天下制覇

Yabe? You’re still in this show?

Impressions:

This was a bit better than recent episodes, but the jokes were still delivered at a snail’s pace. If only the other sex comedy this season and this one could actually breed with this one, maybe they could father something with a variety of thematically consistent jokes instead of spastic leaping around or fewer jokes than the average commercial break. It was a little bit better this week for some parts. They managed an astounding two jokes in a single segment with Futaba passing her cold to Hitoha, causing both to be mistaken as having opposite personalities. That’s the kind of thing that they could have spent a lot more than three minutes on and certainly should have covered well more than two characters.

The rest of it was… eh. Futaba pretended to be a cat, the Marui father thought Yabe was molesting Hitoha, and Mitsuba was too proud to admit that she wanted to go to some amusement park. The cat thing was about the only thing vaguely new or different and that was mostly disturbing. The melodrama of the last part was particularly awful because it was painfully obvious how things would turn out. I guess I should count my blessings that it was just crammed into the last four minutes of the season instead of anything more than that. Still dumb, but at least it was short.

Final thoughts on this season at the bottom.

‘Final’ Thoughts:

It already has a second season in the cards, so this really isn’t all that final. At any rate, I’d consider Mitsudomoe a very disappointing show overall after an excellent first episode and a strong first half. Once we hit about episode 7 though, almost everything from then on turned sour. I think back to all the things that made me enjoy that episode, the visual style and parodies, the energy, the rapidfire and varied jokes, and all of that completely evaporated. Heck, they just completely dropped Hitoha being a pervert and always reading porn about three episodes into the series to totally rewrite her character for an endless parade of the exact same Gachi Ranger misunderstanding joke over and over again.

That ended up being my biggest problem with this series. Every now and then, a little variety and energy did seep back into the show, but nothing came even close to matching up to the first episode. All that creativity slowly withered away and was replaced by a calvacade of "person overhears part of a conversation, assumes that they’re talking about particularly nasty sadomasocistic sex." It stretches far past suspension of disbelief allows and undermines the joke by being utterly unbelievable.  It really feels like they completely ran out of ideas for episodes 7-12 and simply picked on joke per segment to run into the ground.

I guess if you average the first and second half of the show out, it’s decent. Given how poor the last month and a half of the show was, I can’t say that I’m looking forward to the next season. It was a good comedy and then a very tedious one. I don’t know how exactly that averages out. Let’s say one club sandwich out of a turducken. The first half of the show is definitely worth watching, the second half is not.