What I Know
Nothing. One guy is telling me to watch this. No one else has even heard of it.
What The Title Suggests
Hell if I know. Sounds like another stupid phrase title.
Episode Impressions
A mysterious TV in a brownish-red-black void turns on and there’s breasts on it. That’s certainly quite a start.
And quite a pair, too.
And then a bunch of girls horse around in a swimming pool. Okay. I assume only some of them are important given that the rest are all clones wearing swim caps. Everyone gets naked, and a radio dances. I’m not clear if this is all supposed to be on that strange TV in the disembodied universe.
The radio also apparently got laid.
After a fairly confusing OP, it’s back to the mystery TV for some reason. Now we’re at a cafe where everyone jiggles at the slightest motion. Some guy has just started working there. Within a short time they’re in a “meeting” in the back where she starts kind of coming on to him. I’m not sure what any of this has to do with anything. Apparently neither do they, as she pranks him and leaves.
"What, no awkward storage room groping? This job sucks."
Later he (or a guy who looks a lot like him?) meets a shy girl outside her house. She ran out of soy sauce. Is running out of soy sauce such a common problem that people regularly leave their homes at night to go get some from the store? Honestly, I’ve seen this explanation used several times before. He tries to accompany her but she ain’t having none of that. Probably for the best, the guy might be a creep. This seems confirmed later when it’s revealed he’s a writer who seems to have some questionable interests, but before we can learn anything else the magic television switches to another scene and we never see the guy again in the episode.
Apparently one partially done by Rankin & Bass and a whole lot of White-Out.
A girl is looking for her bike. Or a bike. I don’t know if it’s hers.
And the guy helping her look for it isn't very helpful.
This cavalier attitude and his rugged appearance seem to be turning this girl on. But he warns her he’s too “hard boiled” (his exact words) to love her. What a badass. But she’s fallen hard for him, or actually for his work uniform. That’s kind of creepy, lady. Then some dudes show up in a van and start rapping. They invite the guy to a party, but I don’t see why you’d leave the girl out of this. She’s probably a tab of E away from taking off all her clothes and grinding on that guy’s work helmet.
Also some kind of gang war.
I'm totally sure these guys can throw down against dudes with knives.
Anyway the two of them aren’t interested in this plot thread, so they leave those guys behind. Talk about a missed opportunity. Awkward teasing ensues, then a pantyshot. No one seems impressed. Sick of wandering around with the girl, the workman guy decides to stumble on that gang war he heard about earlier, so he does. I’d wonder how he found them, but it’s under a bridge, and pretty much everything goes down under bridges.
I figured those guys from before were pretty outmatched, but their arsenal of comic props and house music serves them well and they’re able to outwit the other gang at every turn. Workman gives approximately no shits.
"Honestly so far this whole gang war has been a complete letdown, Flamboyant Guy Who Just Showed Up."
Somehow this degenerates into a gunfight, although several people involved don’t seem all that concerned about this. The gang leaders eventually decide to face off, which workman dude seems powerless to stop even though he’s come into possession of the one gun in this fight. Fortunately, he manages to persuade them with common sense. I’d think a gun would work better than common sense, but it’s something I guess.
And, uh… that’s the end of it.
Show Impressions
I want to develop some opinion of this show, but quite honestly I’m not sure it even is a show as such. There were three or four completely distinct plot threads with absolutely incompatible tones and it could be both jarring and nonsensical to transition between them. Much as I try making sense of it, I really can’t.
I suppose one could argue a disjointed narrative is not inherently problematic, but it helps if the narrative segments at least appear to coincide somehow. How exactly we got from a topless swim meet to a street fight is unclear. It’s also unclear which of these things I’m supposed to take seriously, if any. And if I am meant to take one seriously, what the hell is the point of the other bits?
Production-wise it was alright. Not great, not terrible. I couldn’t tell a lot of the characters apart, though. It was also generally difficult to tell who was supposed to be important, as the OP and ED have a dozen girls in them but none of them seemed all that important to the story. There also really didn’t seem to be a clear protagonist, although the workman got the most screen time.
Did I Miss Something?
Is this a fanservice show? A sketch-based gag comedy? A gripping gang war melodrama? I mean I guess you can argue it’s all three, but they seem pretty much unconnected with each other other than characters shared between the various sections. The episode shifted so wildly in tone that it’s hard to figure out what the hell it is and what it’s trying to do. I’m still baffled.
Also, what’s up with the TV? Is this some kind of magic microwave-related doodad, a framing device, a stylistic flourish, what?
Are the girls with really similar hairstyles related? I can’t really distinguish one from another. I don’t think they’re sisters or anything, or at least the show didn’t say they were. Huhn.
The First Two Episodes Were…
I’d hope more coherent than this, but I’d guess much less so at best. With any luck they’d explain who everyone is, but there are so many characters that I think it’d be pretty hard to keep up in any meaningful fashion.
Keep Watching?
I don’t really want to, but on the other hand I sort of feel like I should just to get some sense for what the show is actually trying to do. It’s very confusing, and I can’t tell if it’s trying to do this to be artsy or what. Narratively, the thing was just a big mess.
Rewind or No?
On the one hand, it seems like a good idea. On the other, if the show is anything like this on a regular basis I can’t see one episode meaning any more than any other.
Final Single Episode Coherency Rating
1 (James Joyce)
As crazy as Deadman Wonderland and C are, at least they had a central narrative and a coherent style. They didn’t really make sense, but at least if you asked me what they were about I could summarize (“Superjail” and “People fight with Pokemon over Monopoly money” respectively). This show really has nothing going for it on a coherency level. It doesn’t make sense, doesn’t seem to be trying to make sense, and isn’t structured in a fashion which would even permit it to make much sense.
So this is definitely, by far, the least coherent show of the season that I’ve seen. It’s unlikely to be topped, unless David Lynch has been working on an anime I haven’t heard about.
Tune in later for Suzy’s Zoo, a title I understand and dread. It’s apparently very short going by filesize, so it may be a bit of a scant post. Or maybe it won’t. With a name like that, I’m expecting the worst.
