Okay, so as it turns out episode four did not take forever to show up as a raw. It was just on a hiatus for a week. Then, the fifth episode that aired a week ago was one of the four preview episodes and now we finally can get to some more new content with episode six. Seriously, I have never seen a show with such a complicated airing schedule since the time where one of our Dutch television stations suddenly decided to air the final episode of Medabots’ Second season in the middle of its run…
In any case, half of this episode was about Kouhei destroying windows while playing baseball. Aside from being about Kouhei, it was also one of those “been there done that”-scenarios. The only fresh thing is that he just kept on going even after things went wrong two times. It’s typical and I can understand the nostalgic reasons for putting this in, but I was already bored by the “broken window-plot” when I was a kid myself. It’s probably because I couldn’t relate to it at all (I grew up in a small village, so there always was enough room to play and not bother adults).
The rest of this episode was really good though. This time it was about the business of Kouhei’s father taking a nasty hit when they get conned. They lost a lot of money with it and therefore really needed to put in effort in order to prevent to not fall down into debts, and at the same time it was nothing major: it’s a thing that could have happened to anyone; both today and back in those days. It’s also here where Kouhei’s antics made the most impact (heck, he’d been destroying windows at such a stressful time).
I think that Kouhei is at his best when he’s in the background, pretty much like what his sister was in this episode. She had this nice subplot about reading a sad novel ad popped up twice or trice, was nice to see, got fleshed out a bit, and then disappeared a bit. Kouhei also had these kinds of episodes for him, and that’s where he really works as this nice annoying brat. The stories around him though… they just don’t feel as interesting as the rest of the cast.
Rating: * (Good)
So how the heck are you labelling this? You sure this shouldn’t be episode 4 instead (episodes 1, 2, 4, and 6 iirc were the non-preview ones? I don’t know)?
I haven’t seen something this confusing since the invention of sliced bread, which was pretty confusing seeing as people needed to eat bread from another angle. 🙁
I’m trying to label this in the real episode number for now, which I know is confusing since I accidentally labelled episode 5 as episode 2 (one of them, anyways). Episodes 1, 2, 4 and 6 were indeed the non preview ones, by the way.