[Categories: Anime Reviews]
Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya episode 4: Left-field or just bases empty?
It’s time for another review of the current Flavour of the Month which by my reckoning makes me the one hundred and first person to blog it. On with the show…
Haruhi’s latest idea is to join the baseball tournament to further publicity of the SOS brigade. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this that don’t involve signing onto an event that they have little or no experience in but, as usual, Haruhi is adamant and her friends reluctantly form a team of family and friends who happen to be free on the day of the event…which takes place the day after next. As poor old Kyon so eloquently puts it:
Quite.
So, they head over to the practice pitch to swing a few shots (one thousand to be precise) at which point it becomes clear that the school’s official team will thrash them quite thoroughly. Haruhi is still undeterred, even when the team ends up as a ragtag band of Haruhi (who’s insane), Kyon (who’s there out of boredom), Mikuru (who is too scared of Haruhi and the ball to so much as swing the bat), Kyon’s sister (age: 11), Yuki (who couldn’t care less about what’s happening), one of Mikuru’s friends and Itsuki. At this point Yuki shows the most amusing behaviour, in that she doesn’t really show any enthusiasm at all (below). It’s surprising how the most underplayed and low-key gag had me cracking up the most!
Mikuru on the other hand is still a rather pointless character who is beginning to get quite annoying, merely fulfilling the moe stereotype and being the butt of much of Haruhi’s cajoling and bullying. There are some pretty cool supporting cast members added as well though; Itsuki in particular is pretty interesting here, throwing in some theory concerning Haruhi’s boredom threatening the fate of the planet: for this reason the SOS brigade team must not lose the match. No pressure then…
I must admit my opinion of sport and sport-related TV shows is usually that of apathy, which could explain why I didn’t find this episode as engaging as the previous two. Itsuki’s (admittedly baffling) explanations and Yuki’s ‘intervention’ dropped in some more hints about the show’s underlying sci-fi/fantasy themes that have not been explored much so far, which is a nice bonus. Of course, Yuki’s bizarre reaction (such as it is) to having a baseball pitched at her is pretty much priceless.
At the end of this episode I was less than impressed with the theme in question but since I don’t like baseball any more than Kyon seemed to I’ll let that slide. Otherwise while it gives some more predictable Mikuru-tormenting there is a bit of strange supernatural goings-on and some more interesting characters. Now that the supernatural theme has been picked up I hope that the show’s writers run with it: it’s one of several aspects to Haruhi Suzumiya that make it distinctive among the other zany high school comedies, and really entertaining to boot.
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