entire theme of this week seems to be doing things against expectations. After the previous episode I expected another mystery story where Alice had to solve another case. Instead, we got this strange mish-mash of slice of life, character development and… organizing the stage for a band. I’m not sure where that all came from, but it was definitely something different for this series.
The thing with this episode is that the characters got side-tracked A LOT, however the things it got side-tracked with are actually pretty unorthodox and creative. They range from being ordered by Alice to go to the zoo, picking up a new apron, doing the laundry, meeting this strange rock guy and again: promoting this indie band. It’s a pretty whimsical episode and whether it’s good or not entirely depends on the length of this show.
The thing is, that for a 13 episode series it’s just goofing off too much. For a 26 episode series however this was some great material to flesh out the characters. It’s all going to be a matter of waiting what it’s going to be.
Now, as for the JC Staff cliches, there was a good thing and a bad thing about this episode. The good thing is that the main character isn’t just randomly running into females all the time: it’s actually nicely balanced at this point with that rock guy. The bad thing however is that for some reason beyond me, the creators are trying to make Alice into a Shana-clone! Thank God she’s a lot more eloquent than her counterparts, but it’s really getting annoying to see that JC Staff are trying to shoehorn the same bloody character in every bloody show of theirs. I keep complaining about this, because it really feels like someone took a look at the script and changed Alice to act more like every other bloody tsundere, especially after how different she was in the first episode.
Rating: * (Good)
Alice is really getting on my nerves at this point! I found this episode barely watchable. I really didn’t care much for what was happening. Where are those intense mystery cases like the first episode?? And am I the only one who got a “ex-boyfriend” feeling from yakuza-chief (cant remember his name) and the guy at the shop where Narumi went to get the apron. But once again, that must be just me imagining gay characters everywhere!